Research Updates
Here at Bigger Better Brains we believe that through educating yourself, you can then educate and affect positive change in your community.
With all of the research in the field of neuromusical science, our BBB Research section serves as a content hub for you. We regularly share findings and break down the latest research to educate and inspire discussion. We hope you enjoy this page on our website and share BBB news with your colleagues, parents and students.
Stealth Advocacy is The Quiet Power of Repeating Your Message
This blog explores the quiet power of Stealth Advocacy, subtle, repeated messages that shape how others see music education. From hallway posters to one-liners in newsletters, these small signals work in the background, shifting mindsets over time. If you’re too busy to launch a campaign, this is the kind of advocacy that speaks for you, even when you’re not in the room.
Are We Too Busy Doing to Tell the Story of What We Do?
This blog invites music educators to slow down just enough to notice and name the everyday moments that show the power of music learning. From quick chats with parents to check-ins with students or school leaders, these small interactions are golden opportunities to advocate for music education.
Advocacy starts with the student
In our drive to advocate for music education, it’s easy to focus on public performances, programs, or policies. But real advocacy often begins in quiet moments with students, their stories, and their shifting motivations. This blog explores how listening, noticing, and building trust can turn everyday teaching into powerful, student-centered advocacy.
How Can We Make Music Advocacy a Daily Habit, Not Just an Event?
What if music advocacy wasn’t an event, but a habit?
In the bustle of rehearsals, lessons, and emails, advocacy often gets pushed to the margins. But what if we made it part of our everyday teaching language? This post shares four simple ways to weave music advocacy into daily practice, from quick phrases and bold visuals to shared reflections with colleagues. Small actions, repeated often, can shift how music learning is seen and valued.
Friends Who Play Together, Stay Together
Making music together does more than build skills—it builds friendships.
Research shows ensemble experiences activate empathy and connection, helping students feel they belong. From choirs to community bands, music is where friendships grow.
What’s getting in the way of recruitment in 2025?
Recruitment in 2025 is about more than filling seats—it’s about consistently advocating for music learning as essential to student growth and wellbeing. Families want to see the long-term value, and students need connection and purpose. Ongoing, intentional messaging leads to stronger recruitment, stability, and lasting impact.
Show them who they can be
The “Wanna Be Like…” poster series helps music teachers show students how learning an instrument connects to success beyond the music room. This blog introduces the series, invites teachers to contribute new role models, and offers a free download of five brand-new posters.
You Already Know How to Advocate
What if the skills you use to lead a classroom were the exact same ones you need to advocate for your music program?
The Biggest Mistakes We Make With Parents
What if perfect pitch isn’t a rare gift you’re born with, but a skill your brain can grow—shaped not by fate, but by how you listen, learn, and tune in over time?
Understanding the Brain, in Every Language
BBB resources are now available in multiple languages—because every brain deserves the chance to learn music.
BBB Easter Campaign
Free Easter campaign download with posters and social tiles to help students understand the value of music learning.
Make the skills your students build through music visible
A simple, low-stakes app and teacher toolkit that helps students notice, record and celebrate six learning habits that grow through music, from focus to self-management.
Music builds far more than musicians. Every time students practise, they develop focus, persistence, adaptability, collaboration, confidence and self-management, skills that serve them well beyond the music room. The Music Learning Passport helps students notice, record and celebrate that growth, and gives you a simple way to capture it. Students work through six passport stamps in the app, reflect on the habits they are building, and email their finished learner profile to you and their parents.
WHAT YOU GET
Access to the Music Learning Passport app: a link and password to share with your students, who track their progress on any device
A teacher how-to guide with everything you need to set it up and run it with your class
Six printable habit pages, one for each habit, each with a clear explanation, how music develops it, what it looks like in practice, and a reflection prompt
A shareable learner profile: once students collect all six stamps, they choose their strongest skills and email a finished profile to you and their parents
Six Habits of Music Learning posters to display in your classroom, reinforcing each learning habit throughout the year
WHAT IT HELPS YOU DO
Make the skills students build through music visible to them, to you and to parents
Support reflection, goal-setting and student-teacher check-ins
Provide a light-touch piece of evidence for assessment
Help students who are struggling to see their own progress
Strengthen the case for music by showing the wider skills it develops
HOW TO USE IT
Share the app link and password with your students, then use the passport as a quick end-of-term reflection, a goal-setting activity for a new term, a student-teacher check-in, or a support tool for students who need it. Students can complete it independently, in class or through guided discussion, and email their finished profile to you when they are done. Use the printable habit pages to introduce each stamp or spark class discussion.
WHY IT WORKS
When students can see the habits they are building, music learning becomes about more than performance. It becomes visible proof of the focus, persistence and self-management they are developing, skills they carry into every part of their lives. As one student profile puts it, music is not only about what you can perform, it is shaping the learner you are becoming.
"This app was a lifesaver on a day I couldn’t be in class and I didn’t want to set just another worksheet to complete. This experience was deeply beneficial for the students and has sparked many many conversations.” Holly, Middle School Music Teacher
COMMON QUESTIONS
What is the passport? A student app plus a teacher toolkit for tracking six learning habits that grow through music.
How do students access it? You share a link and password. Students can complete it on any device.
Will their progress save? Yes, progress saves on the device they use, so students should return to the same device and browser each time.
Do I need to mark anything? No. Students reflect and email their finished profile to you. It is designed to be low stakes and low effort.
How can I use it? End-of-term reflection, goal-setting, check-ins, assessment evidence or support for students who need it.
Add to cart NOW. Help your students see how far their music learning has taken them.
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