Some things I noticed:
- There are differences of opinion on what is hard or easy.
- Everyone selects different programs. It is important to know why (conductor skills, interest, patience for hard music, etc...).
I wonder if any districts have meetings where they select the repertoire for the following year in a group. I know English teachers don't bring a new book in without discussing it first. Should we use the benefit of the crowd more?
In my district(West Hartford), we have "rep shares" about 2x a year. We don't necessarily pick our rep together, but we share pieces that worked well for us, and often we use the music that our colleagues picked. It saves us budget money because we share our libraries with each other, and it saves us time figuring out what concepts we might teach with those pieces. For our inter-middle school festival, we try to purposely program pieces from the festival with our regular choirs (and band and orchestra) to save rehearsal time for the festival. In that respect, we do plan some of our rep together.
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