Quaver Music: Spark Creativity and Passion for Music

Follow Quaver Music on :

Alice Rolli, Vice President Sales & Advocacy

Music is the best way to convey or express our emotions and connect with others. Especially for children, it is the most effective way to learn, interact, play together, and learn to provide critical and constructive feedback to others - all essential to develop resilience in children. Bringing music to a classroom is a great way to start a student’s day, and it helps make learning fun. With this vision in mind, QuaverMusic delivers cloud-based curriculum resources to schools across all 50 states and 30 countries around the world. From rural Appalachia to schools in the Bronx, the company provides teachers the tools they need to help them engage and interact with students, helping them redefine the future of education through the use of music.

In an interview with CIO Applications, QuaverMusic Vice President Alice Rolli shares her insights on how the company helps teachers use technology to bring music into the general education classroom.

How did the journey of QuaverMusic begin?

The founders, David Mastran and Graham Hepburn, first met on a cruise ship in South China Sea, while David was playing the piano. Music brought them together! Their friendship strengthened over the years, as they composed music and shared stories. A music teacher in a school outside London, England, Graham saw that there was not much access to great resources for music education. So together, he and David rented a studio in my hometown - Music City, USA (Nashville) to record some of the music that they had written. One thing led to another, and QuaverMusic.com was born. The company originally offered a series of a short video episodes to help music teachers unpack musical concepts with students in grades K-8. In 2014, we debuted a comprehensive digital music curriculum, which was adopted and is used today by more than 10,000 teachers in all 50 states.

What are the pain points that you see in the music education and how does QuaverMusic mitigate them?

Music teachers are incredibly creative and dedicated; they want a curriculum that meets their artistry and innovative spirit while using materials that are pedagogically sound. Historically that was a challenge for textbook publishers - and for districts to decide “which pedagogy” or “which approach” the district would adopt. An online curriculum gives us the opportunity to allow teachers to show us what, and how, they are using the resources. In that way, they are our North Star.

We are able to study what is actually being used -- and take teacher feedback to improve it.

When you introduce music, you bring emotion to the classroom. Emotion leads to engagement. When kids are engaged, they learn

By taking this continuous improvement mindset - and having all of our teams in house (curriculum writers, producers, audio engineers, artists, animators, illustrators, developers) we’ve broken the idea of the “Ivory Tower” where a small group decide what is going to work for millions of kids and print up one way to do everything for ten years.

What are the various products and solutions that QuaverMusic offers?

We currently offer three curriculum resources; QuaverMusic for Grades pK-8, QuaverSEL for Grades K-5, Quaver Make Time for Music Grades K-5.

QuaverMusic is our flagship music curriculum for trained music educators. QuaverSEL is our Social and Emotional Learning curriculum - designed around our Music Based Learning™ philosophy to impact school climate, relationships, and bullying prevention efforts at schools. Our Make Time for Music™ curriculum uses music to teach other subjects - like geography and science, and to enable non-music teachers to experience the difference that Music Based Learning™ can bring to their classrooms.

What is the specialty of QuaverMusic that differentiates it from its competitors?

Our biggest differentiator is the breadth of our team and our commitment to having everything from customer service to coders in house. We live by the mantra that an hour is a week in the life of a music teacher. When you think about it, we have one hour, once a week to make a difference in a child’s life through music. We live with that urgency and our customer service team’s goal is to provide a live-answer during school hours so that teachers aren’t frustrated by technology. We want the experience of bringing high quality Music Based Learning™ resources to the classroom to be a simple as turning on the lights.

How do you customize your solutions?

From a technical standpoint, our data integrations team works closely with our district partners to ensure a seamless experience for teachers. We integrate with all of the major Single Sign On (SSO) platforms and rostering exchanges, such as Clever, Google, IMS Global, Schoology, Canvas, One Roster, ITS learning. From a curriculum standpoint, our correlations team modifies our lesson structure and standards to correlate to state-specific education standards. Our content team adds another layer of customization by animating and recording state songs to ensure the most tailored curriculum experience. Once inside their account, teachers can customize their lessons to further refine the experience to best suit the needs of their classroom.

How do you determine your success?

Teachers are our North Star in all of our planning. We survey teachers using our resources each year to gain critical feedback which we use to direct our efforts at continuous improvement. Some of the areas we measure include ease of use, impact on lesson planning, and engagement of students. We also query teachers on student learning gains, retention of complex concepts, and reduction in behavior issues. We can also measure success based on our year on year customer retention, which is over 90%. Funding for schools is very precious, and that we are able to prove our value year after year is another way we can measure our value.

Where does QuaverMusic envision itself in the future?

Our vision is to restore music to its rightful place in the education of our children. For ten years we’ve used music to help teach music. Now we’re using music to help teach other subjects - including Social and Emotional Learning. We see a world where every school day starts with a song.