Keith Evans is Senior Lecturer in Music Education at the University of Greenwich where he coordinates the Secondary PGCE Musicians in Education course in collaboration with Trinity College of Music.

Sounding Off:

"Creative music teachers or functional managers of learning?"

I am increasingly aware of the compliance culture in education and find it at odds with my aim of developing reflective practitioners who show imagination and creativity in leading musical learning. As teacher educators, we are regularly face tensions between preparing new teachers to fit in compliantly with standardised practice and encouraging them to adopt a more radical approach, challenge established norms and potentially bring about change.

Numerous commentators point out that centrally-dictated policy and advice has seemingly ‘standardized’ the learning experience and the result is that good teaching is inclined to be judged as much by how far the lesson conforms to a predetermined format as its ability to engage and truly inspire the learner. The extent to which conformity has now become a problem in English classrooms is clear from the summary of the Select Committee report on the National Curriculum:

House of Commons Children, Schools and Families Select Committee Report (April 2009).

Notwithstanding the arguments concerning the uniqueness of music and the wisdom of a ‘one size fits all’ approach to lesson design, many practising music teachers also seem to be missing the opportunity to engage and build on the musical interests of their pupils by overreliance on published resources. Is this not a further indication of a lack of clarity on a personal vision for music education? Whilst there is a case for the busy music teacher not having to reinvent the wheel, we see a resource designed for one context being used in another entirely without reflection or modification.

In many ways, the challenge is simply concerned with how we prepare good music teachers but, at present, it is far from sure that there is a consensus on what a ‘good music teacher’ actually is. In what Swanwick (2008) refers to as the “input/output model of teaching and learning” a good teacher seems to be one who delivers the prescribed outcomes for the task, however limiting and unmusical that might be. Supporters of this view would probably regard a teacher who manages the class well and whose pupils achieve their target attainment levels through tried and tested methodology far better and safer than one who is prepared to experiment with different pedagogy.

It is very easy to look back on a ‘golden age’ of teacher education before the 1988 Education Reform Act when, with the freedom to devise their own curriculum, the priority was to ensure that teachers reflected on action, evaluated their practice and steadily honed a clear vision for music education. Teachers were trained in universities and colleges of education and tried out their ideas in schools. The school offered the audience but had little input in the training. Yet how successful was this in practice? How many teachers actually went into schools at the end of their training to devise a radical curriculum addressing the needs of the local community? I suspect that many of us still started our careers with well-entrenched values and views of teaching and learning based on our own experience at school and perhaps it was not until some years later, and in the light of further evaluation, that we got somewhere near meta-reflection on practice.

The 1990s swept away the ‘golden age’ and central government control alongside the introduction of the national curriculum heralded a much more mechanistic view of teaching and, ironically, started the de-skilling of the thinking teacher highlighted in the select committee report. The new competency agenda was concerned with meeting prescribed standards for planning, assessment, and classroom management with an emphasis on standardised classroom delivery. Moore (2004) describes this as a shift from the ‘reflective practitioner’ discourse to that of the ‘competent craftsperson’.

The rapid growth of employment-based routes into teaching in recent years reflects the dominance of the competent craftsperson model and, while it would be unfair to suggest that the idea of reflective practitioner is ignored, it perhaps does not get quite the same emphasis it does on a PGCE programme. Obviously, there are specific QTS standards concerned with reflection underpinning all routes into teaching, but PGCE written assignments are still frequently framed as tasks of critical reflection. Another strength of the PGCE model is the opportunity it offers student teachers to regroup at the university at regular intervals throughout the course, reflect on experiences and gradually build a personal philosophy for music education.

Whatever the route, we must find out why some teachers mistake compliance for good practice and what it are the characteristics (personal, musical, educational) that distinguish an inspiring, creative music teacher in the making.

Reference
Swanwick, K (2008) The ‘good enough’ music teacher, British Journal of Music Education, 25;1 (9-22)
Moore, A (2004) The Good Teacher: Dominant discourses in teaching and teacher education, New York, Routledge Falmer.