The Big Gig is the headline professional learning event hosted by Musical Futures International and Music Teachers In International Schools that brings together music educators working in schools all around the world. In this article Anna Gower reflects on 3 key questions that grow from the experience of leading workshops.
What motivates music teachers?
Working with students and teachers in a variety of different situations and locations has taught me a lot. No matter where you are in the world kids are kids, schools are schools and music is music - even when the contexts seem worlds apart.
Music education is filled with passionate teachers and practitioners who are working their socks off to try to enable and deliver quality and meaningful musical experiences for students who may only ever access music lessons at school. So whilst on the surface the context may seem different, many of the underlying challenges and learning for us as educators remains the same.
We constantly reflect on why we do what we do, how we can do it better and how we can persuade others of the value of music for the children in our schools who all deserve access to the benefits that a music education can bring.
Making PD sustainable
Over many years leading music workshops for music teachers, I have always enjoyed the practical nature of great music CPD like the Musical Futures International Big Gigs which I am proud to be hosting at my school in Bangkok in March 2025. Everyone plays, sings and moves from the very first session to the end of the day. It’s exhausting and it’s exhilarating. It’s what music is all about.
As part of the process, teachers become musical learners and experience the workshops in ways that then require them to reflect on their own practice and what their students might need in order for them to be successful and feel a sense of achievement in their lessons.
Unpicking the experience, process, learning and understanding is a key part of ensuring the sustainability of what we cover in those training sessions and underpinning this are 3 questions that I feel provoke the richest discussion after the workshops.
1. What are your aspirations for your learners when they come to the end of your music programme?
Is it important to you that they are able to read staff notation or that they can pass a graded qualification in music theory? Be ready to take a music exams course?
Many teachers value instrumental skills or an open mind and willingness to listen to music in a range of different styles and genres with some understanding.
But when I ask teachers directly, it’s surprising how few have actually thought about defining and articulating those aspirations beyond the general curriculum information that ‘all students will play a musical instrument and sing’ or that they offer ‘a broad and balanced’ selection of topics.
I have got mine down to an elevator pitch now. It is to create independent, musical, informal learners who can pursue their own individual love of music in any way that is appropriate for them and build on the learning and experiences they had in the music classroom at school.
Working in an International School and being mindful of the rich musical experiences the children bring with them to the classroom has become even more important with 52 different nationalities within our transient school community.
2) What are your own values as a musician and as an educator?
For many music teachers, much of their music education would have taken place outside the classroom in instrumental lessons and ensembles outside school.
It’s very difficult to be successful at A Level music without having had some form of additional tuition (can you really get to grade 6 level on an instrument with all the associated music literacy and composing skills just through having classroom music lessons once a week for an hour, if that?).
But it’s a very different way of learning music and I’m not convinced it can be replicated in a classroom with 30-35 students in a room, a random mixture of instruments and often just one or two breakout spaces.
It’s interesting to reflect on how many of our values as musicians influence the answers to question 1 above. Why is it important for students to be able to read music? Why do we want them to be able to follow a conductor? Why do they need to know how many # are in the key of E major or where the viola section sits in an orchestra?
These examples are things I absolutely needed to know to progress as an instrumental musician, grounded in a theoretical approach to music learning. But is it right for our current classroom learners? What are their values as musical learners, listeners, creators, advocates, fans, participants and how do we learn about, consider and build on those as well as our own?
Then there are our own values as educators, the reason we became teachers ourselves. Perhaps you aim to offer inclusive opportunities for all students to access music, to ensure that all abilities are adequately supported and challenged, to create vibrant learning environments and safe spaces to work, to allow students to have fun and make music together. There is an endless wishlist for what constitutes a ‘good’ music lesson or programme and it will look different in every classroom.
Matching up our values with those of our departments, schools and the students themselves takes some thought and often more than a little compromise.
3) Why do you teach what you teach?
When I was training as a teacher, one of the school mentors came to run a session on planning to deliver GCSE music. The task was to look at the syllabus and plan a unit of work. Before we presented back our carefully crafted outcomes filled with listening sheets and short highly scaffolded practical tasks he said that the first thing he wanted to know was what would be the value of that learning to the students.
Why had we chosen these tasks? Was it for us (because we felt we could teach it) or for them (because…)? We couldn’t answer. We had chosen to teach things we were knowledgeable about and comfortable with but we had planned for our needs not theirs. One of the questions that I always ask now when a teacher asks for a resource for a particular topic is why they have chosen that one and what they expect their students to learn as a result.
Why are you choosing to teach reggae to your year 8? Or riffs to year 9 or instruments of the orchestra to year 7? What will they be learning that is in line with your defined values and aspirations and which builds in a progressive way through your curriculum from a start to an end point?
What next?
Once you have some answers to these 3 questions then you can think about finding an approach to deliver the learning that is appropriate for all learners. But getting the approach right isn’t enough if the content hasn’t really been thought through.
So as we go into a new school year, I will continue to discuss these questions with my team and refine my own answers to them.
Meanwhile, why not share your elevator pitch or ask your team at your next meeting if they can define the values that underpin your lessons, curriculum, department.
If nothing else it’s a great reminder of why we do what we do every day, even when some of the everyday challenges of getting the job done can sometimes seem too daunting to overcome.
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Written by Anna Gower
One of the founding pilot teachers for the Musical Futures Informal Learning Project, Anna is currently Head of Primary Music at St Andrews International School, Bangkok and a Musical Futures International Guide. She supports the organisation with in-school pilot work for the new Roland Aspire Young Producers Program and delivers workshop sessions for teachers at Musical Futures PD events across the world.