As a co-founder of the American Orff-Schulwerk Association (AOSA), Carley contributed greatly to the organization's beginnings, serving as a board member and magazine editor.

Carley devoted much of her life to musical instruction, publishing a series of books titled Recorder Improvisation and Technique.

[1] Carley's interest in music education intensified in 1962 when she took an Orff-Schulwerk course in Toronto and subsequently enrolled in the Orff-Institute in Salzburg, Austria, for the 1963–64 academic year.

[2] In 1949, after World War II ended, she taught pre-school music classes to children in addition to private lessons in piano, recorder, hand-drum and ensemble.

"[citation needed] Carley's theoretical work identified the expanded tonal possibilities within the gapped pentatonic scales typically used in Orff-Schulwerk music for children.

[5] Rejecting rote learning of prepackaged performances, Carley exhorted teachers to "see to it that every child is included and challenged at an appropriate level", believing that "[m]usicality is not simply another reading skill or a laborious cultivation of various kinds of physical dexterity.

[6] In writing the books, she sought to create a "more integrated approach to using the recorder as an essential part of the learning experience in the Orff classroom".

[6] The books contain lessons in playing the recorder, musical improvisation, ensemble musicianship, and speech, movement and compositional form.

[6] Book Three, subtitled "Advanced: Composing, Arranging, Analysis" expands on the previous materials and parallels the Orff Schulwerk volumes III and V, introducing major and minor modes with functional harmony, along with many historical techniques of ornamentation and improvisation such as heterophony, variation and chaconne.

Grouped into three sections, Origins, Practicum and Exhortations, the book provides information and opinion from the life of an early pioneer of the Orff Approach in North America.

[citation needed] New editions of Carley's Five Little Books appeared in 2013 and another collection of essays, Taking the Orff Approach to Heart, was published in 2015 as an e-book.