About

Nick Reeder

Educator | Athletic Coach | Scholar of Music, Technology & Culture

I’m an interdisciplinary educator, coach, and music history scholar whose work bridges teaching, mentorship, creative collaboration, historical and cultural research. Drawing from the humanities, music studies, and media production, I design inclusive, project-based learning environments where students think critically, create collaboratively, and grow with purpose.

My AIM Teaching Philosophy is grounded in Active learning, Interdisciplinary thinking, and a Multicultural commitment to comparative study that reinforces values like empathy, equity and service. Whether leading a seminar, mentoring student-athletes, or collaborating on a media project, I strive to create safe, structured spaces where learners of every type can thrive.

Over the past two decades, I’ve taught high school and university courses such as English, history, music, and media studies, always centering student voice and real-world problem solving. I use discussion, digital tools, and hands-on methods like mind mapping and multimedia production to support a wide range of learners. My coaching experience deeply informs my teaching: I use high expectations, individual feedback and teamwork to foster resilience and growth in both academics and athletics.

My background in audio production and outdoor education has deeply shaped my approach to teaching. Whether leading a wilderness trip with middle school kids or guiding high school or college students through a collaborative studio project, I create learning environments that are hands-on, immersive, and rooted in the development of social and emotional abilities that are critical to creative, reflexive higher learning functions built on social and emotional communication skills.

My background as studio owner and freelance audio engineer has also kept me focused on creating opportunities to foster musical and academic collaboration. For example, while mentoring high schoolers in digital storytelling, or recording jazz ensembles at Berklee School of Music, I’ve helped students and faculty bring creative ideas to life. I treating the studio or multimedia lab like the classroom , as a space for co-creation, leadership, and experimentation. Similarly, in outdoor settings, I’ve led curriculum-integrated wilderness trips that cultivate independent thinking, group trust and embodied learning. Across all contexts, I use active, collaborative experiences to help students connect with complex ideas and solve multifaceted problems through communicating and working together.

I’m also a researcher and co-founder of a scholarly network focused on the history and culture of live audio engineering. My work has been published in academic volumes and professional audio publications, and centers on the social and technological dimensions music culture and community. Across all my roles, I aim to help students and collaborators connect and to build communities where learning is active, empathetic and shared.

AIM Teaching Philosophy

Core Goals

The three main goals of my AIM teaching philosophy are to cultivate:

1. A Safe, Inclusive Space
   To create a safe, inclusive space as a precondition for effective teaching and learning.
   This includes creating an environment of respect and tolerance in addition to modeling respectful, kind, and supportive behavior.
2. Critical Thinking and Communication Skills
   To provide students with the critical thinking and communication skills necessary for college,
   as well as the foundation needed to develop them further throughout their lives.
3. A Love of Learning, Empathy, and Purpose
   To cultivate a love of learning, empathy, and a morally informed sense of purpose. This involves not only motivating students to do things that interest them, but also pushing them to engage with new areas of connection, experience, and meaning.

The Social Purpose of Education

I link learning to empathy and purpose first, because I believe that institutions should promote service, equity and responsibility. As an educator, I want to be part of an institution committed to developing equity of knowledge and opportunity, and to producing good citizens who will take responsibility for building better communities. At Northfield Mount Hermon, a co-ed boarding school where ideals of equality, diversity, hard work and service are embodied in the “work” program, I was taught that institutions should encourage students to initiate actions that bridge their passions with the needs of society.

The Moral Foundations of Critical Thinking and Communication

The second reason I link learning to empathy and purpose is that developing critical thinking and communication skills requires acquiring morally informed social and emotional skills. Developing an openness to other peoples’ experiences (empathy) and developing intellectual curiosity and purpose are interdependent. Phillips Exeter Academy makes one of clearest declarations of this educational philosophy, describing its “Harkness” model of small table discussion as a collaborative effort at exploring ideas and solving problems. Exeter, for example, links academic skills to the moral or ethical capabilities necessary for their fruition: speaking involves courage, listening requires compassion, and understanding requires empathy. Accordingly, my philosophy is centered around creating a safe, inclusive environment that fosters respect for the experiences and viewpoints of other people.

Teaching Small Classes Using Case Studies

Early in my career I was intensively trained in the Harkness paradigm. One of my mentors, Kiri Miller, created a graduate pedagogy seminar for us to gain experience with the innovative tools she devised to keep her undergraduates engaged, accountable and working together. When I subsequently designed, marketed and taught a seminar for two summers at Brown University summer school, I incorporated Kiri’s use of virtual reviews, blogs, wikis, and journals, merging these digital pedagogies with traditional reading, writing and discussion. In Politics, Poetry and Music, the high school seniors shared and evaluated critical reviews (concise summaries of readings posted online along with discussion questions) while studying case studies about late 20th century social and political changes in the Americas.

Combining Active, Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Approaches

I use case studies to combine the study of texts and other cultural products with the study of the social and historical conditions that give rise to them. For example, in my History of American Music class at Towson University, students used case studies to establish connections between the music of youth movements and societal changes, comparing examples from the US civil rights movement and from pre-WW2 Germany. One issue these comparisons raised were the different purposes youth movements were harnessed for, despite the similar role folk songs played in generating group identity and action. Case studies naturally invite comparison and promote interdisciplinary, multicultural learning. I chose to elevate multicultural over global here in part to highlight the value of comparative, global study in cultivating an awareness of the origins, complexity and diversity of American society.

High Expectations For Diverse Learners: Collaborative Learning

To bring out the best in students, we have to set high expectations. To do so equitably, we have to recognize that people A) learn in different ways and B) that they are able to make different, but equally valid contributions. However, what is true of students with diverse backgrounds, neurodivergent profiles or learning challenges is true of everyone: students have weaknesses they need help overcoming and strengths they can be empowered by. Therefore I like to do two things that benefit everyone, but can level the playing field for individual learners when necessary:

• Involve students with diverse learning styles and/or learning challenges in active learning components such as designing, evaluating and grading assignments
• Reframe success in terms of effort and attitude whenever possible

Traditional and Collaborative Projects: Teaching Poetry, History and Writing

I have had success pairing traditional classroom methodologies with collaborative exercises that engage social and emotional skills and utilize embodied spheres of learning such as visceral or visual. Utilizing participatory, hands-on learning allows students to draw on strengths they may not be aware of, and to both contribute and be evaluated imaginatively and effectively. For example, when introducing students to poetry or literature, I often draw from my teaching background in American literature and musicology by having students learn basic musical counting, meter and phrasing. At the same time, I like to have students learn by doing while working from Mary Kinzie’s book, A Poet’s Guide to Poetry (2013), which teaches students the process of writing from the perspective of different generations and styles. This is an example of using an active, interdisciplinary methodology to enable students to draw on their intuitive knowledge of western musical vocabulary to interact with verse or prose. I had a fantastic poetry mentor in graduate school, Forrest Gander, who encouraged us to add a multicultural component to a similar exercise by translating poems from another language.

Collaborative Projects as a Hands-on Component of Research

Both at Brown and subsequently as an adjunct music professor at Towson University, I also integrated seminar and lecture teaching with collaborative research projects involving trips to the libraries and media production facilities. At Brown for example, I enlisted advanced undergraduates to help the high school seniors learn and record a piece of West African music. This helped generate material for their group multimedia projects, introduced students to the idea of the Black Atlantic as a region and historical concept, and taught in an embodied fashion the paradigmatic social and musical systems underlying the Cuban, Jamaican and African-American music cultures we were studying. Students learned about participatory music by participating!

Active, Project-Based Learning (PBL)

Since earning my PhD in 2014, my teaching and coaching have become increasingly experimental in order 1) to communicate with and motivate larger groups, and 2) to incorporate new technologies and methodologies into project-based learning (PBL). The basic idea of PBL is that if students take active roles in developing, sustaining and evaluating forms of critical inquiry—as opposed to engaging in less taxing thinking processes like memorization—they can learn to problem solve creatively and reflexively. As Brady Smith notes in Teaching & Learning: The Case for Project-Based Learning in the Humanities (NAIS Winter 2024), a key takeaway about PBL is that students learn to view end products as “provisional.” This focus on active, collaborative problem solving combined with adaptation and evaluation (reflexivity) is a concept that I have been applying to all aspects of my teaching and coaching as substitute teacher and high school coach in Montgomery County Public Schools.

PBL also demonstrates how students with diverse abilities, challenges or disabilities can work together to develop real-world skills. For example, when I went to audio engineering school I discovered that I was terrible at visualizing mechanical systems. However, I found a lab partner with complementary abilities and we pursued as many recording projects as we could. The day after we graduated, we received a call to work with a huge star. On arrival, we found the studio only half constructed. Wires were sticking out everywhere and there was a menacing group of guys hanging out suggesting that we hurry up! We handled the situation only by drawing on social and technical skills that we had developed together. Many of our lacrosse players also struggle with making rapid decisions based on inputs from complex systems. Therefore I have been distributing concise, multimedia representations of key ideas, locations and terminologies that allow students to actively and creatively assimilate difficult phenomena repetitively and non-verbally.

Small Group Learning Using Technology: Mind Maps

I have been drawn to two related pedagogical arguments concerning the effectiveness of PBL scenarios: 1) the rewards of incorporating non-verbal spheres of learning, and 2) the argument that the success of small group learning revolves around structuring and monitoring groups. 

Mind Maps are one of my favorite new ways to integrate traditional learning and big-picture discussions with efficient small group engagement. MM’s were developed in the medical sciences to help students efficiently understand, categorize and retain information about complex, interrelated phenomena. They can function alongside or dynamically expand the potentials of a standard outline or note-taking system. MM’s also teach students how to conceive of an argument or project as both a finished product and a multi-faceted process subject to revision from the start. I have a son in 8th grade with ADHD, so I know that teaching students to identify and commit to developing a complex argument can be difficult. But along with task prioritization and time management, I believe that envisioning the completion of a complex task or project to be one of the most critical organizational/study skills. And that’s why we have to make it fun!

As a PBL exercise, making a Mind Map involves making and remaking an organizational structure using primarily non-verbal, representational means to achieve higher-order thinking and active knowledge construction. The goals are to: 1) assemble and group phenomena; 2) chart, explore and reflect on interrelationships between them; 3) find primarily visual, nonverbal ways of representing these relationships; 4) establish an order or flow to these relationships; and 5) use representational means such as drawing, color, spacing, highlighting or lines to visually depict the organization or hierarchy of one’s thinking. Students can move back and forth between multiple formats (writing, drawing, digital MM’s and outlines, etc.) to develop a research outline, presentation, or collaborative document. These processes force students to take thoughts about complex things out of the realm of the verbal and represent them by means of a kind of visual, creative, artistic or symbolic shorthand, similar to the way TV detectives move pictures, pins, and colored twine around until they puzzle together a mystery. Working visually and viscerally facilitates a degree of nuance and prompts students to make new connections between phenomena that they may not have perceived as interconnected.

On my MM, for example, you see the first goal of teaching—critical thinking and communication, and the first bullet of active learning—collaborative problem solving—represented vertically to reflect the value of this pairing. I depict connections and feedback networks by drawing lines between additional core terms like interdisciplinary, and by having these terms revolve around the hub of the safe, inclusive environment. Putting core terms on the outside allows me to depict relationships between subcategories like service and empathy visually.

While making the MM, ideas about goals and methods came together relatively quickly after doing a literature review and thinking about my experiences. However, I had to spend much more time identifying the concepts, terms, and interrelationships that would best integrate interdisciplinary/multicultural ideas with the social purposes of education, while simultaneously facilitating the arguments that I wanted to make about the relationships between empathy, love of learning, and purpose.

Success as the Ability to Monitor Small Groups

I worked at the writing center at Brown for several years and I believe that students have to master basic fundamentals like critical thinking, clear writing, and oral communication. The word diversity does double duty here for many reasons including re fact I have coached dissertation writers from other academic fields and countries and they have taught me as much as I have taught them.

However, I view group learning as the best forum to assert that all types of learning and learners have equal value. Whenever I design a group exercise, I try to do so with the specific makeup of each group in mind. Studies have established links between the quality of the social relationships in collaborative learning scenarios and the quality of conceptual learning and skill development, producing terms such as relational equity (Boaler 2008), domination by expert students (Esmonde 2009), participatory equity and spatial privilege (Engle et al. 2014). These findings have made me think more about the interactions and feelings that students are likely to have working together, so as to best manage relationships and ensure both individual and group success.

These findings also resonate with a book that challenged me to assess the quality and depth of my interactions with athletes and students. In Coaching from the Inside Out (2004), Joe Ehrmann critiques the transactional style of coaching in which coaches reward or punish behavior for the purposes of winning and/or personal advancement. He offers an alternative in the form of a transformational coaching style. At Whitman High School, I am fortunate to work with a group of coaches who share a similar vision: to help students develop character, empathy, resilience, responsibility, and teamwork, and to help them build an outwardly engaged community. Whenever I catch myself focusing too much on results, I return to some of the questions that Ehrmann argues that we should ask ourselves, particularly: “Why do I coach?” and “How does it feel to be coached by me?” Being successful at this kind of coaching means putting an athlete’s personal and academic development before their athletic development—which is analogous to the creation of a safe classroom environment as a prerequisite to effective learning.