As practitioners and scholars who engage with music encoding we already understand the affordances that encoding music or text can bring to our research and scholarship. However, individuals who are not yet familiar with encoding schemas and the usefulness of digital methodologies may not have a clear understanding of the “why” in using a digital method or an encoding schema (e.g. MEI, TEI). The aim of this workshop is to provide attendees with a concrete understanding and means for communicating the “why” through the use of two pedagogical approaches: deconstruction/reconstruction and backwards design. Deconstruction/reconstruction is an approach in which you take an existing project and disassemble it according to the tools, technology, methods, and techniques used in its creation. This approach enables a learner to feel empowered and get an inside or “under-the-hood” look at how a digital project was developed, which in turn allows them to have a better understanding of the affordances that certain digital tools and methods can provide them. Backwards design focuses on identifying learning outcomes at the outset and facilitates learning, as well as critical thinking. Additional details: https://teimec2023.uni-paderborn.de/contributions/193.html