It was an absolute honor to teach at the Ithaca Virtual Suzuki Experience (IVSE) this summer. Hosted by Ithaca Talent Education and Ithaca College, was one of the few summer Suzuki programs for students to even happen.

As you can imagine, a transition from an in person institute to a virtual one required an epic feat of organization, creativity and courage. Faculty members and families alike were stunned by the incredible preparation done by directors Carrie Reuning-Hummel, Natalie Coots, and Sarah Cummings as well as other members of the staff support team.

IVSE included master classes (lessons), repertoire classes (groups), elective classes, play ins, parent talks, student recitals, guest recitals, a convocation and a final concert. No twinklers were in attendance, but everyone else was! We saw students from Book 1 through Book 10 and beyond, with ages ranging from 5 to 18.

It was a complete success. I want to unpack WHY it was such a success.

1) Gratitude.
Institutes can breed complaints from parents and faculty. People want their money’s worth. Teachers traveling across the country want to be comfortable. Students want to have fun. It can sometimes be seen as a competitive environment where everyone wants an equal shot. The office remarked in a post-mortem with the faculty that they received NO complaints. Stunning.

I believe this can be attributed to a few things.
1) the remarkable circumstances in 2020. We are living through a pandemic, economic collapse, and a complete disruption of the education situation as we know it. To even have the opportunity to make music and learn from each other is a gift. It was also one of the few events to happen over the summer, so students who are typically overwhelmed by school, camps, and other summer activities were able to appreciate the intensive structure IVSE provided.
2) Ithaca College created a zoom account for every faculty member. Though it sounds trivial, or even a little annoying for faculty members to switch from personal account to IVSE account, the real benefit was the office’s ability to control every aspect of the administrative process. IVSE staff set up all meetings, copied all links, sent all invitations, sorted through all the appropriate settings, and therefore was able to provide personalized schedules and beautiful master lists for us. If the technological tasks were put on the faculty to-do lists it would have led to confusion, mistakes, and friction. This set up allowed faculty to focus only on the difficult task of teaching well via Zoom.
3) This institute was different. Far from the standard Ithaca Suzuki Institute which has run for decades with many of the same faculty members and structural norms, the Virtual Suzuki Experience risked trying something completely new. To my knowledge no Suzuki institute has EVER been attempted online–certainly not at the scope, scale, or with the quality of faculty this one did. It is easy for pioneering members to appreciate a healthy risk and offer suggestions, rather than complain in the face of the courage it took to launch.

2) Enrollment.
Because IVSE was so different from the Ithaca Suzuki Experience, no one–faculty or student– was expected to attend. Every faculty member and family at IVSE decided they wanted to be there and that it was worth paying the price of full tuition to attend. IVSE made the difficult but, in my opinion, brilliant decision to keep tuition at the same price as the in person institute. By doing so they took what can be considered a slippery, difficult-to-commit-to educational experience (online learning) and transformed it into a rich, engaging one. People are there because they want to be.

3) Small groups with intense social bond.
Led by highly skilled, live teachers, every recurring group meeting at the institute (lessons, group class, electives, hang out rooms) was designed to be small and peer-to-peer interactive. Students haven’t hung out with each other for months, so teachers deliberately centered student led feedback, get-to-know-you conversations, and encouraged attendance of student organized hang outs in the evenings. The synchronous daily meetings of a handful of people (a few parents and students with a teacher) made a big thing feel small. Inspiration, engagement, accountability, and enjoyment arose naturally.

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This first approach to a virtual institute lined up strikingly well with Seth Godin’s observation of online education (here).
https://medium.com/swlh/will-this-be-on-the-test-237ae9cc53b4

In the article he discusses how in 2016 he inverted everything we had done in online learning contexts in order to create his altMBA online program.

Rather than compulsory schooling, he required enrollment.
Rather than cheap, he made it expensive.
Rather than large, he made it small.
Rather than asynchronous, he made it live.
Rather than lectures, he prioritized student experience and projects.
Rather than moving through the process alone, he created small cohorts who were in constant communication with each other.

I don’t know how many of us would opt to continue teaching online indefinitely, but if we are going to have to (for health reasons) we might take note of the similar, brilliant ways in which IVSE and Seth Godin have intentionally set up their programs.

It is easy to be reactive in the midst of crisis. But crises also gives us the opportunity to reset and restructure out of necessity. When making these large moves, I urge us to do the counter-intuitive, counter-cultural work of intentionally creating something beautiful and built to last.

What a gift to have been a part of the 2020 iteration of this new modality of learning. I feel like I was invited to be on the frontier of something. Thank you.