Draft:Dale Duncan
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Dale Duncan is best known as the creator of the S-Cubed Sight Singing Program for Beginners, a curriculum he began creating in the mid-2000s out of a desire to help teachers who struggled with teacher beginners to successfully sight sing the examples at the annual Georgia Large Group Performance Evaluation (LGPE). The standards for the annual LGPE were so high, that when he learned of them after moving to Georgia from New Jersey, he called a music colleague and said, "Are these really the standards? I couldn't have done this after finishing my master's degree." In his 11th year teaching at the time, he did his best to prepare his students for the sight-singing part of the adjudication, and they did their best. Luckily, he had an amazing and supportive sight-singing judge who filled Mr. D with ideas, and that sparked the continued work to develop the curriculum and to find a way to offer it to others.
The program is part philosophy and part method. The motto is 3/4 learning + 1/4 cup fun = SUCCESS. As Mr. D continues to offer new lessons on TpT, that philosophy is always the guiding light.
The program, along with all of his lessons, is sold on Teachers Pay Teachers, JW Pepper, and other platforms. The program is used by teachers all over the world. It has been reviewed by hundreds of teachers from all over the world on the TpT Platform.
Known as "Mr. D" by his followers, Dale leveraged social media in the early 2010s to get the word out about his program when major music education companies decided not to offer his program. The program is not traditional in the way that other sight-singing programs were offered, all of which came in a textbook format. Mr. D's program comes in a PowerPoint or Google Slides format and is digital only. Most of the major distributors in music education at the time were not equipped to handle that, but some have since caught up to the TpT model.
When Dale found Teachers Pay Teachers, he realized that he could create a new way of offering a sight-singing program. During the fall of 2013, Dale set up his iPhone 4 on a tripod daily for two years and documented his teaching of the sight-singing material daily so that teachers could watch him teach the material. Each day, he went home, uploaded the videos to YouTube, and placed the links into the lesson plans. He also uploaded teaching tips for each lesson so that teachers could be successful and know where they might find pitfalls.
He offered each week's lessons one at a time, week-by-week for $3 per lesson.
Teachers found the lessons, and the lessons helped their students, and the reviews came in.
Over time, he bundled the lessons as a full curriculum in various types of bundles aimed at middle school, high school, and elementary teachers and the various teaching circumstances they face daily. All of the bundles start with the same material. He offered the bundles in this manner so that teachers wouldn't buy more than they needed, depending on how often they see their students.
He taught public school in three states and retired from public school teaching in May of 2022. Dale continues to create new materials for teachers and offers them on TpT and JW Pepper. He travels the country as an Allstate/All District/All County conductor and continuing education provider.
Dale Duncan is a former USA National Aerobic Gymnastics Championship Gold Medalist. He coached many adult and youth athletes to gold medals at the World and National level. He represented the USA as an FIG (International Gymnastics Federation) Judge from 1995 until 2021.