Teaching Podcasting: Roles of Engagement

by: Sutiweyu Sandoval

Sutiweyu Sandoval has been educating youth within arts/dance/music for nearly 20 years. He merges theory and practice with social-emotional learning and peer support. Sutiweyu currently leads Podcasting and Music Production workshops in our Building Beats LA classrooms.

An interesting thing happened recently. A student at a site I had already been teaching at for 6 months requested that we shift the lessons towards podcasts.

In the time leading up to this point, the students had shown more enthusiasm for the music production and DJ’ing aspects of our program so this request caught me by surprise. Regardless, I was inspired by this student taking the initiative to curate their own education, so I went home and created a 6-week lesson plan that began with planning a podcast and ended with distributing it to various platforms.

The goal was to coach them through the process instead of simply narrating as I did everything myself. My excitement as an educator could not have been higher.

The first lesson involved selecting a theme, laying out the various roles we would need and appointing the executive producers. By the end of that lesson, they were bored to tears.

But by the third lesson the interesting thing happened: the executive producers took it upon themselves to recruit students to the other roles via an audition process.

We wrote the roles on the dry-erase board along with short descriptions. Printed copies of the script were on-hand and the entire class was lined up to read lines to snag the starring role, volunteer to record the podcast or discover their passion for mix engineering. Students who had previously participated in lessons but hadn’t seemed especially excited about it were now competing to be involved.

Here are the roles we created and a revised version of my lesson plans based on what I learned from this experience.

The Roles

Executive Producer

For the purpose of these lessons, these are the “big shots.” They oversee the production as a whole, coordinate the other students and maintain creative control. The capability to visualize the project, understand the production process, oversee that process and communicate with other students is key.

Script Writer

Regardless of the topic or format, there will generally need to be a written component. The script writers are in charge of writing as well as creating printed or digital versions of the script as needed. Writing and tech skills are at the heart of this role.

Vocal Talent

These are the voices we will hear on the podcast. It could be the students who read the script, or possibly the interviewer and interviewee. Being able to take direction as well as speak clearly and at a consistent pace is important.

Vocal Producer

An optional role but a potentially important one. These students guide the vocal talent through their performance. They are keeping watch for stuttering, mispronunciations, variations in volume, inconsistent pacing and other such issues that can impact the quality of the performance.

Attention to detail and communication skills are central to this role. They need to not only spot issues but communicate them in a way that the vocal talent is comfortable with.

Recording Engineer

The importance of this role cannot be overstated. The engineer sets up and checks the audio equipment, creates test recordings to discover optimal microphone positions and keeps an eye on the vocal talent to make sure the microphone distance stays consistent. They are also in charge of communicating with the entire class about when it’s time to be silent so that recording can begin.

Tech skills are a priority but they also need communication skills because, like the vocal producer, they will have to give guidance and feedback to other students.

Post-Producer

This role oversees the selection of introduction music, outro music and any sound effects that will be included. It’s both a technical and creative role that can have a major impact on the feel or tone of the podcast. These students will need to understand how to source or create music and sound effects as well as collaborate with the executive producer to make selections that fit the vision of the final product.

Mix Engineer

These folks are in charge of making sure that the final project sounds as clear and balanced as possible. If one voice turns out to be louder than another, multiple takes will need to be cut up and spliced together to create a single seamless performance.

They will be in charge of balancing the overall volume with Gain, applying FX such as Reverb and boosting/lowering certain frequencies with EQ. This role is highly centered on technical skill.

Distribution

The distribution team will discover the most popular podcast platforms, the registration/submission process and creation of visuals/cover art and a description. This is an optional role but a valuable one. This role requires a nice balance of research, tech skills and creativity.

Documentation

Another optional role but also a fun one. Throughout the entire process, it can be very beneficial to have someone taking photos and video. Students can use this to reminisce, share with friends and family or incorporate it into the distribution plans as behind the scenes content. Technical knowledge of how to operate equipment and also edit the content is very helpful.

The Lessons:

1. Introduction and theme selection

Present your syllabus so students can get a feel for the entire process.
Describe the roles so students can mentally align with the ones that sound like a good fit.

I used a 2-step voting process for the students to select a theme. After explaining that we would only be using a single theme for the entire process, each student voted for the theme of the podcast. If any theme had a tied number of votes, we voted again after removing the non-tied theme.

2. Format and executive producer selection:

Interviews, discussions, monologues and audio plays are all different kinds of formats that can be used in a podcast. I’ll go into further detail about formats in a future post.

During this lesson, I did review various formats and how they would shape the presentation of the selected theme. This process was the bulk of the lesson time.

Next, the executive producers were selected. Due to the high degree of responsibility, a passionate and mature student with project management skills would be a strong choice.

You can select the students for this role or have them volunteer but if you do the selecting, be aware that this is the last time you will be making decisions in this production if you want this to really be their production.

3. Recruiting for the other roles and scripting

At this point, the executive producer is making the major decisions. This begins with recruiting students for the other roles we describe.

Now, let’s discuss recruitment methods. Auditions were one method but asking for/soliciting volunteers is another. The pros and cons are largely based on how engaged the class as a whole is. Auditions make more sense if there is high demand for roles but screening makes much less sense if you are still building enthusiasm for the project.

Creation of the script or conversational prompts should be the next topic. I recommend quickly going over different ways to approach this based on what is appropriate for the intersection of theme and format.

Ultimately, this will probably be something the writers have to do in their freetime instead of during the lesson. If that’s the case, then make sure that they are prepared to create a version of the script that can be easily shared and edited. An electronic document works fine for this as long as they are able to access it in the classroom.

4. Rehearsal and recording:

It might be that you have content creator/influencer students who can deliver lines on the first read through. If that’s not the case then I recommend a 15-20 minute rehearsal session where vocal talent can get comfortable with lines, vocal producers can spot problem areas and scripts can be edited on the fly to make things flow better.

While this is occurring, you can teach your recording engineers about setup, mic checks and how the talent should handle the microphone for optimal sound quality.

Lastly, is the recording process. Even if the script is relatively short, you have to allow for mistakes, giggling, nervousness, frustration and coaching from recording engineers/vocal producers. Be generous with the time you allot to recording.

5. Post-production and sourcing sounds:

This lesson will largely be instructional as you guide your post-producers on where to source music/sound effects and how to incorporate them into the podcast.

I kept the formula fairly simple: an intro song that faded into a sound effect related to the theme, recorded dialogue that came in over the sound effect, an outro song that started after the dialogue finished and credits over that outro song.

Music and sounds were sourced from Pixabay and Freesounds, respectively.

6. Mixdown:

As I taught the mix engineers, cutting recorded dialogue apart and then sewing it back together to create seemingly perfect takes was the most time-consuming aspect of the mixdown. They also learned how to separate the various vocal talents into separate audio channels so volume/EQ could be adjusted on each voice until they all sounded balanced. Adjusting the volume of songs and effects and applying a gentle amount of reverb to the master (or each individual channel) so the entire podcast had a uniform sound was next.

7. Distribution:

Students researched the leading podcast platforms, which turned out to be Apple Podcasts and Spotify. They then learned how to sign-up, which audio formats were accepted, downloading the audio in those formats from the DAW, creating a little cover art in Canva, some marketing copy to describe the podcast and uploading it all.

8. Promotion:

Developing a promotional strategy and calendar was the final lesson. Students used the same art, marketing copy and links from the distribution lesson to send promo out to their social networks. We used Google Calendar to time it out so that everyone promoted the project at the same time.

Before I finish up, it’s worth mentioning that not all classrooms are the same. Here are some aspects of my classes that may differ from yours so that you can adjust accordingly:

I had an average of 13 students per lesson. If you have a larger group then consider finding ways to shorten or streamline the steps. If you teach a smaller group, prepare to go into each lesson with more depth on the instruction side.
My students had previous instruction on sound recording and music production so the recording engineers and post-producers already had a grasp of our chosen DAW (Soundtrap). If none of your students have that knowledge then supplementary lessons might need to be created to develop those skills.
Some of the students who were recruited for key positions did not have the most consistent attendance. The recording process got delayed multiple times due to talent not showing up. Consider casting multiple students for each role so that there will always be someone to step in.
My classes were about 90 minutes in duration. I’m aware that’s longer than most instructors will get to spend with their students in a single session so feel free to break lessons into multiple parts if you don’t think they fit into your class duration.

Head to part 2 where we explore podcasting formats for your students’ projects.

Music EducationSutiweyu SandovalJanuary 9, 2024Podcasting