Students learn more from their band experience than musical concepts. Many students learn leadership skills as a part of their time in band, but these skills are rarely an official part of the curriculum. Additonally, band directors must use leadership to successfully build and guide their program, but are rarely provided formal training in leadership theory and skills. I used transformational leadership (Bass & Riggio, 2006; Burns, 1978) as a framework to examine practices band directors use to learn leadership themselves and help students develop their own leadership. I utilized Deci and Ryan’s (2000) Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and autonomy supports (1995) to help identify director practices that were transformative in nature. Through the use of interviews with three band directors and ten students I examined how band directors learn leadership, how they use it, and how students in band understand the use of leadership by directors and themselves.
I found that band directors typically learn these transformative skills through a variety of formal and informal situations through life starting as early as high school. Directors develop leadership skills through the presence of mentors and the use of critical self-reflection over the course of their careers. Directors create a culture of band that is extended to the student body and reinforced through student leadership and peer mentoring. Finally, managerial tasks can be used to help students develop leadership identities (Komives et al., 2005), develop leadership skills, and allow them to act as transformative figures themselves.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/43310 |
| Date | 08 November 2021 |
| Creators | Richardson, Keith D. |
| Contributors | Roesler, Rebecca A. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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