Becoming a Better Music Teacher (FutureLearn)

This course will offer instrument-specific advice and resources as well as guidance on how to plan music lessons within a broader curriculum. You will gain the confidence to challenge your existing practices and identify weaknesses in your own teaching style in order to become a more effective music or singing teacher.

What topics will you cover?

- Assess your current teaching

- Explore and evaluate teaching and learning principles

- Identify core musical skills

- Evaluate your own technique

- Develop a range of strategies for teaching technique

- Explore links between motivation and progression

- Increase your awareness of professional values and practice

- Design a curriculum and devise lesson plans

- Produce a personal development plan

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you'll be able to...

- Reflect on and evaluate your journey to teaching so far

- Develop an understanding of a range of teaching and learning principles

- Compare teaching and learning principles and develop your own teaching philosophy

- Identify the core musical skills which need to be taught, considering how they inter-relate

- Evaluate your own instrumental technique and assess how you approach teaching technique to your pupils

- Explore the basis for motivation and how motivation is linked to progression

- Develop an understanding of the role of assessment in progression

- Assess your own teaching practice in the context of professional values and practice

- Design a broad, individual learning plan for pupils with reference to short term goals

- Engage with other teachers and contribute to discussion about professional development

Who is the course for?

This course is for all music and instrument teachers and vocal coaches.

A music teacher training suited both for private teachers as well as teachers working in schools, music trusts or music academies.