Teaching as a Natural Step in a Music Career
Teaching is often viewed as something musicians do alongside performing, rather than a career in its own right. In this interview, Alex Forryan, Head of Training and Education at RSL Awards, shares why education should be seen as a natural and respected progression for musicians.
In conversation with our very own David A Jones, Director of Presto Music School, Alex reflects on how the skills developed through learning music – communication, adaptability and discipline – translate directly into effective teaching and sustainable career pathways. The discussion highlights the importance of modern pedagogy, recognised qualifications and a professional approach to music education.
Alex Forryan Interview Summary
This interview explores the importance of teaching in music education, emphasizing that becoming a music teacher is not a fallback option but a natural progression of musical mastery. Alex Forryan argues that musicians who have put in thousands of hours to master an instrument already possess the discipline, methodology, and skills needed to become great teachers.
Key themes discussed include:
- Mastery and Teaching: Teaching is an extension of musical mastery, not a lesser pursuit. Musicians should view teaching as a valuable career path that can be more sustainable and profitable than performance.
- Transferable Skills: Learning music builds skills like resilience, goal-setting, adaptability, and self-management, which are crucial in life and teaching.
- Global Opportunities: With organizations like RSL (Rockschool Ltd.) operating worldwide, qualified music teachers have international job prospects.
- The Shift in Perception: The old saying, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach”, is outdated. Today, the best musicians are also teachers, as seen in the rise of educational content on social media.
- Pedagogical Approaches: Teaching should be tailored to different learning styles (e.g., VARK model: Visual, Auditory, Read/write, Kinaesthetic), but also integrate new approaches like logical, linguistic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal learning.
- Practical Teaching Strategies: Using analogies, visualization, and real-world applications can make teaching more engaging and effective.
- Assessment and Feedback: Effective teaching involves regular formative and summative assessments, ensuring students receive constructive feedback to improve their learning outcomes.
- Teacher Wellbeing: Teaching is mentally and physically demanding, and educators must practice self-care to sustain their careers.
Conclusion
Forryan highlights that great musicians already have the foundation to be great teachers, and teaching should be seen as a respected, fulfilling, and lucrative career path. Music education extends beyond just playing an instrument—it fosters essential life skills and opens up global opportunities for educators.
Alex Forryan
I’ve always found that with the hardest conversation whenever you’re talking about teachers graduating from a player’s perspective and the player’s point of view to that point where you’re saying, A) you are not taking the easy option by becoming a teacher, B) that there’s some very good reasons why you’ll be a good teacher.
Because if you put in the effort to learn how to play your instrument which will have taken hours and hours and hours; if you go back to Gladwell’s 10,000 hours, to become proficient and have mastery of a certain instrument, so you’ve got proof of concept – you as an individual can learn to do something to a very high standard by putting in lots and lots of effort.
So, I’ve always said to young musicians that are considering teaching, A) don’t think of it as a second choice, and B) you’ve already got the methodology in place. You’ve already proven that you can learn something to a very high degree; so therefore, you can probably become a very good teacher if you get onto a programme and you get mentored and coached to learn how to do it properly, very similar to the way that you did on your instrument.
If I consider how I became a good musician and a good drummer, it was by copying all the best people; I’ve never come up with a new idea for myself ever, I’ve got someone else’s idea and thought, “That’s great, I want to do that!”
You can use transferable skills; if you can upskill young musicians and go, “Look, use the same methodology, get around some really good teachers to learn what really good teachers do and say, and make it your own, do those things, you’ll become a good teacher”.
The minute you start becoming a good teacher, you become sought after, your lessons become more fun, more activated, more people will gravitate to having your lessons; you can either charge more or you can upscale what you do so that you’re getting a bigger cohort, you can make more money. All of a sudden, you’ve created a revenue stream and a career for yourself, that is probably going to be far more profitable in the long run than your playing career and definitely have way more longevity.
You’re going to be doing this a lot longer, and it will open up way more opportunities. Internationally, certainly. If you look at RSL as it as a product in a macro without getting into the micro of what grades or what instrument; if you’re comfortable working with that as a vehicle, you can literally work in every country in the world because RSL are in every country in the world. There’s nothing to say you can’t go and teach in China, in India, in Mexico, in America, in Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus.
We’re having conversations with people that work and teach in those countries all the time and UK music teachers are still considered to be the desirable gold standard of teachers. I would say to any younger musicians to stop being ‘excusist’; stop saying, “Oh you know well I’ll probably have to do some teaching”; celebrate the fact that you’re now at a point where you can become a teacher.
You now know enough, and it’s really funny that the music fraternity are so funny about that. Say it’s martial arts; every martial artist wants to gravitate to the point where they can become a Sensei, and they champion that. You become first dan, second dan, third dan, sixth dan, and you become a teacher – Sensei means teacher.
That’s what you’re trying to gravitate to. Unfortunately, musicians just don’t seem to think about that; they seem to think that by getting to that lofty height it’s some sort of secondary role, but it’s the absolute opposite! You’re now in a position where it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve made it. Well done, you’ve now got to that point in your career, isn’t that amazing?”.
Back in the day there was always this idea about “Those who can do, those who can’t teach”. These days that is so not the case! With the advent of Instagram, social media feeds and video, every one of the best players in the world is putting out content, which is effectively educational material for other people. So, all the best players are the best teachers, so it’s completely changed. For me, that’s exciting.
David A Jones
The fact that the people who have attained what is perceived as the highest echelons, are now achieving even higher echelons by becoming teachers.
Alex Forryan
Exactly, that’s the vehicle. The minute you untether that from just being about the musical instrument, mastery on that musical instrument is the by-product of all the fantastic things that you’re learning when you start to learn music. The resilience, the self-management, the goal setting, the growth mindset, all the things that we know as musicians that go along with what we teach. We’re bolting that onto learning a particular technique on a particular piece of equipment, but that’s not the defining part of it; the defining part of it is the transitional skills and life skills that you’ll get as a byproduct to learn that musical instrument.
So often as musicians, we’ve got it the wrong way round; they seem to be really good at seeing it the wrong way, seeing it through the wrong kind of prism. Every golf club has a golf pro, and because he’s called the golf pro, everybody thinks, “He must be amazing”. He’s the teacher!
But how come he gets all of the kudos? Because he’s the golf pro, he’s just the guy who plays golf, but he’s got to the point where he’s really good and he can teach people – they call it the golf pro. Now, everybody champions that; he’s the guy everybody wants to go and do a round with, and he’ll tell you what clubs to buy, and then we’ll go and spend thousands of thousands of pounds on a pair of clubs in the pro shop.
But again, musicians don’t think like this, we make excuses for being a teacher, it’s that thing that we’re going to do in between gigs. It’s not! The gigs are the things you do in between educating.
David A Jones
And you’re making the world a better place.
Alex Forryan
Yes, you are! I know that sounds a bit woo-woo, but it’s true; you look at people that have studied music, there’s some very good specifically backed studies that say that people that learn these musical instruments have learned to do something to quite a high degree of technical knowledge at very early ages.
When I was teaching in FE colleges. I used to say that we’re expecting young musicians to come into a vocational course at 16. Now they’re on an equivalent course to somebody that’s on a plumbing course or an electrician’s course, except that they have huge levels of prior learning before they get onto that course.
Most people that are 16 might have started playing an instrument when they were 6; they have got 10 years of prior learning before they even get onto that course. No one did plumbing in their spare time and had plumbing lessons from the age of 6 so by the time they get to their college course they’re proficient to an almost professional standard, whereas musicians do.
To get onto an FE course as a musician you’ve at least had a couple of years of prior learning. Other courses at a vocational college at 16 don’t have that level of prior learning, maybe sport, but again, that’s another clouded argument.
David A Jones
Very rarely do you bump into somebody who is a passionate seasoned ticket holder in football and is a superb musician, because you haven’t got the time! I mean many people like football, but to actually have somebody who is as passionate as we know some people can be and be a musician as well, there are not enough hours in the day, counting towards your 10,000 hours.
Alex Forryan
That’s the thing, and you’ve put yourself through a ringer to get proficient on a musical instrument. You’ve had to deal with some demons with yourself. You’ve been in those dark corners where you’re going, “I don’t think I can do this”, and you’ve had to talk to yourself and get into a position where you can do it, and you’ve had to go away, do some self-analysis and think, “Right, what am doing wrong?”
So the critical thinking element, the collaboration, the creativity; that’s all embedded in what we do, it’s not a new thing for us musicians, it’s what we’ve known for decades. The minute you can start getting those elements, those traits into other parts of your life, you don’t freak out when something goes wrong, you don’t freak out if you make a mistake, you pick yourself up and go again.
And when asked, “Why are you good at it?” “Because I’ve done this for years when I was playing my musical instrument!” I didn’t wake up one day and go “Bingo! I can do this”, I knew there was going to be an element of hard work.
Now, if that’s the messaging that we as music educators are giving to the world, that’s a hugely important piece of the puzzle.
David A Jones
One of the things that we cover in teacher training is the power of analogies; are you familiar with SEDPOF? (Set the scene, Explain, Demonstrate, Perform, Observe, Feedback).
Alex Forryan
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
David A Jones
We make sure that we stress ‘setting the scene’ with the teachers from the perspective of “Don’t start going off on a tangent where we just waste lesson time”, but you’ve got kids who are coming in who are thinking about what they’re having for lunch, or the argument they’ve just with their parents, and their mind is elsewhere.
You need to break them out of that and get them into the room, get them welcome, settled, ready for the lesson, with some form of warmup activity, maybe.
But in the setting of the scene, sometimes we’ve got a concept which is coming up which is so far removed from what the end result will be; we know what it is, but at age of 7, that setting the scene is really important.
One of the things we noticed was there was a fair bit of reverse engineering going on, just like you said, with regards to how well music prepares you for life in general. Even the other way round; let’s say you’ve got 10 typical analogies that you use in class.
Think of any example – when you are baking a cake, you’re going to have at least a little look at the recipe first. “What ingredients do I need?” You don’t start baking something you’ve never baked before in your life just by getting the flour and cooking it straight away. So have a little look through it first.
We talk about microwave practice at Presto, this is where you will focus on the smallest bit.
If there are 4 bars in your piece that you’re trying to work on, you can play bars, 1, 2 and 4 and it is bar 3 that keeps going wrong. If you’re going to do 4 minutes practice, that would mean that you’ve got 4 minutes on each bar, but it’s only bar 3 that’s going wrong. So, you can do 4 minutes practice, but instead, we’ll just practice bar 3, and it’s so small and so focused, it’s not going to take you a minute to do it, it’ll only take 30 seconds! So, you’ve just done 4 minutes practice in 30 seconds, you’ve just microwaved your music.
We talk about all these analogies and going back to what you’re saying, you’ve just set up all these different ways in life in which the end result is not always music; it now can be seen from the other way – these things I am learning, I will use for the future. You can see how it becomes more visible as to how students can use those methodologies.
Alex Forryan
I think you’re right. Using the analogistic examples, the minute you start talking about music, whether young musicians are interested in reading notation, tab or chord charts, the minute you can tie it to a map and you can start talking about it from a Geography point of view, and say “Look, this is telling you is where you start from and where you need to end up”.
I’ll do it with young students all the time, especially when there’s some development patches, and say, “Look, you’re the pilot of this plane. You can go in lots of different directions. As long as you land it here, you need to make whatever course corrections you need to make”.
Those are the important life skills because chances are what you’re just about to attempt in life or do probably isn’t going to run to plan.
The military say, “No plan survives its first contact with the enemy”, and it’s exactly that! You know you’re going to change it. There’s no point in going, “Well this is the plan, it doesn’t change”, every plan changes. That elasticity of goal setting is the problem-solving part of it.
David A Jones
My mum and dad were both teachers and I didn’t really know what was going to do, but the one thing I knew I definitely wasn’t going to do, was to become a teacher, no chance!
Because I just didn’t enjoy what mum and dad were going through. My teaching is a completely different experience because I’m teaching privately using our system, and so I don’t have to conform to other people’s systems. When schools have constraints, ‘it has to be done like this’, and if the teacher doesn’t gel with that…
We were talking before about navigating the maps. We tell students that music looks like it sounds, it sounds like it feels, and it feels like it looks. We enjoy music in three different ways; you can listen to it, you can watch a gig, you can physically feel it. Those fit our learning styles, it’s a perfect mesh.
So, nobody is 33%; I mean, Gardner said there was multiple intelligences, not just learning styles. If, for example, super simplifying, about third of each, visual auditorial, kinaesthetic; nobody is that.
I was very much, an auditory learner, a lot less of the visual or kinaesthetic. I pushed myself to improve my reading, and the minute it started to kick in the tiniest bit, it really helped me. We try to give these real-world examples to the teachers; I have a student who appears to be 49.5% auditory, 49.5% kinaesthetic, and just won’t read the music at all.
And I know what he’s going through. Because of how music was presented to me as a student I really struggled and was dismissed at school, so I would never want a student to feel as though they were being pushed into a room they weren’t enjoying. I’m not going to get a student to learn something in a way that just takes the fun out of it.
I always try and balance that with “Look Freddie, reading might be a tiny little bit of your learning style, but even if we could get 1% improvement, it would really help you. You’ve got two halves at the moment, your listening skills and your playing skills, and if you we improve this one little thing, that 1% could potentially have a big impact, as you’ll start to learn music in a different way.”
We make sure that the teachers understand about balancing that, because if it’s not balanced, they’ll lose the fun element and give the student a negative experience.
Alex Forryan
It’s interesting when you talk about learning styles, because up until very recently, visual, auditory, read, write and to some extent kinaesthetic learning styles have been the way that we’ve taught teaching, and we address the learners’ needs.
We see teachers sometimes making the mistake of going “Well, I’ve only got auditory learners in my class, so I’m not going to do any reading”, but they’re the bits you do need to work on, because they’re the learning needs.
These days, people are extending beyond VARK now (Visual, Auditory, Read/write, Kinaesthetic), and they’re talking about logical learning, piecing it together. You’ve got jigsaw puzzle learning, linguistic learning – attaching the learning to some of the language and syntax that’s used. People are now talking about solitary learning/intrapersonal learning, so from a teacher’s point of view, are you facilitating some learning that can be done on your own? Whether that is providing good video content or information your learners can go and access.
Then you’ve got interpersonal learning which is social learning. What benefits can you bring from learning in a group? Watching somebody else struggling with the same thing that you’re learning all of a sudden demystifies it.
And then suddenly you’ve taken away the stigma attached to that section, and people relax into it. And often that’s when the learning takes place, because they’re like, “Actually you know, I’m no different to anybody else, this is a tricky bit, we need to work hard”. So these days, although we’ve got the standard VARK model, there’s always this logical, linguistic, solitary, intrapersonal, interpersonal side, and I’m really excited about that.
Again, they’ve been things that we as music educators have been talking about for a long time. We’ve known that kids learn differently when they’re in a group than in a solitary lesson. Sometimes, a 1-2-1 music lesson is the most demoralising experience of a child’s life!
Whereas, if they put them in a situation where they’re with their friends, you’ve demystified all of these things and they’re just having fun. They’re able to go, “I don’t get it, sorry, show me, I need to know more”.
You can turn it into a game, like Rhythm Warriors does; it’s softening the message and gamifying what we’re doing, it’s way more approachable and fun. The minute we make it approachable and fun, people will start learning, and they’ll learn faster; there’s an accelerated learning piece to be really championed there.
David A Jones
Somebody commented on one of our socials, and they wrote: “Can anybody tell me more about lessons at Presto?” They tagged us in it, and then somebody else replied, and they went to another teacher, a 1-2-1 teacher. And the comment was something like “Oh, I hear they only teach in groups”, and it felt like a negative comment. It said something like, “I even heard that they sometimes use headphones in class as well”. We use headphones in specific scenarios, and in the training, we always say that they’re used for positive reasons.
First, the students can actually practice the piece they’re doing, but whilst they’re doing that in these small groups, it gives you the chance to observe what’s actually going on. Everything is based around their success; there’s no other reason for doing this other than they are going to get a successful result. It allows them to internalise the information you’ve just given them and gives them a chance to practice it.
We give them the fishing rod. You’re still teaching, but it gives them validation, and then everyone can enthuse and bring it together.
Alex Forryan
Which is steeped in a pedagogical approach which has got a fancy title; ‘The gradual release from responsibility model’, which is the ‘I do, we do, you do’, but in effect again, it’s another one of those things that we as musicians have known for a long time.
The best way to coach a group of learners is “I’ll do it, let me show you, then we’ll do it together so the pressure’s off you, then you do it and I’m going to be there coaching you and talking you through it, and then you’re on your own”. From an educator’s point of view, you’re just taking that step back, you’re just taking it one step at time.
David A Jones
In our teacher training guide, it looks at pedagogical approaches. I have theories; we refer to it as our Presto approach, and what we do is we summarise many different pedagogical standpoints. So we look at, for example, everything from Piaget to in particular Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences. So, let’s apply that into a class of mixed children; we as private educators try to group by age and ability, but this isn’t always possible in a class of 30 children. In many of these pedagogical approaches, we say, “Let’s now apply this theory in practice”.
Let’s take a real-life situation, and see how those well-established approaches which are proven, although some certainly come under scrutiny, work in a practical application.
The perfect example: In multiple intelligences where you might have a logical brain that is desperately trying to be creative, because in multiple intelligences, there’s not a huge amount of blending. It’s brilliant in clarifying, “Some people are like, this is what they are like”, but we’ve seen time and time again where a particular student will learn particular types of pieces of particular context in a specific place. Then you try to do a slightly different subject they may struggle to learn it. So, we go down a different approach; we always teach to the needs in the individual, but within a group environment.
Alex Forryan
I think that’s the thing; you’ve got these commonalities, which again should be championed, and there’s also there’s going to be specific differences between learner to learner. But again, there’s a value in being able to identify those differences, and from a learner’s point of view, they can identify the fact that they’re different to other people. That you know, somebody learns one way that’s great, I may not learn that way, that’s not the sort of thing I do.
I think that’s what’s so lovely about what’s on offer these days from an education point of view, certainly the products that Presto offer. Some people need to do things once, some people need to have access to information, then they can run with it. Some people need to do it 10 times. We as educators need to facilitate that and say that how you learn is completely up for grabs.
We know what we need to learn, we know that there’s certain stepping stones that we need to hit, but whether you have to hit them 10 times, once, 5 times or whatever that’s okay, it’s fine.
Even now, if I’m learning something new, sometimes I get it straight away, other times I don’t.
We’ve just launched the new syllabus, and sometimes you pick up a book and fly through 2,3,4,5 tunes. Then you hit one and say “Hang on a second, I need to sit down and look at this one because it’s a little bit more tricky”, and that happens all the time, there’s nothing wrong with that. This is natural.
I remember when I was doing pit work back in the day. You’d learn a show and a lot of it was simple, and then all of a sudden, there’d be something in an odd time signature, or there was lots of stops and starts. I remember when I was doing Singing in the rain with Tommy Steele, and the drummer had to look at a mirror that was focused up on the stage.
Tommy Steele would be tap dancing on stage and you’d be trying to riff with him on the snare drum and it changed every night! You had to adapt to that and learn the adaptation of what you were doing.
All of those skills that we learn as musicians, they cross over in your life so many times. We as music educators are so lucky, because a lot of these things are things that we can use again and again, and then it becomes a methodology. Then we’ve got once we’ve got methodology, as an educator, very few things freak you out; you don’t get to a position where you don’t know what to do. You do know what to do. You’ve got those tools in your teaching toolbox. You can do things with them, and it’s exciting.
David A Jones
I didn’t know whether this was complementary or not, but I had a student who I taught for years, and it was about 4 weeks before her grade 8 exam and her nerves had just got the better of her this time. She was really beginning to lose it, and up until now she was as cool as a cucumber.
I guess she was just that age, the pressures of life etc. She said, “I don’t think I’m going to be able to do this”, and I said, “I want you to do something new for me, I want to practise your exam”.
She said, “I am practising”. But she wasn’t, she was practising her pieces and her scales. I said “I want you to practise the exam. I want you to pick up your books, leave the room, shut the door, knock on the door, say hello to the ‘examiner’ and roleplay the whole thing”.
Alex Forryan
I know that from an RSL point of view, an examiner will soundcheck the first tune. And he or she will tell the candidate that they’re going to soundcheck the first tune, but candidates always forget; they start to get all nervous and launch into the first tune, and suddenly the examiner stops the track and asks if everything’s okay.
I’ve trained that into my classes. I say, “we’re going to do some exam prep now, and roleplay the exam”. It’s not the tracks or the technical exercises that panics them, it’s the exam.
David A Jones
This student, she got distinction. And when she came into her lesson the following week, we had the results and she was delighted. I asked, “How were your nerves?” And she said, “That exercise you gave me, out of everything you have ever taught me, that was the best”.
Alex Forryan
Yes, it’s literally the power of visualisation in action. Again, in lots of different walks of life, lots of high-pressure training environments, military, police, they do it. We should be stealing the best ideas.
David A Jones
I hear that the RSL teacher diploma material has changed a bit? It’s been added to but the actual format of it hasn’t changed a huge amount, is that correct?
Alex Forryan
Exactly, the format hasn’t changed. So, you’ve still got a 4-unit structure, the only difference is that there is not the ambiguity around an optional unit now. The optional unit has been taken away and replaced with an assessment, which makes sense; a lot of people were doing the assessment anyway. So, you’ve got the same structure. You’ve got understanding learning, in which you’re going to be talking about pedagogical approaches.
Again, for all learners, it’s about your personal approach to it. It’s not a theoretical research project; it’s about what pedagogical approaches are relevant to you teaching your learners in your setting on your instrument your way. That’s what the assessors want to see, they want to see an application of pedagogical approaches. They don’t need tons and tons of background information about Piaget etc., what they need is “I use these techniques because I get these results.”
That’s what they need; pedagogical approaches and the usage in your lessons, but those lessons can be group, 1-2-1, large group, small group, half an hour, 15 minutes, an hour, it doesn’t matter. It’s the decisions that you’re making as a teacher, and why you’re making those decisions. And then a self-reflective element to go “Does that work? Why does it work?”
What metric are you actually using? There’s some really good metrics out there; corporate training uses Kirkpatrick as a methodology. It gives you a step ladder approach. “Can they do this? Did they get this? Did they get this out of it? Did it make a difference? Is it usable?
Then you’ve got inclusivity; again, hugely important as a unit topic. But again, it’s not necessarily about SEND learners, but it’s also about making sure that you’re creating an inclusive learning environment for everyone involved. Whether it be a gender difference, age difference, religious background, cultural background, demographic background; how are you creating that kind of environment? It’s really critical.
The planning, facilitating, and evaluating learning is hugely important. We need schemes that work, you need to show that you can do a sequential scheme of work, that there is a natural flow for one lesson to another, but we’re building in contraction, and more importantly, expansion tasks. So you know that all of your learners are going to be doing these tasks, but some of your learners will have to turn left and contract what they’re learning, and some of your learners have to turn right and expand what they’re learning.
And as long as there’s evidence and you can show a good theoretical approach to that, the lesson plans should reflect that with a little bit more detail; how, why, what methods, what resources you’re using, again with contraction and expansion built-in, then a reflective element of that. And then obviously one of those lessons must be videoed.
Then the final part of the assessment is looking at different assessment philosophies, so we talk about an initial assessment, because again there’s absolutely no point in doing any lesson planning if you haven’t done this initial assessment. You are planning for an unknown, which is impossible. So those initial assessments need to be good, robust, give you the information you need, and you need to be mining information from your learners.
That’s really going to inform some of the critical challenges. That might be from dexterity, preferences, what learning styles? How are you identifying what those learning styles are?
Then you’ve got formative assessments in the middle of the learning. These are the learning checks you’re building in to pressure test your students. Again, it comes back to that exam thing; you’re prepping for an exam and that’s your summative assessment. Then you need to be pressure testing those informal assessments, and the best part about a formal assessment is that it then generates feedback.
If that feedback is positive, structured, developmental, supportive is hugely powerful. How that feedback is delivered after those formative assessments is massive; certainly for the qualification.
If you can structure what you’re doing in such a way that you’re saying that the reason for the formative assessments is so that you can give some really specific feedback on what those learners need to work on.
It just means that when you’re working towards your summative assessment, whether that’s a graded exam, a concert, recital, audition, or it could just be when you invite the parents in at the end of a term to watch what the students are doing, that the summative assessment is what you’re working towards, and again, that has to be pressure tested, so that you get to that point over the line, sign them off and move on.
If you can get that messaging across it’ll always be received well, because that shows a really good rounded, robust understanding of education, how learners learn, and what we can offer.
David A Jones
One of the nice things about the platform that our teacher training is built on is that it has knowledge checks throughout. So, the actual format of training is an example of best practice of thing that they could expect. Not in the same format, but at least the process of “This is why we’re going to do this”, “Tell, Teach, Tell”.
In the introduction, we learn some material and then the next action is a little bit of housekeeping. We need to talk about safeguarding, health and safety, etc. But the very next thing is ‘Assessment led’. Because if there’s no initial assessment, what are going to teach? And every single step that we make in class is as a direct result of the feedback that we got off the student. If it’s not, we’re teaching at, not with.
Our teacher training is broad, as it covers all the things that we do at Presto. We are also keen to look after the wellbeing of the teacher.
Alex Forryan
Our diploma has a module for that too, Self-Care for Creative Professionals. A good unit, I recommend this for anyone looking to do an additional unit. There’s a mental health part and a physical health part, and it’s good that they’re separated because we know it’s well documented that the one feeds the other. It’s important for lots of musicians, performers and creative professionals generally to think of it in those terms.
Yes, you might have the mental piece down and you might be understanding of what you need to do and managing your trajectory, but that’s always going to be balanced with the physical approach. Are you getting enough sleep? Are you giving yourself some downtime?
Teaching is a very intensive, labour intensive, mental intensive profession. To be doing it properly. It’s in ‘all in’ thing. Good educators put a lot into it, and it does take a lot out of you; you need to give yourself some time away from it and recharge, revitalise, and go again.
David A Jones
And there’s a symbiosis between the physical and the mental health perspective. Perfect example, in the run up to Christmas, I was working 80 hours a week and I had all sorts of issues with my back as a result.
I’m back exercising again now for half an hour every day, so physically, I’m now looking after my back, which massively improves my mental health anyway! We know these things, but if we don’t act on them…
Alex Forryan
That’s the thing. Musicians are historically bad at that; we know what healthy eating is, but it doesn’t mean to say we do it! It’s a good thing to be reminded of. What we’re doing is educating the holistic approach to education.
David A Jones
Teachers in our music school may start their training at the age of 17, but won’t do the exam until they are 18, they’ve been teaching for a year, and they’ve been going through the programme for at least year.
We are now making it available to everyone online, providing you are 18, and then you work through the programme, we’ve specified in there that we would want elements within the training to now be put into practice.
“For the next week now, embody what is going on here, explore it yourself, find your own rationales around it. You see if it works you, and if it doesn’t, why is has it not worked for you? Next week when you come back to the training, can you bring 3 points to the table on your observations?”
That’s how we’ve spaced it out, and in the first 4 months it unlocks week on week. After the first 4 months, it is less prescriptive.
How long would you say would be a minimum for an 18-year-old to be doing their RSL diploma? In my humble opinion, I’d say a minimum of 9 months.
Alex Forryan
I was going to say a minimum of 6 months; you need to take a long view in this, it isn’t the kind of thing to get over the line quickly. I mean you can, but then it becomes irrelevant.
David A Jones
If they pass it straight away then to me, they defeat the object of the training because the training isn’t there to give them the certificate.
Alex Forryan
No, and what everyone needs to understand is that just putting certificate on the wall of a positive outcome without the learning taking place makes it irrelevant.
David A Jones
What does it mean to the teacher? If the teacher who’s earnt it can see it on the wall…
Alex Forryan
Yes, for educational facilities that may want to enrol in your training programme, you want better teachers at the end of it, you don’t want better essay writers! You want better educators at the end of it. There is a little bit of self-reflection in there. You do need to dig deep; this should be a bit of a voyage of discovery.
I know when I started teaching, some of the time I didn’t think I knew anything about teaching, and then suddenly when I found out the formal names of a lot of these things, I said, “I’ve been doing this for ages, I didn’t know it was called that!”
I’d already identified that some learners are good at watching me and copying what I do, and other learners needed to be absolutely told what to do. And others needed it to be written down and there were other ones that just needed to have a go at it. I didn’t know, it’s called visual, read, write or kinaesthetic.
I remember coming across ‘gradual release from responsibility’, well, I’d been doing that for ages! I’d do it. Then I get them to do it, then they do it on their own. I didn’t know it was called that.
There’s also elements where you think “I can learn from this”. I remember when I was working in a college, and we were being mentored because we were musicians that had suddenly started teaching, and we had a maternal person that oversaw the department.
She turned round to me one day and said, “Just make sure you Bloom your lessons”. And I didn’t know what she meant. One day I asked her, “What do you mean, Bloom your lessons?”, and she said, “Go back to Bloom’s Taxonomy and make sure that your lessons are Bloomed; go and ask yourself those questions. Don’t ask those questions to your learners, ask them to yourself”.
And suddenly you think, “That’s a really good use of that”. I’d learnt it as a thing, but I never learnt it in practice.
The nice part about that was that suddenly you start thinking, “Can I look back on that?” Same when you’re reflecting on those lessons; “Did I tick all those boxes? Can they remember it? Do they understand it? Can they synthesise it? Have I given them tools that they can now go and use beyond what I’ve already taught them?
If that isn’t the case, then maybe there’s a part of the puzzle that’s missing. You need to put that self-reflective piece in there. Even nowadays, whenever I’m doing training, I still go back and think “Bloom it a little bit”. Does that lesson bloom?
You go from the point where people remember what you’ve told them to the point where they can actually use it. What a fantastic way of looking at your learning. There’s always a space to learn.
I make it my point now to keep learning. Every week I watch a good few TED talk videos. I listen to at least one audio book on training, I try to try to train myself out of subjects, I’ll listen to books by FBI negotiators to find out how to talk to people. I’ll go and look at marketing and look at how marketing messages are put across.
It comes back to what I was originally saying; I’ll steal all the best ideas I can find, I’m like a magpie for good ideas, because if I can bring it into my teaching, it’s going to make my teaching better, and my learners are going to benefit from my kleptomaniac approach to learning new things.
David A Jones
You sound like me! My wife will say to me on a regular basis, “Are you listening to more training stuff?” Whilst I’m cooking, I’ve always got some form of education on.
Alex Forryan
My car is a rolling university. That’s the way I look at it; if I’m not listening to a book or a podcast where I will learn something, then it’s a waste of time. Music for me is something I can go and sit down and relax and listen to. When I’m moving – trains, planes, automobiles, that’s a learning time.
I’m an aural learner. I’m a drummer, so I’ve always learnt, it’s primarily – listen, copy, repeat. Again, I’ve just taken those elements and then moved on with it.
