How to Be a Better Choir Director This Year: Five Honest Practices That Compound
We’ve all been through the standard Professional Development workshop. Directors come in expecting ten tips and tricks they can take back to their classrooms — quick-fix techniques that will magically improve their next rehearsal. I've come to believe the quick-fix model is mostly an illusion. You can find counterexamples to nearly every tactical "tip" by looking at successful directors who don't use it. Some great directors are warm and effusive. Some are quiet and stoic. Some run highly structured rehearsals. Some are loose and improvisational. The surface practices vary enormously.
What doesn't vary is something deeper — a small set of habits and mindsets that distinguishes directors whose programs compound year over year from directors who plateau or decline. These are not glamorous. They're not the ten tips you can post on a wall. They're the practices that, applied consistently over years, produce directors and programs that grow into something genuinely meaningful.
Here are the five I've come to trust most. Pick one. Bring it into your practice this year. Watch what happens.
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Practice one: take care of your voice
You are a working voice user. You demonstrate parts in every rehearsal. You direct community sings. You speak across rehearsal halls for ninety minutes at a time, sometimes multiple times a day. Your voice is your primary instrument as much as it's your singers'. And for most choir directors, it's the most consistently neglected part of their professional development.
A choir director's voice is the most public-facing part of their work. Your singers model what they hear and see from you. Tight throats produce tight choir tones. Poor breath support produces poor singer breath support. Vocal fatigue at the end of a rehearsal means your demonstrations get worse just when the choir is most depending on you.
Do this for yourself, this year:
Warm up daily. Five minutes. Lip bubbles, gentle scales, breath work. Same as you'd lead your choir through. Do it before every rehearsal. Do it before every lesson. Do it in your car on the way to work. The warm-up is the difference between voices that show up ready to work and voices that warm up on the singers' time.
Cool down at the end of rehearsals. A minute of gentle descending humming. Gradual return to relaxed phonation. The cool-down is what keeps your voice intact across consecutive days of heavy use.
Get vocal training yourself. Most choir directors I work with haven't had a voice lesson in years. Find a teacher you respect and book a lesson a month. Your demonstrations will improve. Your stamina will improve. Your understanding of what your singers experience will deepen. The investment compounds for the rest of your career.
Take vocal rest when you need it. When your voice is tired or sick, the temptation is to power through. Don't. A few days of rest is dramatically better than three weeks of trying to teach with an injured voice. Your singers will be fine. The next rehearsal will be fine. Take care of the instrument.
Hydrate and sleep. The boring stuff that actually matters. Two-thirds of vocal health is hydration and sleep. The other third is technique. Don't optimize the third and ignore the two-thirds.
This is one of the most overlooked practices in choral directing, and one of the highest-leverage ones. Your voice has to last forty years. Spend ten minutes a day on it.
Practice two: forgive yourself
Choir directing is impossible to do perfectly. The variables are too many. Singers come and go. Voices change unpredictably. Rehearsal time is too short. Repertoire decisions are made with incomplete information. Concerts include moments that go wrong despite all preparation. The job, done honestly, includes a steady stream of small failures that have to be incorporated into the work.
The directors who burn out are the ones who can't forgive themselves for any of it. Every flat note is their fault. Every singer who quits is their failure. Every concert that doesn't go perfectly is evidence of their incompetence. The internal monologue is brutal, and it eventually drives them out of the profession.
The directors who sustain are the ones who can hold themselves to high standards while also forgiving the small failures gracefully. This is not the same as being complacent. It's the same as being a serious athlete who acknowledges that you can't win every game, can't perform at your peak in every practice, can't get every detail right every day — and who works hard anyway, learning from the failures without being destroyed by them.
Some specific practices that help:
End every rehearsal by naming one thing that went well. Out loud, to yourself or to your singers. The internal accounting of choir directing tilts heavily toward what went wrong. Counterweight it deliberately with what went right.
Take honest notes about what didn't work, then move on. Yes, the alto section was flat in measure 24. Note it. Plan to address it next rehearsal. Then close the book and stop ruminating. The post-rehearsal stew is what wears directors down. Notes and a plan are productive. Endless looping is not.
Forgive yourself for the kids you couldn't help. Some students need more time than you have. Some boys' voices crack through their solos despite your best work. Some singers quit before you could help them. This is the nature of the job. The directors who can hold these losses without crumbling under them are the ones who can keep showing up for the next student.
Acknowledge the mistakes you make in rehearsal openly. When you give the wrong cue, name it. That was on me — let's go back to measure 24. The graceful acknowledgment costs you nothing in authority. It teaches your singers something invaluable about how to handle their own mistakes. And it lightens the weight you carry, because you've named the thing instead of pretending it didn't happen.
Make peace with the long arc. You're not finished after this concert. You're not finished after this season. The work compounds over decades. Some years are great. Some years are difficult. Both are part of the same career. The directors who sustain are the ones who can see beyond the current rehearsal to the longer arc of what they're building.
This is one of the hardest practices on this list. It's also one of the most important. The directors who can forgive themselves stay in the work. The directors who can't, leave.
Practice three: invest in your own learning
The single biggest difference between directors who plateau in their first five years and directors who continue growing into their thirty-fifth year is whether they keep learning.
A surprising number of directors stop learning after their initial certification or degree. They use the methods they were taught. They rely on the repertoire they already know. They don't attend conferences. They don't read new pedagogical research. They don't take their own lessons. They don't observe other directors at work.
The opportunity cost of this is enormous. Choral pedagogy keeps evolving. New research on the changing voice, new compositions, new approaches to literacy, new technologies for rehearsal preparation — all of it is happening, and the directors who engage with it bring better practice into their rehearsals than the directors who don't.
Some specific practices:
Attend at least one professional conference a year. ACDA, NAfME, OAKE, your state organization. The exposure to current practice, the conversations with other directors, the workshops on specific topics — these compound over years into expertise that solo work cannot produce.
Read pedagogy regularly.Choral Journal, books on the changing voice, books on rehearsal technique, books on specific composers. An hour a week of reading current scholarship and craft writing keeps your thinking sharp.
Take lessons or coaching yourself. Voice lessons. Conducting coaching. Repertoire study with a more experienced colleague. The directors who invest in their own ongoing training treat their craft as the lifelong skill it actually is.
Observe other directors. Get into other people's rehearsals. Watch how they run things. Steal ideas. Notice what works that you'd never do. Notice what they do that you'd never do but that works for them. The exposure to other approaches keeps your own approach from calcifying.
Build a network of trusted colleagues. Five or six directors at similar career stages with whom you can have honest conversations about what's working and what isn't. The professional loneliness of choir directing — most of us work alone in our specific positions — is one of the underrated costs of the career. A small network of colleagues mitigates it dramatically.
The investment is not optional if you want to keep growing. The directors who plateau aren't lacking talent. They're lacking ongoing intake of new material.
Practice four: focus on the kids who need you most
In every choir, there's a distribution of singers. There are the natural musicians — the kids who would do well in any program. There are the middle-tier singers who can grow with good instruction. And there are the struggling singers — the ones who are flat, the ones whose voices are cracking through change, the ones who can't read music, the ones whose home lives make consistent attendance hard, the ones who joined the choir because they were lonely.
The instinct of most directors is to spend disproportionate attention on the natural musicians. They produce the best sound. They give the most rewarding feedback. They make rehearsals feel productive. They earn the director's affection by sheer ease of the work.
The directors who genuinely change lives spend disproportionate attention on the struggling singers.
This isn't a sentimental choice. It's a practical one. The natural musicians are going to be fine. They'll grow with adequate instruction. They'll find private teachers if they need more. They have the home support and the cultural capital to navigate the music world on their own.
The struggling singers are the ones whose musical lives depend on what you do. The kid who joins your choir not knowing if she can sing, and leaves five years later as a confident performer, is the kid whose life you changed. The boy whose voice cracked through middle school and who almost quit, who you helped through it, who continues singing into adulthood — that's the kid you mattered for. The adult community member who walked in convinced she was tone-deaf and walked out a contributing alto two years later — that's the singer who needed you most.
This means the work is sometimes uncomfortable. You spend time with the kid who's hardest to work with. You stay after rehearsal for the extra ten minutes that the struggling singer needs. You invest in the kid who's not going to make your concert sound dramatically better but who will, if you help him, continue singing for the rest of his life.
Most of your singers will not become professional musicians. Your goal is that every singer who works with you feels comfortable singing Christmas carols with their family, singing lullabies to their grandchildren, joining a community choir as an adult, raising their hand at a wedding when the audience is invited to join the song. The human-interaction part of music — the part that lasts a lifetime — is what your work is actually for.
The kids who need you most are the ones who'll carry that gift with them longest if you give it to them.
Practice five: remember why you started
You did not become a choir director because you loved spreadsheets, scheduling, fundraising, parent emails, rehearsal logistics, copyright tracking, or any of the dozens of administrative tasks that fill your week. You became a choir director because singing in groups made you feel something specific that you wanted to give to other people. Most directors I know can tell you the moment they decided. The piece they sang as a teenager that changed them. The director who took them seriously when no one else did. The concert that made them feel, for the first time, what music could actually do in the world.
Stay connected to that.
Sing yourself. Join a choir if you can. Sing solo work when opportunities arise. The director who only ever conducts loses touch with what their singers are experiencing on the inside. The director who continues to be a singer themselves stays in touch with the deepest reality of the work.
Listen to music for pleasure. Not pedagogically. Not for repertoire selection. For pleasure. The reason you fell in love with music is the reason you do this work. Stay in love with it.
Spend time with singers outside the rehearsal context. Coffee with a former student. A meal with the choir leadership team. A casual conversation with a singer about why they love singing. These relationships are the soul of the work, and the administrative crush of the job will starve them if you let it.
Remember the kids you matter to. When you're exhausted, when the season feels long, when the budget cuts are coming, when the parent complaints are landing — remember the singer whose life you changed. Remember the kid who joined your choir at the worst time of her life and found something to hold onto. Remember the boy whose voice you helped through. Remember the adult who started singing with you at sixty-two and now sings every week, decades into her life that no one expected to include this.
That's what we do. Not the spreadsheets. Not the audition forms. Not the budget meetings. The work of helping people sing.
If you ever forget that, the year will eventually drain you. If you can stay connected to it — really connected, not as a slogan but as a lived experience — the work sustains itself.
The compounding effect
None of the five practices in this article are revolutionary. None of them are quick fixes. None of them will transform your next rehearsal into something dramatically different.
But over a career, the directors who do these things — take care of their voices, forgive themselves, keep learning, focus on the singers who need them most, stay connected to why they started — build programs and selves that compound. Year by year. Decade by decade. The cumulative effect is the difference between the director who's still vibrant and growing thirty years in, and the one who burned out by year fifteen.
Pick one. Start this week. The choir you direct in ten years is partly being decided by what you do now.
That's the work. That's the privilege. Welcome back to it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Topher Keene
Choral Director, Pedagogue, and Vocal Coach
Grammy-Award Finalist Topher Keene is a widely respected choral pedagogue and clinician. He has served as the director of education for a Grammy-Award-winning boys choir, holds Kodály certification from the New England Conservatory, and has led teacher-training workshops at ACDA, OAKE, NAfME, and state and regional conferences across the country. His work focuses on the pedagogical fundamentals that produce literate, capable singers — and on the long career of the working choir director.
Topher specializes in helping struggling singers learn to match pitch, working with adolescent changing voices, and building rehearsal cultures where every singer can grow. He maintains an active studio in Phoenix, Arizona, and works with choir directors, music teachers, and individual singers across the U.S. and internationally over Zoom. He also runs Choir Unlimited, a choral publishing company specializing in accessible, pedagogically-sound choral repertoire.
Whether you are directing your first choir or your thirtieth, the fundamentals are the same: care for your singers, care for your voice, and care for the music. The work compounds over a lifetime when those three things are kept central.
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