Music
The Faculty of Education, in partnership with East Anglian Schools is working to improve the quality of music teaching in secondary schools.
Do you want to be part of this enterprise and become an excellent music teacher?
The postgraduate Course in Music recruits twenty graduates each year: the majority hold an upper second of first class degree in music or a degree in which music plays a substantial part.
Your Qualities
You will need to be:
- intelligent and intuitive
- analytical and reflective
- bright-minded
- personally and musically flexible
- bounding with ideas and initiative
- willing to learn new musical skills and adapt existing ones
You will have a sound working knowledge of current music educational practice as observable in state secondary schools through recent experience and know yourself to be able to relate well to people of all ages.
The Music PGCE Course
The course is based on a close and interdependent relationship between Faculty-based and school-based learning working with principles of inclusion and equality of opportunity in teaching and learning for all students whatever their potential and achievements. By placing the practice of music at the heart of the course in Faculty and in school trainees have every opportunity to develop as musicians as well as music teachers.
A Music Trainee's Perspective
Rachel Maguire, now in her third year of teaching, reflects on her PGCE year in Cambridge:
"It is the very best training a music teacher could hope to receive. The course does things differently. Forget the focus on form-filling that seems to be present in so much teacher training - you're as likely to spend a day drumming as you are singing, learning gamelan as discussing how to ensure that ‘every child's music matters’.
The course spots potential and nurtures it, maintaining the academic rigour you would expect from a course at Cambridge whilst ensuring those from a wide variety of backgrounds can benefit from the training. Most importantly of all, the course ensures that music is at the heart of the course - making sure that each year graduates go out to schools across the country as confident, creative teachers ready to lead music making of the highest quality. I feel incredibly fortunate to have trained at Cambridge. Ofsted have said that my lessons are outstanding, and when that's the case I know it has a lot to do with the training that I received."
School Placements
Trainee Ben Moss writes about his school-based experience as he reaches the mid-course stage.
"Trainees are placed in two contrasting schools known as Professional Placements (PP1 & PP2). My first was a state-of-the-art academy with over 2,000 pupils. After Christmas, I began my second in a more traditional comprehensive school in Suffolk. Each trainee is assigned a mentor at school, an established teacher who is there to help nurture your teaching skills, help set professional targets and be a source of guidance. I have been blessed with very friendly and helpful mentors on both my placements, eager to help me become a great teacher. I’ve never been afraid to seek help and advice, and meetings are always focused and constructive. It’s quite intimidating going to your school for the first time, knowing you’ll be there for the next three or so months. The induction week and the subsequent format of three days in faculty, two days in school before our full-time placement certainly helped settle us in. This is vital for getting to know your classes, your mentor, the school and planning your goals for the term.
PP1 will be for one term; PP2 is for a term and a half. This means that you begin to develop your ideas and teaching techniques in PP1 and then develop these further in greater depth and sophistication in PP2. Moreover, help and advice are always there for you when you’re on your placement from the faculty - you are not on your own!"
Supporting each other
"One of the great things about your first placement is that you are likely to be placed with another music trainee, someone in the same boat as yourself. Likewise, in both placements, you build up a great camaraderie between all the trainees at the school. So whether you’ve had a good or bad lesson, there is always someone to discuss things with you. You might be thinking that the commute to and from school will be dull and tedious. Wrong. It’s been great fun traveling with other trainees - it’s yielded interesting results. The singing we’ve had in the car would have blown the competition away at the X Factor, but perhaps not the joke telling. My experience at PP2 has been amazing and I can’t wait to get more involved with the department and my teaching commitments.
Life on the course has been a rich and rewarding experience, and I feel very fortunate to be studying at Cambridge for my PGCE. I would recommend this course to anybody thinking about becoming a music teacher in secondary schools."
From PGCE to Masters
Former trainee Di Brady who completed an MEd writes:
"On reaching the NQT year you will find that you will be busy planning, being a tutor, attending parents’ evenings, open evenings, reporting, taking part in school trips, as well as being in the classroom itself. Reflective teachers will often consider areas for development within their everyday teaching practice. However with a teacher’s heavy workload, these ideas for development are often a brief thought that remains on an ever-expanding wish list.
Becoming an expert
In the sense that teachers continuously make improvements to their everyday practice by implementing new strategies within the classroom, all good teachers can be thought of as researchers. However, by sustaining and improving your research skills developed through the PGCE, the MEd course encourages a more substantial form of reflective practice which makes way for significant, long-term development.
You are required to produce a 20,000 word thesis and so you will be fully aware of the pressures on top of a full-time job. However once your project is underway you will discover that the worlds of in-depth research and classroom pedagogy can constructively co-exist, and indeed make life easier. Your research into a seemingly specific issue will lead to you becoming a resident specialist within your school, and very often you will find that your research can be applied to subjects and classrooms other than your own. The MEd experience will develop a more advanced, reflective teacher-researcher perspective that will doubtless contribute to the ongoing challenge of making a real difference to the education of children and young adults."