The biggest conundrum I faced as a middle school general music teacher was how to actively engage my students in music making that was relevant to them. Unlike students who took my band and string classes, my general music students had no choice but to be in my class. This was a challenge that forced me to look beyond my music education training on clarinet in Western classical art music and to search for music and ways of musicking that could inspire and educate my students. I began incorporating popular music into my lessons. Students were creating beats on GarageBand and composing their own raps. I was teaching them how to salsa dance to music that was a blend of popular R&B songs set to salsa beats. Their engagement skyrocketed. I still felt like I was floundering as a teacher, but I was beginning to discover that starting with the musical preferences of my students and creating a learning environment that allowed for more informal learning—ie, student choice of repertoire, self-directed and peer learning, teacher as facilitator, aural learning (Green, 2008)—were ways to help my students gain confidence in their musicality and build musical skills.

Fast forward four years—I hear about a non-profit organization called Little Kids Rock, which essentially was helping teachers create “garage” bands, or “modern” bands, in their schools. What? This was an idea I had seen being enacted in the United Kingdom (ie, through the work of Dr. Lucy Green and the nonprofit Musical Futures), and I had only dreamed that this could become a reality in the United States. Now, there was a support system for music teachers who wanted to bring popular music into schools, including an incredible amount of financial support for professional development and instruments as well as a wealth of free online resources to access. The purpose of this article is to share what modern band is and is not, why this kind of programming is needed in K–12 music education today, and how modern band can be realized in any school system. There was no incentive from Little Kids Rock to write this article, nor is the purpose of this article to promote or advertise for the non-profit. This is an article written from the perspective of a teacher who wants as many students involved in school music as possible.