The Performance Teachers' Staff Development Project, which is currently administered from Southampton, is a consortial project with the music departments of Royal Holloway, University of London and the University of Surrey. It aims to implement a one-year course for instrumental teachers which will provide a benchmark of competence in teaching. The pilot scheme is taking place during this academic year (1997/98), and is being followed by forty-two instrumental teachers from the three universities. It will be accredited by the Staff and Education Development Association (SEDA) and will provide the teachers with a grounding in teaching practice which they will be able to adapt to their own specific concerns. The Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM) is committed to the project, helping dissemination through its journal.
The course comprises several elements. Short seminars are taking place throughout the year, covering such topics as teaching strategies, psychology and relationships, methods of assessment, physiology and stress management, and the integration of performance teaching with other elements of an undergraduate degree programme. Each is led by an expert in the field. The teachers taking the course will document the progress of their students throughout the year, and consider the development of their own teaching techniques. In addition, each teacher is placed in a group with four others for peer-assessment exercises - the teachers within each group will sit in on each other's classes and discuss the differences and similarities in their teaching methods. Two of each teacher's students will also be asked at the beginning and end of the year to complete a questionnaire assessing their teacher's approaches.
The project aims to develop a teaching-training course which will be flexible enough to be able to be adapted to the needs of any music department offering performance as an option for undergraduates. As it is hoped to be able to implement the course on a nation-wide basis, we are currently making enquiries with other university departments to establish which institutions might wish to participate in the course during the next academic year (1998/99). We are in the process of establishing a database with details of each department's policy towards its instrumental teachers, in order to assess how we may adapt the course to the particular needs of each department. Enquiries about the project are welcomed.
Angus Gibbon, Music Department, Royal Holloway, University of London
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