What makes a good music teacher? - Music Manifesto Feature

"I prefer the term effective teacher," says Leonora, reeling off a list of essential qualities: passion for the subject, a sense of humour, being an effective communicator and a good listener with good observational skills.

I'm sure we'd all agree with those, but furthermore, Leonora points out how the role of the teacher has changed in recent years. "It's about flexibility. It's about facilitating, rather than teaching," she says. "For me, that is quite different from the old fashioned style where you deliver; you tell the children what to do, and they do it.

"We don't approach the creative side of music making like that now. A good teacher for me is someone who has imagination, sets up a whole range of different activities for children to be able to demonstrate what they can do, and then builds on that."

This approach allows children to take ownership of their own learning and, with their teacher's help, to be analytical about their own work. "That's a skill [for teachers] in itself," says Leonora. "Asking the right questions, so the children become intelligent thinkers and there's a certain amount of self-evaluation."

Good teachers don't settle for simply doing something, they encourage their students to think about how they could do it better. So for a primary school involved in Sing Up, for example, the challenge is not just to get everybody singing, but to get them singing with quality.

One of the winners at last year's Music Teacher of the Year Awards, Tom Rainbow, echoed the same sentiment when he talked to us about the high standards of music at Malorees Junior School, where he is deputy head. "I think it's really important that they can play in tune and not just accept that's what junior violins sound like. Junior violins can sound like grown-up violinists - they just play simpler music. It's so important not to just say, 'Oh, that'll do.' We aim for the best and we expect the best out of the kids and they will always rise to the occasion."

Encouraging a high standard of musicianship, especially in primary school, doesn't mean teachers have to be virtuoso performers themselves. As the Sing Up campaign has highlighted, teachers don't have to be music specialists in order to effectively teach music.

"As long as a good classroom teacher has got some confidence and imagination there's an awful lot they can do with music," says Leonora, although she admits in order to lead classroom singing they do need to be to confident in using their voices - but that's very different thing to being a professional singer.

In secondary schools, the specific demands are different. "I think that secondary teachers need to be good managers," Leonora says, "because children at that age do need managing." But young people also need to be understood. "I think [teachers] need to be sympathetic to those youngsters as people. Who is the emergent young adult in this person?"

The biggest challenge in secondary teaching, however, is dealing with the broad range of abilities and experiences of students in each class or year group. This has always been an issue in music, with some students having private instrumental tuition outside of classroom music lessons, but it is heightened now as children from Wider Opportunities programmes move up into Year 7 and beyond. "There's a real skill in making sure all of those children feel valued for what they can bring to the classroom," says Leonora.

So, what does it take to be an effective music teacher? "It's that balance of making sure every child feels valued, making it fun but challenging, having a sense of humour, being flexible," says Leonora. "It's recognising the quality of what the children are doing, and helping them to improve and make it better."

This feature was originally published by Music Manifesto, the campaign to improve music education 2004 – 2010.

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