TATI Comes to YAMA!

A Weekend of Learning, Creating, and Growing Together

In February, we announced that YAMA would be hosting the Pacific Northwest Regional Practicum of the Teaching Artists Training Institute. Here are some of the highlights!

On March 26 and 27, teaching artists converged at YAMA for two days of hands-on professional development unlike anything we've hosted before. The experience was led by facilitator Alan Wong, a lifelong Seattleite with over two decades of experience supporting youth, educators, and communities across the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Alan brought a warm, grounded presence to the room.

Over the two days, Alan guided the group through a series of practical, creative exercises that teaching artists can bring directly into their classrooms and rehearsal spaces. Teaching Artists learned together, wrote poems together, and let ourselves feel things. There was laughter, there was reflection, and there was the particular kind of energy that happens when people who care deeply about their work are finally in the same room.

One of the highlights was TATI's Critical Response Process — a guided, formal observation framework designed to help teaching artists grow. In small groups, participants got to watch each other teach and then move through a structured reflection together, offering feedback that was both honest and generative. It was a powerful reminder that even the most experienced educators benefit from being seen and supported, and that growth is limitless.

A Community That Centers Growth

What made this practicum especially meaningful was who was in the room. Many of YAMA's own teaching artists participated alongside guest teaching artists from programs with missions like ours — people who traveled from Juneau, Austin, and Minneapolis to be part of this gathering. Across different cities, different programs, and different contexts, there was a shared language: the belief that music education, done well, changes lives.

And who better to remind us of that than our own students? A panel of YAMA students joined the practicum to share what it has actually meant to grow up in this program — their voices, their stories, and their honesty grounding everything that happened that weekend in something real.

TATI's work is rooted in a simple but powerful idea: transformational music education starts with transformational training for the people doing the teaching. This practicum was a chance for YAMA to be part of that larger movement — to invest in our teaching artists the same way our teaching artists invest in our students every week — and an opportunity for us to show off the incredible students who choose to be a part of our program.

We're grateful to TATI, to Alan Wong, and to every teaching artist and student who showed up and made this weekend what it was.

Learn more about the Teaching Artists Training Institute at tatraininginstitute.org.