Mr. Darren Dutton
Educator
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Photography by Hayden Aron
Mr. Dutton as an Educator
Mr. Dutton as an Educator
My goal as a teacher at all grade levels is to give students their own musical voice. While direct instruction is sometimes necessary, I prefer to guide students towards the answers that will provide them success. I try every day to build an environment of trust, where students can confidently explore their own musical expression.
I am a staunch advocate for chamber music and other small performing ensembles in the grade school band and orchestra classroom. Small-ensemble experiences give students the chance to engage in peer leadership and communication, along with allowing freer selection of repertoire, including music from places other than the western "classical canon."
My elementary pedagogy is based largely around John Feierabend's First Steps in Music and Conversational Solfege. These curricula encourage students to develop as well rounded musicians, becoming "tuneful, beatful, and artful" in their performance of and engagement with music. In my current job at a NYC District 75 special education elementary school, I have adapted these lessons to work for my students with varying Individualized Education Plans (IEPs).
Conducting High School Band
At the end of my high school student teaching, I had the privilege of conducting the Half Hollow Hills High School East Symphonic Band for their winter concert in 2023. This piece, Ballade by Darren Jenkins, was one that I had worked on with these 11th and 12th grade students for about 8 weeks before this performance. During that semester, I also worked with the students on several other pieces for that concert and taught small-group lessons.
Kindergarten Teaching Video
This lesson took place early in my student teaching and was my fourth lesson with this group of students. This lesson is based on John Feierabend's First Steps in Music curriculum. Lessons in the First Steps style do not have one central focus, instead giving short doses of many different kinds of musical experience. These experiences, when repeated week after week, aim to give students a solid foundation for future musical growth.
Music Arranging: Pep Band
HSE Pep Songs 11-2023.pdfDuring my high school student teaching, I took several pep band arrangements from the school's library and combined them with several of my own brief arrangements to create a new set of charts for the band. The pep band used these for the duration of the season and continued to use them after I finished my student teaching. I put these together in the Sibelius music notation software, which I have become familiar with and proficient in since first using it in high school. I also added "courtesy accidentals" to remind students of some notes from the key signature that they might forget.
Video Editing: Brown Bear
At P17X, my first and current full-time teaching job, I volunteered to record and edit the video for Read Across America week, in which our students read the story "Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See?" Our art teacher, Ms. Mary Ann Harding, helped the students make the animals that you see in the video, and our theatre teacher, Ms. Annika Gullahorn, helped prepare them with the words from the story. I also narrated the entire video, with the exception of the bear in the introduction, who is played by Ms. Harding. This was one of several video projects that I undertook during my first year teaching.
Crane School of Music Portfolio
Crane School of Music Portfolio
At the end of my Music Education studies at the Crane School of Music, I completed an online portfolio showcasing what the progress I had made as an educator during my degree studies. It consisted of two major elements: the Four Pillars of Music Education, and the Artifact Repository. The Four Pillars are a series of pages on this site dedicated to showing how I fulfill the "Four Pillars of the Contemporary Music Educator," four qualities that Crane helps to foster in its students to create exemplary music teachers. The Artifact Repository is a series of "artifacts," which include videos, lesson plans, and narratives relating to the work that I did during my studies and my student teaching. Links to both of these can be found below:
"Do what you love, love what you do, and make a difference in someone's life."
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