I’ll warn you now. There are no answers in this blog post…
As it always does, #mufuchat left me with a lot to think about last night This week, the idea that really stuck with me was that of music specialists. The chat itself was entitled ‘How well supported is music in your primary school?’, which naturally included some discussion of the huge range of musical experience held by primary school teachers.
Some schools will have music specialists to provide support and this prompted Anna Gower to ask a very sensible question “Perhaps we could ask how many primary schools have a music specialist?” In true #mufuchat style, however, the assembled chatters soon highlighted the nuances that combine to make this problem more difficult than it first seems.
Have a look through this short extract of tweets from the chat to see what was said.
Until this, I had always seen a simple dichotomy in the teaching of music at primary school – specialists and generalists. I was well aware that many music co-ordinators may not have had specific teacher training in the subject but the idea of ‘specialist’ had always seemed simple. These were people who had done their teacher training with a focus on music, who knew that they would be teaching (mostly) music. It happens. Plenty of self-employed, hub employed or LEA employed teachers will work with a variety of different schools and give them the benefit of their specialist knowledge, skills and experience.
These tweets caused me to try listing the types of specialist music teacher that may exist in a primary school and I came up with the following (I’ve probably missed a few; input welcome):
- classroom primary teacher who trained and specialises in music (perhaps teaches all of the music in the school)
- classroom primary teacher with musical experience who now leads the rest of the school in music
- classroom primary teacher with little musical experience who took on the role as a result of a passion for music
- classroom primary teacher with little musical experience who took on the role as a result of an operational necessity
- a visiting music teacher with QTS
- a visiting music teacher without QTS
Should these different types of specialist by ranked against each other? Is a visiting specialist preferable to an internal specialist? What about someone who took on the role as a result of passion in comparison to a highly trained musician who wishes (s)he wasn’t in the classroom?
I’ve been working hard to better understand what it means to teach music in a primary school and this bit of thinking has certainly helped me to clarify the picture. As usual with matters in music education, it has taught me two things:
- #mufuchat gives me plenty of questions
- There are few, if any, correct answers