About My Teaching
I'd like to give you an idea of what we do in class and why these lessons are an incredible opportunity. Should you attend one of your child's lessons you will observe:
- A positive, encouraging, empathetic and team-based approach to learning music.
- Active and engaging teaching through which students develop their musicianship (e.g. aural skills, sense of beat, music-reading skills, stylistic understanding etc.) and instrumental technique.
- Students being presented with new musical challenges and developing a repertoire of strategies for overcoming them. Schools often refer to a 'growth mindset', and we as musicians adopt this every time we meet! My goal is to model and rehearse this balanced, healthy reflective thinking to enable students in reaching their musical goals and applying their multifaceted skills to other aspects of their lives into the future.
The learning activities will typically flow from a targeted warm-up into the introduction of new tunes or continued refinement of melodies they had been preparing at home. Students record the focal points for their weekly set work in Practice Journals throughout each lesson. There's plenty of scope for variation and differentiation (i.e. matching the content, approach and demands of activities to individual learners' needs) within this framework, so each 30-minute lesson can look quite different to the last!
At a macro level, learning to play music and making it with other people is inherently worthwhile because it's fun, good for cognitive development/maintenance and can be creatively satisfying. Some of the key features our weekly lessons offer that students may not encounter in other school-based activities include:
- 30 minutes of focused attention, in which a small number (<5) of students attempt amazing and challenging things.
- Care and encouragement from a dedicated, expert musical mentor every single week.*
- Developing and refining valuable universal skills such as goal-setting and complex problem-solving.
- Reinforcing those skills week-in-week-out, thereby learning to appreciate long-term progress and balancing out the 'immediate gratification' mindset that we all naturally fall into. The flip side of this is that students quickly associate the quantity and quality of practice time with how challenging they find the weekly set work. Practice carefully and regularly and playing well becomes easy. Practice carelessly or infrequently and playing your instrument remains difficult. Such is life.
*Except when students or teacher are off sick. Or there's an assembly. Or a school camp. Or swimming lessons....
About Me
I'm a Senior Teacher with the Western Australian Department of Education and have been teaching in public schools since 2008. Prior to that, and while completing my Bachelor of Music Education at UWA, my musical occupations included:
- performing on trombone with classical and jazz ensembles such as the West Australian Symphony Orchestra (WASO), Fremantle Symphony Orchestra and Perth Pops Orchestra,
- teaching instrumental music across a number of private schools around Perth,
- directing school and community ensembles, and...
- music retail just for something completely different.
My musical journey began the same way many of yours did when I joined the IMSS program as an 11-year-old beginner trombonist. Before that first brass lesson I'd never had formal music lessons or played anything more than a few notes on the recorder. Thanks to my supportive family and dedicated music teachers - Neil Coy, Tim Stapleton, Andrew Braham, Phil Heathcote and Bruce Thompson - I was able to experience the joy of making music with others as my skills and knowledge gradually expanded.
An extensive and varied range of opportunities stemmed from those early years of school and community music-making. The list of ensembles and cities involved would put anyone to sleep; suffice to say that those musical doors would not have opened were it not for the quality training I received in my IMSS lessons, school bands and high school music classes. So much good flowed on from that initial acceptance into the IMSS program back in 1996 (yes, I'm properly old), and I'm grateful that the instrumental teaching job I've been working at for two decades now allows me to pass on the same gifts to students across a wide swathe of Perth.
Prior to having a couple of kids of my own I was teaching classroom music and contemporary guitar as well as brass instruments, while also conducting a number of ensembles in public schools around the Peel region. I transitioned to full-time brass teaching a few years back, but continued gigging with cover bands and small jazz groups outside of school. These days don't involve much performing or community banding, but teaching at anywhere between 15 and 19 schools each week as well as playing school concerts with the IMSS Brass Quintet is plenty to keep busy with!
If you've found this site by chance or via the MusicLessonsWithMrTaylor YouTube channel then I hope there is something of value here. Most of the content you can find in the video directories page is recorded between classes or when students are running late, but even with the inherent 'one-take' limitations they can provide you with an advantage that didn't exist back in my day. I hope you remember they exist next time you're thinking "I don't know how this should go!", or remember to actually use our Clap-Sing-Play process ;)
Enjoy!
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