What's new in pedagogy research?(music education)

As a professor of piano pedagogy, I expend a great deal of time and effort training piano teachers. I give as much help and information as I possibly can cram into the year long course; I meet with them to plan the group lessons, and I watch and evaluate their group and private teaching with their peers and with children. Sometimes I see improvements, great and small, and I always wonder what the most effective factors were in the training process. Margaret Schmidt is an assistant professor of string music education at Arizona State University, and she recently conducted a study titled "Preservice String Teachers' Lesson-Planning Processes: An Exploratory Study." (1) In this study she observed and evaluated the teaching of 10 freshman and sophomore string majors, seven of whom were majoring in music education and most had taken or were taking her 45-hour string pedagogy course.

Schmidt originally planned to compare the student teachers' written lesson plans with their teaching behaviors observed in private and group string lessons and their post-observation discussions. She had to change the focus of the study when she discovered that most of the teachers did not write lesson plans, and few of them kept post-lesson written notes evaluating the lesson. Five main themes emerged from her data analysis:

* Knowing How to Begin--Although the student teachers had expertise on their instruments, without any previous teaching experiences they were sometimes at a loss as to how to begin.

* Knowing What Children Need to Learn--Schmidt writes, "... it was difficult for them to see the importance of planning for their students' successful learning. Some of them were unable to draw a connection between their presentation of information and the children's apparent difficulty in learning." (2) Some of them seemed to assume that if they explained it the way they understood it, the student would get it.

* Setting Goals and Teaching on the Fly--Although there were several students who did not write detailed lesson plans, they sometimes showed an innate sense of pedagogical goals and a sequential approach to teaching. "... most of the teachers seemed to view the ability to teach 'on the fly' as something to be emulated. They seemed to believe that setting general goals for their students constituted sufficient planning." (3) They sometimes just responded to what happened in the class or lesson with an idea that occurred to them, and strayed further and further from the goal of the lesson as one bright idea led to another.

* Writing versus Thinking--Even the teachers who wrote lesson plans tended to simply note some sketchy ideas, rather than use the planning processes that Schmidt had shown them in their pedagogy class.

* Transferring In-Class Learning Experiences--Six of the 10 teachers had taken Schmidt's pedagogy course, and this gave her an opportunity to see how much of her training transferred to the actual teaching situation. Although the six had done well on the class assignments for lesson planning and sequential teaching, "... none of them demonstrated those behaviors of their own accord in their initial work in the String Project." (4)