Introduction

This free course, Teaching secondary music, explores some of the key ideas and concepts that beginner teachers in secondary schools need to understand so they can plan their teaching to support the musical development, understanding and skills of all the young people they teach. These include:

• what it means to teach and learn musically
• the musical knowledge(s) teachers teach
• where and how young people are taught and learn music
• the pedagogies that underpin different forms of and approaches to music education.

Through coming to a greater understanding of these concepts and the issues they raise, and reflecting on the implications of them for your own teaching, you will develop your practice as a music teacher. You will be supported in coming to this greater understanding through being introduced to the work and ideas of some significant contemporary music educators.

Now listen to an introduction to this course by its author, Gary Spruce:

Transcript

As you work through the activities you will be encouraged to record your thoughts on an idea, an issue or a reading, and how it relates to your practice. Hopefully you will have the opportunity to discuss your ideas with colleagues. We therefore suggest that you use a notebook – either physical or electronic – to record your thoughts in a way in which they can easily be retrieved and re-visited. If you prefer, however, you can record your ideas in response boxes within the course – in order to do this, and to retrieve your responses, you will need to enrol on the course.

This OpenLearn course is part of a collection of Open University short courses for teachers and student teachers.