Kate Smallidge

Education

MM, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester

BM, BS, University of Connecticut

Kate Smallidge teaches PreK-4 general/vocal music, choir and beginning brass lessons and band at Mansfield Elementary School in Mansfield, Connecticut. She has taught general music, beginning instrumental music, and middle school choir for the past twenty years in Farmington and Greenwich, Connecticut, Rochester, New York, and Chelsea, Massachusetts. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Connecticut in music education and a master’s degree from the University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music. Ms. Smallidge conducted The Main Street Singers, a children’s choir in New Britain, Connecticut from 2011-2014, and was recognized in 2014 as the Connecticut ACDA Outstanding Young Choral Director of the Year. In support of future music educators, Ms. Smallidge works closely with the University of Connecticut music education program to provide opportunities for internships, observations, and practice teaching.

Teaching Philosophy

My philosophy of teaching revolves around cultivating the feelings of joy, accomplishment, and collaboration that children experience when participating in choir. These are experiences that exist momentarily in time and space and express collective and personal emotions by combining lyrics, singing, instruments, and often movement.

Over the past seventeen years of teaching, I have honed my teaching practice using additional knowledge from personal experiences, mentors, graduate classes, international travel, and conference sessions. As a Mansfield teacher, I have expanded my teaching to ensure that students are active learners, collaborators, and leaders of their learning in my classroom. In my teaching, I present a sequence of learning that enables students to become musically literate. Students use their knowledge of music notation, solfege, and rhythm syllables to decode age-appropriate melodies that come from our choral music. As independent musicians, students are able sight read, audiate and perform familiar songs and new music, as well as compose simple rhythms and melodies.

I am a positive, caring, and generous person with a joyful disposition, all of which I bring to my teaching. As a music educator, I engage daily in the creative processes of envisioning instruction, implementing this instruction, and creating beautiful music with my energetic and musical students. My students are extremely important people in my life, and the relationships I have with them are very strong. I teach with integrity, love, humor, empathy, and lots of fun. It is received with smiles, laughs, hugs, trust, and ever expanding music making, where I learn as much from them as they learn from me.