I spend ages preparing sessions for early career music teachers; you don’t get much time to work with them and there’s pressure to make every minute count. Thankfully there is lots of good thinking in books such as this one that save some time in selecting the ideas, the provocations and the exemplification of practice that can make a rewarding session for early career music teachers.
The opening chapter in Cooke & Philpot 2023 tackles pedagogy. I used many of the activities in the chapter with the trainees and was pleasantly surprised by the challenge they presented. I thought it was clear what pedagogy *is*, and that there would be some consensus in our conception of pedagogies as music educators. Reader: there was little consensus. This was excellent! It made for some engaging discussions and when I overheard at the end of the session “that was brilliant” it made me realise that such discussion is vital for energising the music educator.
Cooke and Philpot’s chapter emphasises children’s musical needs and ‘walking with them’ as teachers, and that these relationships should drive the necessary ‘pedagogical fluidity’. The activities in the chapter helped provoke reflection on the trainees’ experiences of being taught, and their relationships with their teachers. The autobiographical vignettes shared in the session helped trainees understand the genesis of their approaches to pedagogies, and helped trainees consider the connection with their current teaching. We could shape a shared understanding of pedagogy that helped give confidence to trainees in explaining the various decisions they make in the classroom, and ultimately through the curriculum they design for and with children.
The concept of pedagogical fluidity was useful to explore – the questions in the image above are from the chapter – and helped trainees to consider that they need not stick to one approach for all children all the time. The vignettes in the chapter of classrooms, that helped to illuminate pedagogical decisions, were perhaps skewed towards a particular type of teacher; a teacher that was willing to relinquish their direction-setting for children to take the lead. This troubled the trainees a bit, and they found that difficult. They wanted to lead the lessons, and whilst they were open to serendipity they were less inclined to see children leading the shape of activities. I couldn’t tell if this was partly due to the nature of teaching in (some) independent schools and/or a product of more recent teacher training where (what Cooke and Philpot call) ‘state-sanctioned pedagogies’ dominate.
My session ended wrapping up all the conversations, fuelled by the helpful thinking of Cooke and Philpot, reflecting on the validity of a spectrum of pedagogies and the need for teachers to be vulnerable and accept healthy risk. Trainees were risk-averse. They saw strength in teachers leading, but they reflected on their own moments where teachers afforded them the necessary decision-making opportunities in their education.
There’s quite a strong agenda in the Cooke and Philpot chapter to steer the reader towards a certain way of thinking, and there was perhaps a skim over the proliferation of digital tools as the authors might have been out of the classroom for many years and not experienced this more recent work.
There was such a strong sense from trainees that their purpose in classrooms was to be musicians with the children and they felt their expertise as musicians was needed; they didn’t want to stand back and let music unfold without their direction. Might this have been due to the predominantly western art music backgrounds of the trainees, and the expectations they’ve cultivated from their own educations? Maybe. They had a strong moral sense that there was music that needed to be taught (now that’s an ethical dilemma for the music educator!). I’m not sure I agree there is (and we know the various debates notation alone has inspired).
I spend most of my week in music classrooms; twenty years in and this has never tired me! It’s inspiring to join lessons with other music educators and work with students. It makes me smile to see students being actively (and expertly) taught something they can apply promptly and musically (I spend much of my week prompting music teachers to make music lessons *musical*) – not just write about. But there is such pressure in schools to help leaders understand something is *happening* and the messy pedagogies of the music classroom can be disconcerting for the uninitiated; teachers often succumb to the allure of the written word as this becomes something leaders can understand. They can make sense of what has been taught and can comprehend what students are thinking about when they see a familiar exercise book like their own subject. But the best way of experiencing what has been taught and what students are thinking about is to see the lessons, and it’s beyond the realm of single lessons where we start to see musical developments. Over a sequence of lessons we see confidence to clap rhythms seen on the board, and to clap such rhythms against different rhythms. And to progress to being able to manipulate rhythmic units to devise their own, and to be able to share such rhythmic ideas with others by writing them down.
The risk is if we let lessons unfold as dictated by the students we might lose the bigger picture; there’ll be some students with the privilege of instrumental learning who can set the pace and direction thanks to their additional learning. Some without such privilege will be dragged along, and will face the inevitable diminishing confidence as they see their peers make use of their additional beyond the classroom learning. But if we set the pace and direction free of considering the students then we’ll lose some passengers along the way who will also become disenchanted by the relationship-less experience in their music classroom. It’s a dance – between teacher and student – of the pace and direction that makes music such a privilege to teach. We do need a bigger picture that sculpts the limited lesson time we have and helps nurture every musician, but we want to allow the necessary space where divergences are celebrated. We do need some map though, and I think the better quality map the better experience we can have on our journeys through it.
In Cooke and Philpot’s chapter (2023) they share the crocodile and the explorer as two possible exemplifications of how we can move through the curriculum. The ordered and strong sense of uninterrupted journey by the crocodiles is in counterpoint with the dalliance and oscillating pace of explorers. Such a binary can’t capture the genuine experience in classrooms, but finding the right kind of classroom where there is the space/pace to acknowledge a musical opportunity is important. There’ll be moments where the ‘two by two’ of the crocodile might be needed – we spent some time considering this in the session with trainees but I wasn’t convinced there really was such moments.
I’m looking forward to catching up the trainees in the months ahead. I’d love to know the moments where explorers dominated their lessons; what happened that enabled children to take the lead, and to what extent were they as teachers willing to be vulnerable? Ultimately I’d love to know where their thinking about pedagogy went after the session – what more did they read, what explorations did they go on to deepen their thinking and develop their music(al) teaching.
Steven Berryman 