Improving teacher confidence - evaluation of a pilot music professional development program for primary teachers

Good musical education has been shown to have benefits across the curriculum but its delivery in schools is still extremely variable. Part of the problem is that many primary teachers lack skills and/or confidence to offer engaging music programs. In an attempt to find possible solutions to this problem we ran a pilot program of a short series of professional development workshops and evaluated their impact on the participants. The five, hour and a half workshops covered most of the primary music curriculum but focused on singing and composition, as areas that are integral to the curriculum and in the case of composition the area of most trepidation amongst teachers. After the workshops we discovered noticeable improvements in confidence to deliver music programs in all areas but particularly in composition, probably mostly due to participants becoming aware of simple yet effective activities they could use. Some participants successfully tried out workshop ideas in their classrooms, while attending the workshops, suggesting that a close relationship between learning and implementation will enhance the learning experience. The pilot program demonstrated that even comparatively short programs can be effective and provided some indications of useful strategies for delivering supportive and efficacious programs and potentially useful content and resources.