The Importance of Using Qualified Music Teachers in Schools

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Many studies have proven that learning music stimulates both creativity and imagination in children. It helps them socialise, increase their self-esteem, concentrate more, and focus their attention. However, for all these benefits to be truly exploited, it is essential that the subject be taught by a specialist qualified music teacher.

In this blog we explain why:

The benefits of learning music

Music is a complex system made up of sounds, melodies and rhythms that have been discovered and used to create infinite different possibilities. It manages to immediately transmit different emotions and express fears, along with evoking profound feelings.

Scientific studies indicate that music has beneficial effects on the intellectual, psychological, and creative development of children. It has even been proven that music stimulates the left side of the brain, which is responsible for language, mathematical learning, and the use of logic.

Furthermore, music helps students:

  • Improve their average grades across a range of subjects.
  • Increase tolerance, self-control, and sensitivity.
  • Improve the learning of history, aesthetic, and social values.
  • Improve their affective, intellectual, interpersonal, emotional, neurological and physical development.

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Learning music with a specialist music teachers vs learning with a general music teacher.

All the benefits mentioned above can be increased or decreased based on the actual teacher training. Teachers, qualified in a music conservatory, have a professional foundation that helps them teach musical knowledge to children or, indeed, any student.

These teachers are the ideal people to teach music, as they can identify and analyse the specifics of the job, in addition to possessing the necessary skills needed to meet the everyday challenges.

Their skill set includes:

  • An ability to play a chosen instrument.
  • A good ability to transmit their own knowledge and skills.

The superior ability to teach music is based on their practical ability to play an instrument.  In short, they are instructors “who know how to play and not only teach music”.

Music is taught with music

These days, we know that teaching and learning are only meaningful if they are linked to an experience. Music cannot be taught without first being experienced in practice, and this is true for both children and adults.

When there is no professional training, such as that provided by the conservatory, the teacher has fewer resources and skills to use when teaching music.

Music and pedagogy

A balance is required between the mastery of the discipline that is taught, in this case music, and that of the teaching techniques used to teach it. A qualified conservatory teacher can find this balance between the two.

In ancient Greece, the pedagogue was the slave who guided the young nobles through the streets to school. In this way, the teacher becomes the driver and the guide, one who teaches by experience and through example.

The coexistence between practical ability and knowledge is especially close in music. The teacher is the teacher, but he must also be the professional musician, from the music stand, from the conservatory, who publicly demonstrates his expertise in his field.

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Teacher skill and teaching quality

If we say that a conservatory teacher is capable of balancing teaching methods with musical technique, then the direct relationship between the qualifications of teachers and the quality of teaching is clear.

In this case, qualified conservatory teachers, unlike qualified general music teachers, can easily offer solutions to specific problems, provide various options and guide, stimulate, and increase students’ receptivity and responsiveness to artistic events:

  • They encourage student reflection on their own practice.
  • They help develop autonomous learning, with the use of cognitive, metacognitive, and conceptual strategies.
  • They help in the development of the following musical skills:
  • Studies on the acquisition of rhythmic sense.
  • Studies on the acquisition of tonal sense.
  • Studies about ways of understanding sound objects.
  • Studies on the analysis of the emotional responses of the subjects who interact with the music.

Relationship with students

Students see their teachers as responsible for the acquisition and outcome of their musical skills. In many cases, they come to attribute their interest in learning an instrument to establishing a good relationship with them.

In this situation, the good relationship with the teacher is made up of pleasant, relaxed, positive, and friendly interaction. However, the students’ perception of what a good teacher should be is focused on “professional quality”.

A qualified teacher will always have the advantage of being able to transmit the passion, strength, and beauty that each note, produced by an instrument, carries. However, the main quality of a good teacher will be in the ability to fully communicate both theoretical and practical knowledge to his students.