Johanna Gamboa-Kroesen was driving home when she got a call.

“I was driving on a beautiful rural highway through the woods of New England,” recalls Gamboa-Kroesen. It was her year 2006 and she was in the final stages of completing her MMEd. She attended Hart School of Music in West Hartford, Connecticut. She had a phone interview with a Southern California school district for her first job, so she waited for the call, but it wasn’t too soon. she explained. “I had to go out of the way to pick up the phone. I had my first interview on the side of the highway.”

she got a job

For Gamboa-Kroesen, a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship that led her from public school to a doctoral program was the first step in her professional career as a music educator. In Fall 2022, she will join the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music as an Assistant Professor of Music Education.

Her passion has always been to teach and share the joy of music. In total, she spent 16 years teaching music to elementary and middle school students at schools in Irvine. It was a fulfilling job that she loved with all her heart. For ten years she honed her craft and in the process she won two teaching awards.

But she noticed something strange along the way.

“I would have had students who did very well in music class. They responded well to instruction, improved regularly, and were strong participants,” says Gamboa-Kroesen. “But they struggled in other areas. When I spoke with their teachers and coaches, it seemed like we were talking about two different students. Seemingly having problems What was it that made these visible students so successful in her class?

It was the beginning of a research project she would be taking on for her doctoral program at UCLA. Already with her ten years of teaching experience in public schools, she was ready to create a study to measure the impact of music education on student success. She identified five of her schools as sites and developed research and observational equipment to submit to the dissertation committee.

The committee was enthusiastic. They advised her to start with teacher data collection before interviewing students about their experiences. I was thinking.

“I was pretty sticky to my committee,” said Gamboa Clausen. “If we are student-centered in practice, we should be student-centered in research.” She didn’t have to push hard. “My committee was very understanding and receptive to my rationale.”

Gamboa-Kroesen’s research yielded an important discovery. She found that her student success correlated with a strong sense of community and belonging. A musical ensemble was just such a place to build community.

“Sometimes students go to school and don’t hear their name all day long,” says Gamboa-Kroesen. “Musical ensembles are places where students can feel they belong and where they get that sense of ‘they are my peers.’” It also led to improvement. Students who participated in welcoming musical ensembles were more likely to attend other classes and less likely to engage in risk behavior.

Gamboa-Kroesen explored why some teachers were able to build more successful ensembles than others. An exciting finding of her research was that music teachers are generally more effective when they de-emphasize competition in ensembles and instead focus on shared responsibilities.

For generations of music students who have grown up with performance auditions and chair placements based on skill level, this is a counterintuitive conclusion.

“Think about it,” said Gamboa Clausen. In fact, sitting in the back and learning is harder than being in the front. And students who might have careers as professional musicians can’t spend their school days in front of a conductor. “

Gamboa-Kroesen’s research has important policy implications. If music education can open the door to better student outcomes, including students’ emotional well-being, it is important that administrators and policy makers continue to make it a priority.

After all, music is essential.