Sing Up Area Leader Janice Mitchell works across Cheshire, Halton, Wirral and Warrington using her skill set to embed singing into the region. As an Area Leader, Janice’s job involves a range of skills from creating and delivering training sessions, to networking, strategic planning and forging new partnerships. We talk to her about the importance of vocal leadership and high-quality, healthy singing.
How important do you think quality vocal leadership is, as part of Sing Up’s training programme?
It’s good to encourage best practice. Vocal leaders work with children, and the vocal health of those children is in their hands. Children are the vocal leaders of the future, so if you don’t promote good practice now, that’s obviously going to have a knock-on effect. In terms of sustainability, you’ve got to train people and train them well otherwise there won’t be any sustainability. At the start of Sing Up, my perception was that there weren’t very many vocal leaders and animateurs in the country. Since then, the network has grown but in an unregulated way because there hasn’t ever been a specific pathway to becoming a vocal leader.
What do you think still needs to be tackled when it comes to achieving quality vocal leadership through Sing Up?
However good the training is, we are not able to monitor how people use that training when they go back to their settings. People can come along to half a day or a whole day, and it might not be enough to pick up how the voice works. People can go back and deliver a few ideas that they’ve picked up, but they may still be using bad habits and bad practice from the past. Sing Up is exploring this and maybe one way is through the Sing Up Awards.
What kind of positive impact have Sing Up’s training courses had on the vocal leaders taking part?
Last year, I did co-mentoring sessions where we got together and shared ideas and good practice. These people have been inspired and have been more likely to go onto things like Music Learning Live, Lin Marsh’s courses and Sing Up Training Courses.
What makes a good vocal leader in your opinion?
A good vocal leader should be inspiring, lively, energetic and engaging. They should be able to model good practice and have good pedagogy – for example, using children as role models in sessions and enabling children to evaluate their own singing.
“A good vocal leader should be inspiring, lively, energetic and engaging.”
As a trainee teacher I aspire to encourage young role models in my teaching. Does anybody have any advice on how to do so?
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