Music teacher education column: Ready, steady, off we go

Across the Tees Valley area, Key Stage 1 classroom teachers are singing every day with their classes as part of the First Thing Music project. Using KS1 favourites like Listen, listen, Touch your shoulders and Walk and stop, teachers lead daily 10-minute music sessions comprising chants, rhymes, songs, actions, and movement. These teachers are trying out their classroom musicianship skills to help the children to hold a steady beat and show it in their physical actions like clapping and walking.

They use their voices to model confident singing with the children, practising key skills like pitching their notes from a chime bar so they can sing ‘ready, steady, off we go’ at the starting pitch of the song and in the appropriate tempo in the middle of a busy classroom. These are all general classroom teachers, not music specialists.

Every week the teachers join the project leader, Lindsay Ibbotson, for a weekly Zoom call. They discuss their teaching with one another, sharing stories and video clips of the children's work. I have been lucky enough to attend some of these sessions. The videos are absolute gold dust; a living archive of how these teachers are learning to teach music. They are also exemplars of work from children at all levels of fluency and confidence, allowing the teachers in the project to observe one another without actually having to travel to another school. Being able to watch the children in another teacher's class do the same song you just did with your own class is a fantastic training tool.

The analytical discussions among the teachers focus on the micro-detail of the children's learning – what different children could do well; what they found difficult; how the teacher used their musicianship skills to help the children move in time or sing in tune more fluently. As Ibbotson and her colleagues have reported, teachers in the project have found professional discussions in this community of practice very helpful in building their confidence and self-efficacy in music teaching. Talking about what works in their own teaching facilitates them in being more confident to be musical with the children.

The schools have also reported a significant improvement in pro-social behaviours in the children being taught music in this way. The children show an increasingly positive disposition for learning; they listen with concentration in all subjects and are more focused on tasks like reading and maths, and show a particular improvement in language skills, reading, and writing.

First Thing Music started in 2018-19, and is now being repeated in the original schools as well as being rolled out to other schools across the North East, Surrey, Cumbria and Lincoln, and is being trialled in some university PGCE programmes. The key focus of this learner-centred teacher training is that, through their own efforts, general classroom teachers learn how to lead practical, inclusive music lessons of exactly the type recommended in the Model Music Curriculum. The expert trainer supports and facilitates their learning, but they do not come in and do the teaching for them. The long-term goal is for classroom teachers to be able to lead music sessions for themselves, and do it regularly, ideally daily, so that music is a foundation for every child in KS1. Teachers who have been in the First Thing Music project for several years are now able to offer support and mentoring to other colleagues within their communities of practice who are starting out as music teachers.

So far, so fantastic – but where do projects like this leave the specialist primary music teacher? Are they going to be out of a job if all KS1 teachers end up being able to teach classroom music across the UK? The simple answer is no – schools will always need a specialist music teacher to co-ordinate the teaching of music across the school, and make strategic, informed decisions about curriculum design and planning.

The specialist will also be able to teach the children more music than a classroom teacher could manage. Classroom colleagues need the music specialist as a mentor and critical friend. The expert music teacher is a key part of the community of practice into which these classroom teachers are now entering. The more primary teachers in the music community of practice, the more music teaching will be done by teachers, which can only be a good thing.

Reference
Ibbotson, L., & See, B. H. (2021). 'Delivering Music Education Training for Non-Specialist Teachers through Effective Partnership: A Kodály-Inspired Intervention to Improve Young Children’s Development Outcomes'. Education Sciences, 11(8), 433. doi.org/10.3390/educsci11080433