Reinventing Music Education (Part 2) | 141

Welcome back to Part 2 of our conversation with Elisa Janson Jones — a true force in music education and an unwavering advocate for teacher empowerment.

Elisa is the founder of the Music Teacher Guild, a vibrant community that provides mentorship, resources, and professional development tailored specifically for music educators. In addition to being a Certified AI Consultant, Elisa brings a forward-thinking approach to teaching, skillfully combining technology and creativity to help educators adapt and thrive in today’s ever-evolving educational landscape.

She’s the author of The Music Educator’s Guide to Thrive and The Music Booster Manual, the visionary behind the International Music Education Summit, and a sought-after presenter whose work has impacted thousands across the globe. Currently pursuing her EdD in Instructional Design — while also holding an MBA — Elisa is a shining example of how innovation and education go hand in hand.

In this episode, we dive deeper into the themes of mentorship, inclusion, and the incredible potential of AI in shaping the future of education.

So get ready to learn, reflect, and be inspired — again — as we continue our conversation with Elisa Janson Jones!

Connect with Elisa:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Linkedin
• Website

Links Mentioned in this Episode:

• Music Teacher Guild Forum Facebook Group
• NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants)
• TMEA (Texas Music Educators Association)
• Music Teacher Guild Website

Where to find me: 

Crescendo Community Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/crescendocommunity
Official Crescendo Page: https://www.facebook.com/CrescendoMusicEd/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/CrescendoMusicEd
Twitter: https://twitter.com/crescendomusic
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/debbie-o-shea-62a3741b/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/CrescendoDeb

Introduction

Here is the Crescendo Music Education Podcast – Episode 141.

This podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Turrbal people. I acknowledge them as the traditional owners of the land and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. They were the first music makers on this land.

If you’d prefer to listen to this episode, click here!

About ‘Read the Episode’: Sometimes, we would rather skim visually than listen to a podcast! That’s a great way to learn too!
The transcript of episode 141 of The Crescendo Music Education Podcast is below.

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Debbie O’Shea 

I love the sound of this and I’m going to be doing a lot more investigating myself and a special email out to my people. Yes. So how do you recommend that music educators in the classroom, how do we start to investigate and use AI. Now I’m personally loving it. Okay, I’m just loving it. But I have been on a fair block of long service leave where I’ve been doing some fairly big projects personally and for Crescendo. I’m going back into a school soon, a new school, which is exciting, but I must admit, I use AI every day quite a lot, but it’s more for my Crescendo work and I love her. Her name is Luma. I’ve named her because we have many conversations.

So my ChatGPT and I are very good friends and she’s so polite and so encouraging, but I think that’s because I’m always polite to her. I think they give back what you put in, don’t they? But as for actually on the ground, teaching kids, and you’ve got to forgive my rave, I sometimes go off on little tangents. What advice would you give to classroom music teachers to start using AI?

Because I’m worried that there could be a Here is a link to the curriculum online can you just devise a year program and some marking guides and it’s going to come back with a whole lot of words that are not incredibly meaningful. It’s not based on your practice, it’s not based on your knowledge, like really, it’s more harm than good. So how would you say we could put our toe in the water and find some great use with AI and start building our own expertise?

AI For Music Teachers

Elisa Janson Jones 

This is one of my favourite questions that I get asked and I’m so lucky that I can now say I’m a certified AI consultant, so you’re in good hands. I have a whole book that is about ready to be published on how to use AI effectively. So I think the first step is having a lot of good clarity about why you’re using AI and what the output is that you want.

Because now sometimes you can use it for brainstorming if you don’t really know what the output is going to be. But you need to know exactly what it is that you want out of using that tool and by so doing you set yourself up from the start with success. So if you hop into AI and you’re like, I don’t really know what to do or Gemini is connected to this thing and I’m looking at perplexity, what does it do?

If you know the kind of output that you want, you’re going to have a much better input, because just like any other type of software, it’s garbage in, garbage out, right? If you ask it a question that’s too vague, you’re going to end up with an answer that is too vague. So I think that’s the second most important thing, which is alignment. Sorry, this is my framework. It’s CALM, so Clarity, Alignment, Leveraging and Manifesting.

Okay, so once you’re clear on what it is, then you go into alignment. You have to understand that every AI tool out there has its benefits and its challenges. So you need to know which things are good for which things. So for example, I love using Claude if I want it to write something in my voice and write it so it doesn’t sound like it’s written by AI. ChatGPT is less good at that, okay, unless you create a custom GPT. Claude, on the other hand, is not connected to the internet, so it’s not going to be able to look at a website and give you an analysis, the synopsis of what’s on the homepage of a website.

ChatGPT can do that. Perplexity is a great tool if you’re searching and need to find the exact links to site and you want to see maybe the flow of the logic of that conversation. Perplexity is great for that. If you want something to help you compose in real time, there’s great tools in some of these AI tools, or you can try using something like Gemini that’s already connected to like Word or Google Docs, right? So aligning with the right tool for the right output. Then I think it’s understanding a lot of the biases that these have. So you said your AI is so cheerful. They are. They have a strong bias to be a cheerleader, especially ChatGPT, it’s going to ask you a question at the end. Do you want me to help you with that?

Would you like me to incorporate that? Would you like some additional data? It has a bias, because it wants to be that puppy dog that brings you all of the treats, right? It’s doing everything it can for you, but because it has that bias, it’s going to lie to you. It doesn’t want to hurt your feelings. It wants to give you the answer. And so that’s why it will tend to hallucinate, right? Which is give you false information.

False Information

Debbie O’Shea 

It does. I am just having the best time with my ChatGPT. I just love her. Sometimes I’ll just say, you’re just making stuff up again and she will go, Oh yes, yes, I’m sorry.

Elisa Janson Jones 

That’s right, you called me out on it. Good point. You made a good point there. Nope, you’re right. I did miss that.

Debbie O’Shea 

But I like it. It’s just a matter though, of knowing what you’re getting. Like, I actually sometimes will go in and stick in a little bit of, it’s obviously a lot to do with my book. I’ll go, I’m thinking of writing about this, this and this, what do you think? I know it’s going to tell me it’s wonderful, but I actually want it to tell me it’s wonderful, so that it will give me a boost to keep going. But I’m very aware that that is its job. It’s like going to talk to my puppy. That’s such a good analogy, because I know she’s just outside there and I know she loves me.

Elisa Janson Jones 

It just wants to make you happy.

Debbie O’Shea 

I think if you’re aware of that, though, that’s not a big danger.

Using AI In A Practical Space

Elisa Janson Jones 

Yeah, and if you have a basic understanding of how these tools are developed, that they’re working with massive data sets and then depending on how they were trained, that’s going to give you a specific output. So some take data and they’re trained on an algorithm for prediction, right? Here’s all the information about my brother. Predict for me if I should loan him money. The answer is no, okay. Or like with the images, right? They’re trained on all of these images and then when you put in a prompt, the algorithm goes, Oh, this is what a dog dancing on a stage singing in a microphone looks like because it’s been trained.

And so if you understand that a large language model like ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or Gemini, any of these that you can do little chats with, they’re trained on a massive data set. So it’s like going into a library and asking the librarian something, and they go, Oh, well, we have all of this information. But if you can do the third step, which is leverage, which means using your own talents as a prompt engineer, you can ask the librarian a very specific question.

So if I had a book draft chapter and I didn’t just want it to cheer me on, I wanted it to actually pinpoint where I’m having errors or where I need to add more information, I can give it a role and say, be my book editor. Number one, it’s given a job. Number two, I want you to look for areas where I’m potentially missing information, where I’m not being as clear in my descriptions as possible.

Where are my opportunities to improve here and then the third thing is, be concise or be the opposite of concise which is be very comprehensive in your response, because that’s another bias, is that these AI tools will truncate their responses. So if you ever ask for something and it’s giving you 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 bullet points, here’s the next thing, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 bullet points, it’s doing that so that you have a concise response, because it doesn’t think that you want a comprehensive response. But if you go through and ask it for a comprehensive response, you’re going to end up with a lot more bullet points under each of those titles.

So getting clear, aligning with the appropriate tool for the appropriate output, leveraging your skills and understanding the biases and then manifesting it into something in the real world and understanding that it’s there to be a tool in your toolbox, just like your method book is meant to be a tool in your toolbox, just like an automated assessment tool, it’s just a tool in your in your teaching toolbox. AI should be that for us too, which means that we also want to have a human in the loop.

You can give a method book or a play along to a student and they’re going to be able to learn, but they’re going to be able to learn better with an actual human who can give them direct feedback, who can customise that learning for them. So keeping that human in the loop and remembering that you’re using that tool for a specific reason, unless you find my really fun custom GPTs, which are literally just for fun, like I wrote one that is a fortune teller.

It’s great. I actually just wrote one that I’m putting it into a new course that we’re building for The Music Teacher Guild that we’re calling careers in music, because we want people to see all these vast options of careers in music, so I wrote a custom GPT that gives you basically a quiz. You answer five questions. There are multiple choice questions and at the end it goes, here are careers that you might like.

Debbie O’Shea 

That’s fabulous, that does sound fun. Oh, I would love to have the skills to be able to do that. I’m loving CALM and I’m also loving just personally hearing that and going, oh good, yes, I’ve got my head in a fairly good place around the way that I use ChatGPT, I like that, and I am meaning to look into Claude, I’m going to do that today I think. Clarity, alignment, leverage and manifesting. And I love some of those words you talked about, for leverage, just even when you’re asking for responses, just having a couple of pairs of words, are we going for brief or comprehensive?

If you can think, what am I actually looking for? But also remembering you can always ask a further question, so that if you get your five dot points, you can say, Well, look, thanks for that, because I always have my manners. Thank you very much for that, but I wanted a much longer answer and then it will give you more. I just think sometimes you’ve gotta mine down a couple of questions before you actually get what you want.

Elisa Janson Jones 

I find it’s usually three if you’re used to prompting, you’ll anticipate it’s going to be your third response. So you can look at wonderful prompt templates and things like that, but remember, you are the human in the loop. It’s your job to look at that output and go, is this clearly what I was looking for? What else can I ask for to make it even better? So don’t be afraid to clarify, I almost always get what I want out of AI these days, but there was one instance where it would not give me the output I wanted. And I tried so many different things, and eventually was like, Okay, this doesn’t work for you. I’m just not going to use AI for this. And it was creating a triathlon training plan.

Debbie O’Shea 

How weird.

Elisa Janson Jones 

I know, you think Oh, that’s so easy, but I was very specific about what I wanted and the outputs just got so wonky. Maybe it would do it better now, because this was a few months ago. But at some point, if you’re not getting what you want, it’s not going to happen and that’s okay because AI is still in its embryonic stage truly, if I can say one more thing about AI, don’t be afraid. Okay, because there’s a lot of, like, uncomfortableness and that we’re getting agentic AI and there’s all of these news stories and I get them right, like ChatGPT briefs me actually, every morning on all the newest developments in the AI space, so that I can always stay on top of it, right?

But I think you have to understand that we’re in the same place now as a lot of the world was when the personal computer first came out. Do you remember the first word processing document you ever saw? I remember specifically, like going from hand handwriting all of my assignments to typing it out on a computer and then being able to erase it without hitting, like back, back, back, back on the typewriter.

Debbie O’Shea 

And using the white tape on the typewriter.

Ethical AI Use

Elisa Janson Jones 

Yes, yeah, or white out. So those firsts that seemed like magic, or the first time that you created a formula in an Excel document, its mind blowing the potential that this can do for us. But just like that transition from the analog world into the digital world and now we’re going from the digital world to what I would call the agentic world, where we don’t have to make every command of a system it’s going to automatically do it.

Many things have already been doing this through automation and so it’s really not that different than what we’ve already been doing. But because it makes good news, they’re going to make it scary in some way. But you don’t have to be afraid of it. Just know your own potential, protect yourself as best you can. Be ethical in your AI use and you’re going to turn it into something that’s really of great advantage to you.

Debbie O’Shea 

Thank you for saying that and I think that’s the way we should all be approaching it. Absolutely. I love it. I’m excited about it and I can understand that some people are hesitant and scared and we don’t really know, but as long as we’ve got people in there, you talked about that human element. I mean, surely it’s going to be more good than harm. A lot of exciting things are happening, I think. Thank you for that brief outline. I love it. I’m going to use CALM and I love the human in the loop and the agentic world.

Elisa Janson Jones 

Awesome, I’ll send you my book once it’s published. I have the website up already CALM AI navigator, because I’ve just filed a US trademark for it.

Debbie O’Shea 

Oh well, congratulations, wonderful. Yeah, we’re cheering you on here. Oh, heavens, there’s so much to talk about. Can we have a quick talk about your research and the core competencies that you think music teachers need in today’s world before we get onto our nuggets of fabulous, because it sounds like our core skills. I still think we need our core skills of musicianship and classroom management and all of those things we’re going to still need. But what additional ones might we need looking forward?

New, Additional Skills

Elisa Janson Jones 

Sure, so I almost finished writing up. I’m actually just in the final approval stages for the study that I did, which is on, I had to focus it in on secondary instrumental music education. So to be fair, it doesn’t cover choral or pre-K through five, elementary or general music education.

So I really focused in on the secondary instrumental but the outcomes are pretty telling and I focused on first the instructional strategies that are being used in the classroom now, because a lot of that has changed as we’ve gotten more involved in the digital world and especially since that time of fully remote learning, a lot of us have kept some of those technology tools and advancements. I will never write my lesson outline on a whiteboard again, because I have a projector and can project it on Google Slides and that’s much easier for me to edit and change rapidly and keep track of what’s happening. So we looked at instructional strategies and then looked at competencies.

So based on these instructional strategies, for example, using a Google Slide as your lesson outline and projecting it on the wall, that means that you have to have the competency or the skill to be able to create a Google Slide, to be able to power up a projector, to use these digital tools, that’s not included in any previous competency guide okay. Then the third area that I looked at were knowledge gaps. So where are music educators being under trained in some university programs?

I can’t say all because I’m not studying university programs. I’m just looking at perceptions of knowledge gaps from my study participants. It was a pretty big study participant group and we did interviews, so it’s a lot of data that we achieved. So to get to your question Debbie, now that I’ve explained the study, the areas of opportunity, I think number one is, I called it cross cutting skills and these are skills that will be beneficial in the classroom, out of the classroom, and literally, in any job. Other studies have looked at professional skills and personal skills and I’m saying these are called cross cutting skills. They’re things like effective communication, effective judgment in communication.

So one of the best things you can do is learn to be a master communicator, whether it’s via text, via email, via ChatGPT, via a phone call and to be judicious about it by understanding, just like garbage in garbage out with ChatGPT right? You need to give it good information. It wants to be asked in a certain way.

The same is true for humans. If my daughter’s calling me versus calling my husband, there’s going to be two different conversations there, even though we’re talking about the same thing, because she knows our personalities. So having masterful communication skills is going to benefit you as a teacher. It’s going to benefit you in literally any job. So a lot of those cross cutting skills are areas of opportunity.

Elisa Janson Jones 

I think another one is in your ability to identify your own knowledge gaps. So basically knowing what you don’t know and then having the initiative to learn it and close your own knowledge gaps. So for example, what did I not feel comfortable in as a young music teacher, the business side of things, right? Financial documents. I remember staring at that first budget and I opened a brand new school, so I had a lot of budgeting going on and I was like, what is best, I don’t understand this budget sheet and so what did I do?

I mean, you don’t have to go get an MBA or anything like that, but I could have taken an accounting 101 class. I could have watched some YouTube videos. Maybe you don’t know how to how to create a Google Slide that functions as your daily lesson plans and how to organise it better. Katie Wardrobe has some wonderful resources over at Midnight Music.

Debbie O’Shea 

I love Katie. Hello, Katie.

Elisa Janson Jones 

So knowing what it is that you don’t know and then taking ownership over your own professional learning is very important. Another piece that came up that was surprising to me actually, was knowing yourself as a teacher, this identity piece and that transition from student to becoming the teacher and acknowledging that there does have to be some humility when you step into a brand new teaching job. My daughter is about to graduate from university and get her very first teaching job and she might, like many young educators before her, pick music that’s too hard. Or I confess, when I first started teaching elementary school, we sang songs in too low of a tessitura for young voices, so I had to learn really quickly. Oh, right, we need to take it up into this range instead, because they are children’s voices, right?

But a lot of times you just don’t know that. So having that little piece of humility and saying, Okay, I’m an educator now and I can reach out for help. And that’s the last piece, which is, you don’t have to be stuck trying to figure it out on your own. I don’t know a single music educator who wouldn’t help another music educator when asked for help, I was able to enter the elementary music classroom. I was trained secondary instrumental and I had to take this elementary music job because it was the only job available in western Colorado at the time and I needed a teaching job.

So I was very fortunate to get it, but it was teaching elementary I hadn’t taught six year olds before. I didn’t have a curriculum or a method book to follow, like I did when I was teaching band and orchestra and choir, right? So I went to my own kids’ elementary school teacher and I just said, Can I have an hour of your time? Can we sit down together and you could just tell me how to teach elementary music?

And he did. He gave me. Like, here’s the curriculum map and here’s how you can break it down. And here are some of these tips. And then he’s like and here is my phone number. And because of that, I ended up having a ball teaching elementary school. And if I were to go back into teaching, that is where I would want to be.

Debbie O’Shea 

It’s the most important place to be. But yes, I love that so much of what you said in the opportunities is that the way you phrased it? Not the weaknesses, the opportunities for improvement there.

Elisa Janson Jones 

Always opportunities.

Debbie O’Shea 

Always. A lot of it seems to me to be based on the ability of the teacher for self reflection and being really honest about where you are, what you know, what you need to know, and that humility. I think you’ve hit the nail right on the head. Well, obviously you have, you’ve done the research. I’m just going by gut reaction. But really it is about self reflection. Don’t you think?

Elisa Janson Jones 

Oh yeah and that goes to the personal side of things too, right? I’m very tired. I’m not taking care of myself. Well, that’s a sign, take care of yourself. I’m focused too much on work. I’m not doing enough in my personal life. That’s a sign, listen to yourself and just do what it takes. You can spend more time on yourself and it’s really not going to take away from your students?

Debbie O’Shea 

No, in fact, it adds. We’re up to nuggets of fabulous. I sometimes wonder why I started calling it that, but now I have and you know we’re in the 100 and whatever’s episodes, we’re still stuck with nuggets of fabulous. But I would love to hear your nuggets of fabulous. We’ve already learnt so much from you, but could you just drop a little couple of nuggets before we get into our farewells?

Love Yourself!

Elisa Janson Jones 

Oh, I have given you all my best stuff.

Debbie O’Shea 

Nuggets already delivered.

Elisa Janson Jones 

But there’s one thing that we haven’t talked about, and this is going to sound super cheesy but you need to love yourself, like love yourself and honour wherever you happen to be at any given time and care about yourself, like genuinely care about yourself. If you struggle with that, I find it’s really helpful to try and see yourself through the eyes of the people who love you, because the more that you love and care for yourself, the more that gives everyone around you the permission to love and care for themselves as well. So it’s one of the least selfish things that you can do is just love and care for yourself, first and foremost.

Debbie O’Shea 

That is wonderful. It’s slightly ironic that I’m actually writing about that in my book right at the moment too. It is so true. It feels wrong in a way, because you feel like you’re being selfish. But it’s quite the opposite. So I love that. That is a perfect nugget. Now, how can people connect with you? The Facebook page?

Elisa Janson Jones 

Yep, I’m so easy to find. My search engine optimisation is so good.

Debbie O’Shea 

So just type your name in, Elisa Janson Jones? I just had to remember which J was first Janson Jones. So basically, Google you and connect anywhere. What’s your favourite platform?

Elisa Janson Jones 

Favourite social? Well, just like when we talk about alignment with AI tools, I think there’s alignment in social media. So if you’re looking for professional connection and networking, I’m on LinkedIn.

So that’s my favourite one when it comes to sharing professional resources and building our network and stuff like that. We also have a Music Teacher Guild page on LinkedIn with almost 1000 followers now, which is awesome. If you’re into just like the more socially kind of stuff than Facebook. If you want to see all of my outdoor adventures, I put those on Instagram and all of these are accessible on my personal portfolio page, which I highly recommend everybody has.

If you don’t own a domain name that is your name, you should go and get one. So I have elisajanson.com or my new one which is elisajones.ai. That’s the easiest one, because it’s just Elisa, Jones is an easy last name and then.ai. Then, of course, the Music Teacher Guild, musicteacherguild.org, get on there, find a mentor, find our courses. It’s going to be great.

Debbie O’Shea 

Goodness, I will put all of those links into the show notes. And if you’re looking for the show notes, you won’t find them on your podcast players, but you’ll have to get back to my website crescendo.com.au and then find Elisa’s episode and it’ll all be in there. There will also be, eventually I’m a bit behind, a blog post with the full transcript as well as the link, so you can find them all in there. That sounds wonderful and I think we’ve already talked so much about advocacy, so we’re not going to go there. I am so going to connect in all of those places when I am off this recording. But one last chance to get on your soapbox and tell the world something that you would like everybody to hear.

Elisa Janson Jones 

Other than love yourself.

Debbie O’Shea 

Your nugget of fabulous was, I think, your soapbox moment?

Elisa Janson Jones 

I don’t know that I have much else to say. Just connect, build relationships, build your network. Support yourself like this is your life. It’s your life to live and nobody else gets to direct it but you, so do it. Have an awesome life.

Debbie O’Shea 

I love that. It’s been a delight. Thank you so much for having a chat to us today, I will certainly be in touch off the podcast. So thank you, Elisa.

Elisa Janson Jones 

Thank you, Debbie, it’s been a real pleasure.

Sign-Off

Thank you for joining me for this podcast. Don’t forget, you’ll find the show notes and transcript and all sorts of information on crescendo.com.au. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast or found it valuable, you might like to rate it on your podcast player and leave a review. I’d really appreciate it if you did. All I can be as the best version of me. All you can do is be the best you. Until next time, bye.

Just for Laughs

As we know, laughter relieves stress, don’t lose sight of the funny side of life.
I have a question for you. When Iron Man takes off his suit, is he stark naked? _{Actually, I quite like Iron Man.}