Effective professional development for music in the primary school
A School of Education seminar presented on June 28th, 2017 by Dr Benjamin Thorn and Dr Inga Brasche
While there is increasing evidence of the benefits of good musical education across the curriculum many primary teachers lack skills and/or confidence to offer engaging music programs. In an attempt to find possible solutions to this problem we ran a pilot program of a short series of professional development workshops and evaluated their impact on the participants.
After the workshops we discovered noticeable improvements in confidence to deliver music programs in all areas but particularly in composition, probably mostly due to participants becoming aware of simple yet effective activities they could use. Some participants successfully tried out workshop ideas in their classrooms, while attending the workshops, suggesting that a close relationship between learning and implementation will enhance the learning experience. The pilot program demonstrated that even comparatively short programs can be successful in providingstrategies for delivering supportive andeffectiveprograms, content and resources.
As well as presenting an evaluation of the results before and after surveys we will demonstrate some simple practical activities that were included in the workshops so be prepared to sing and have fun!
