Learning to Teach: Perspectives from beginning music teachers

This paper aims to discuss the perspectives of beginning music teachers, their mentor teachers and the supervisor/researcher as significant evidence in understanding the process of learning how to teach. The perspectives of all those included afford a special understanding of the process of beginning music teaching. This study draws attention to research reported in general education literature of beginning teacher induction and significantly, less relating to beginning music teaching Verrastro, R. E. & Leglar, M. (1992) Music teacher education, in R. Colwell (Ed.) Handbook of Research on Music Teaching (MENC, Schirmer). The main aim was to identify what the concerns of beginning music teachers were and to analyse the data in relation to the developmental model of Fuller and Boun Fuller, F. F. & Boun, O. H. (1975) Becoming a teacher, in K. Ryan (Ed.) Teacher Education: Seventy-Fourth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). The results are discussed in light of the Concerns Confrontation Conceptualisation (CCC) developed by Fuller and Boun in order to draw together the perspectives of those involved. The CCC as a model enables the discrepancies that arise from significant concerns to be analysed from a variety of perspectives. As a teacher educator this has been a reciprocal learning experience that will have an effect on my own practice. I have found that, in order to encourage a deeper level of interpretation and professional growth, beginning music teachers require supported and structured experiences.