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Music departments, with their lively classrooms and many extended curriculum activities, offer vast potential for researching and disseminating ideas across the wider educational community. Teachers have the advantage of being embedded in the school context as ‘practitioner researchers’, able to draw on their lived experience in questioning the musical behaviours that they encounter on a daily basis. Their knowledge is often specific to a particular school, and in this respect complements the broader studies of national trends carried out by such organisations as the National Foundation for Educational Research (e.g. Harland, Kinder & Hartley, 1995; Harland et al., 2000). Teachers have a vital contribution to make to fostering understanding of teaching and learning in music, and it is therefore important that new entrants to the profession are equipped with the research skills needed to reflect on practice in a systematic and robust way.
Sometimes the research carried out by teachers will be of primarily local interest, useful mainly to colleagues and to researchers themselves as a form of staff and curriculum development. On other occasions, the research might have broader relevance to educational practice or debate, and so could be offered for publication in a professional magazine or research journal. In either case, reflecting on practice is an important route to more effective teaching, as it heightens awareness of everyday educational encounters, and challenges assumptions about students’ musical attitudes, behaviour and development.
Defining research questions in music education
Every research project needs a question: something that you as a researcher are aiming to investigate or discover. Sometimes this question might be fairly broad or exploratory (examples 1 & 2 below), at other times more specific (examples 3 & 4):
- What effects does participation in a school ensemble have on students’ musical and personal development?
- What are the factors affecting students’ decisions to continue or give up instrumental learning in the lower secondary school years?
- Do students achieve more in composing lessons when they work in friendship groups?
- How do attitudes towards music technology vary amongst boys and girls?
The selection of a research question might be motivated by a clear educational need, such as the wish to improve assessment practices in the music department, or to monitor the introduction of new resources. Inevitably, practitioner researchers might wish to see a particular outcome that supports their own educational ideals or aims. But good practitioner research must seek to avoid such bias and to be genuinely questioning and exploratory in its aims and methods.
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