Abstract
This study focuses on the role of feedback in teaching with particular emphasis on its effect on learner performance, motivation, and self-regulation. A critical account of feedback and applicable models highlight conceptual guidelines of how individual, relational, and environmental factors can impact on the utility of feedback as a performance changing device, and reasons for theory–practice disjunction. A qualitative methodology investigated 25 instrumental music teachers in Victoria, Australia, realizing the effect of studio teaching feedback on students from teachers’ perspectives and recollections of their studio teaching practice. Knowledge and skills, positive attribution, and music and relational qualities are reported through these reflections of feedback, feed-up, and feed-forward approaches to student engagement. The study highlights positive feedback encounters are typified by learner engagement and teacher–student relationality, contesting the traditional, behaviorist “feedback ritual” and teacher-centered approaches in the music lesson. The study offers implications for purposeful and structured learning opportunities, and cyclical engagement that builds impactful feedback episodes and feedback design that factors in the influence of context, culture, and differentiated relationships in learning. The study encourages educators to consider balance of “drill and thrill,” where feedback is embedded as an influential pedagogical/relational device, rather than discreet episodes of educators “telling” learners about their performance.
Feedback is a crucial component of the teaching and learning process that provides information on current performance in relation to effecting future performance. Whilst a large body of literature argues the importance of feedback in learning, the one-to-one music studio site has only recently engaged with general educational strategies and approaches regarding its impact. Within secondary music education the one-to-one lesson is a favored pedagogical model that facilitates the interaction and organization of effective learning between student and teacher (Gaunt, 2008). An important facet of the way teachers design learning situations is the utilization of pedagogies that engage students through feedback as an interactive process of teaching and learning (de Bruin, 2019).
Within instrumental music, studio practices have been described as utilizing direct teaching, rote learning, teacher-centered, and “instructivist” rather than constructivist approaches (Colwell et al., 2017; Sink, 2002). The principles of effective music performance teaching emphasize the need for specific instruction, incremental, and developmental steps forged through explicit instruction and teacher feedback (Rosenshine, 2009). Concomitant educational theory has posited teacher behaviors characterized in terms of a triadic sequence involving task presentation, student response, and teacher reinforcement or feedback (Speer, 1994). Bloom held conviction that individualized learning was not only beneficial but regarded one-to-one tutorial instruction as the “gold standard” for education against which others should be compared (Bloom, 1984). Today, the one-to-one lesson—whilst unrealistic in mass general education remains an enduring aspect of instrumental music teaching, where teacher feedback plays a crucial role.
Feedback is widely viewed as an intervention to improve learner performance, providing a basis for which learners can be extended into higher levels of cognitive function (Gilboy et al., 2015). Feedback can offer powerful impact within the music lesson (Burwell, 2021) with dialogic connection between teacher and student used to stimulate and extend students’ thinking and understanding (Alexander, 2018). However, dialogic approaches to teaching and learning can, as numerous studies suggest (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996; Molloy, 2010; Wubbels et al., 2006), provide large variations in student-teacher relationships in terms of approach, direction, and ways of communication. This suggests that not only a one-size-fits-all model on how to give feedback is flawed , but that understanding differentiated approaches to instructive processes is key to a rich feedback skillset.
The instrumental music lesson is a site of negotiated relations, interactions, frustrations, and epiphanies (de Bruin, 2018a). Teaching involves pedagogies of modeling, scaffolding, coaching, and reflection on progress, with Creech and Hallam (2010) asserting teacher–student learning relationships play a significant impact on outcomes. Apprenticeship models continue to evolve (Gaunt, 2010; de Bruin, 2018b), with Gholson (1998) identifying teachers’ proximal positioning as key. This places importance on variables, such as feedback, developmental cycles, and relationality that provide a warm, safe studio climate in which the student can feel safe to respond, question, fail, and try again (de Bruin, 2018c). Poulos and Mahony (2008) also suggest that students’ perceptions of teacher status and expertise enhances the credibility of feedback and, therefore, their reflexivity to more likely “listen to” and “act on” the feedback messages.
Feed-up, feedback, feed-forward
Effective feedback provides a cognitive “roadmap” of where the student is in relation to the ability to meet a shared goal. Initial teacher instigation provides the learner information as to “Where am I going?” (What are the goals?), How am I going? (What progress is being made toward the goal?), and “Where do we go next?” (What learning needs to be undertaken to make better/next progress?). These dialogic prompts correspond to notions of feed-up, feedback, and feed-forward (Hattie & Timperley, 2007).
Feed-forward provides a “where to next” appraisal by providing future-oriented options or solutions. It involves the process of replacing positive or negative feedback with possible solutions that draws the learner to focusing on the next attempted iteration (Khalil, 2017). Feed-forward is thus a tool that teachers can use to draw students into more accomplished levels of thinking by elaborating on development that secures future attempts (Sadler, 2010). Carless (2019) further asserts that students’ perceptions and actions to feedback can extend their thinking across different aspects of the learning process, highlighting the complexity with which feed-forward strategies and judgments may be applied (Sadler, 2010). This places focus on the temporal and iterative nature of feedback as a spiraled or looped process—a series of cycles that build student engagement and growth through sustained connection to the task and qualities of teacher dialogue, rather than mere explanation of the task.
Feedback models
Models of feedback include diverse behavioralist as well as more recent constructivist approaches. Chinn and Brewer’s (1993) peripheral conceptual change model places focus upon learners’ roles in seeking, interpreting, and acting on feedback, and the sense-making of both internal (self-driven) and external (teacher-driven) information. Kulhavy and Stock (1989) examined the complexities of how teacher feedback may confirm, complement, or contradict learners’ internal feedback, highlighting the need for the crafting of calibrated and timely dialogic responses. Bandura’s (1991) enduring social cognition theory emphasizes attention (focus), retention, reproduction, and motivation where teachers’ encouragement of students fosters development of their individual self-efficacy through constructive feedback. Importantly, this theory involves four interrelated processes of student goal realization: self-observation, self-evaluation, self-reaction, and self-efficacy, saliently highlighting the diverse ways feedback events across these four processes can impact student motivation and goal attainment.
Teacher- and student-centered feedback
Leadership, management as well as education have adapted feedback models in various guises. Of prominence is the IDEA (Internalization, Distribution, Explanation, and Action) model (Mitchell, 2016) that asks the teacher to identify specific issues/behaviors, describe the impact of the issue, encourage continuation and change, and agree on sustained adjustment. This model highlights the pervading view of feedback as an action in which a more experienced person tells a less experienced person about their interpretation of what to do, and how to do it better. Indeed, much feedback literature focuses on enhancing the teacher’s capacity to deliver high-quality information at appropriate junctures (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006), with little to no consideration of the role of the student in feedback, nor their affiliation to “change” decisions or attunement to advice given.
Consensus on student-oriented feedback research surrounds three key components that constitute the pre-requisite properties for feedback: (1) information on the goal of performance, (2) information about how performance meets the goal, commonly referred to as the “gap,” and (3) strategies to address the gap (Sadler, 1989). Feedback offered as improving self-regulated learning places the learner at the center of the feedback process (Butler & Winne, 1995), whilst linking learning goals with strategies or approaches used to achieve them. This “adjustment process” involving student- and teacher-driven feedback loops enable the learner to interpret a task and design tactics to reach the desired goal but is reliant on student self-motivation. The oft-used yet largely reductionist “feedback sandwich” (Henderson et al., 2005) envelopes specific and critical feedback between outer layers of positivity/flattery, in which students may become acclimatized and triggered by the frothy lead and final remarks of a feedback interaction, ignoring the substance concerning closing the gap.
Hattie and Timperley’s (2007) study of feedback interventions assert that the approach used in feedback has a significant bearing on whether or not it is useful, and that feedback can have a debilitating effect on performance if it is delivered in a way that is unidirectional, tangential to students focus, or perceived to threaten learners “self” (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996). Within the one-to-one construct, advanced studio practices and strategies, such as scaffolding (Wood et al., 1976), coaching (Schön, 1987), mentoring (Gaunt et al., 2012), and cognitive apprenticeship (de Bruin, 2018b) have provided nuance to both the micro and macro level development and interplay occurring in the moment, and across the life of the learning relationship. Extended multi-year relations occur frequently in the teaching of instrumental music, and research has pointed to the positive impact interpersonal dynamics and relationality between student and teacher play on sustained learning (Burwell, 2012; de Bruin, 2018d, 2022).
The role of feedback is considered a generative and productive strategy for constructive action (Lewis, 2020). Feedback includes effective communication and dialogue that can facilitate students’ learning and responding in more sophisticated ways as they understand the rules for interpreting and acting upon events as they occur. Feedback can thus be understood in terms of the moment-to-moment guiding of student actions, direction of attention to critical features, providing of information and exemplars, as well as motivational “coaching” to succeed. At the heart of feedback is the utilization of a dialogic pedagogy whereby teachers explore beyond learners’ mere internalization of abstract knowledge, emphasizing affiliative and empathic engagements that promote multi-directional development, dialogue, and perspective (Bakhtin, 1981; Wiliam, 2016).
Dialogism
Dialogic pedagogy can enhance a student’s thought and creative process through the dialogic positioning to and relationships with teachers and collaborators. Teachers can use dialogue to great effect in guiding student actions, directing their attention to specific sensations, feelings, and processes, and by describing critical features. Teachers can adapt modeling, coaching, scaffolding, fading, and reflective episodes in response to the learner’s developing skills and growing independence (de Bruin, 2018e). Threaded within larger pedagogic themes, teachers can shape nuanced and bespoke levels of task challenge (Van de Pol & Elbers, 2013), involving effective interactions and recalibration within “zones of proximal development” (Vygotsky, 1978). This may promote learners’ active roles, adaptability, and attenuation to discrete skills explored in the learning moment (Rojas-Drummond et al., 2010). At the core of feedback is the capacity for the teacher to impart effective change, and research suggests that the effectiveness of feedback may be measured by its influence on student behavior (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006; Wiliam, 2016).
The premise behind the need for feedback is that learners have difficulty in comprehending the performance target and in evaluating how their own performance matches up to that target. Current concerns regarding the use of feedback relate to the dismantling of traditional “feedback rituals,” emphasizing the building of constructivist learning principles that encourage learners and educators to view feedback as a co-produced system of learning, rather than discreet, unconnected episodes of unidirectional “telling” (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). Residing between honesty and sensitivity, Higgs et al. (2005) suggest the challenge lay in “giving feedback that preserves dignity, facilitates ongoing communication between teacher and student, but that also leads to behavioural change” (p. 248). Rather than merely the need for dispersement of high-quality information at appropriate junctures (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006), feedback requires aspects of teacher relationality, empathy, and insightfulness that ensures students positive uptake of feedback offered (de Bruin, 2022).
This phenomenological study investigates teachers’ ideas of feedback given to students. The aim of this study was to:
Seek what music teachers believed were important facets of feedback,
What actions and dialogue they utilized, and
What attributes and behaviors they sought to develop in students from the feedback they gave.
This study forefronts instrumental music teachers’ concepts of what feedback is, and the circumstances, intent, and modes with which they provide it. Building on extant literature, this study provides insights into how teachers approach closing the knowledge/skills “gap,” how dialogue is threaded with strategic pedagogic actions, and the idiosyncratic aspirational, motivational, and relational climates constructed in music studios that facilitate learning.
Methodology
This investigation of perspectives and reflections of feedback offered by teachers to students in their studio lessons spanned teachers of trumpet, trombone, flute, piano, clarinet, saxophone, drumkit, and voice, with data gathered across the 2020 and 2021 school years.
Participants
This study investigated 25 instrumental music teachers throughout Victoria, Australia. This research sought to investigate teachers’ understandings of what feedback is, how they offer it, and what impact they felt their feedback provided for the student in the one-to-one instrumental lesson. This project sought a diverse range of instrumental teachers, where the participant cohort taught students across years 7–12 (12–18 year olds) within government and independent (private) school music departments. Teachers were specialist instrumental teachers who taught their instrument, and on occasion, additionally taught groups of 2–3. Ethical permission was gained in interviewing these instrumental teachers.
Data collection and analysis
The four guiding questions of this study were used as a framework to guide the discussion in semiformal interviews. Participants responded to questions that sought information about their understanding of feedback in learning and teaching, the strategies and processes they set in place, and their understandings of how this shaped student learning and improvement.
The teachers were asked to reflect on their experiences of providing feedback in instrumental lessons.
Based on these experiences of dialogue and verbal exchange in pedagogic approaches, they were asked to comment on what they believed to be important facets of the feedback they gave, and the regularity of this feedback type.
To focus their thoughts further, they were invited to consider what were the important attributes and behaviors they sought to develop in students from the feedback they gave.
They were asked to discuss their views and values toward feedback relating to relationality, and musical ability.
This study utilized a phenomenological approach to explain the lived worlds of instrumental music teachers. This considers an epistemological constructionist view and social context that emphasizes how “meaningful reality is contingent upon human practices being constructed in and out of the interaction between human beings and their world” (Crotty, 1998, p. 42). The study analyses lived experiences and participant meaning making within the “living dialogic space” between teacher and student where knowledge and experience are developed together (Chappell & Craft, 2011).
Participants were a purposive sample selected across government and independent (private) secondary school sectors in metropolitan and rural settings with established music departments, spanning a number of instrument groups. Interviews with teachers were recorded using a H4 recorder and transcribed verbatim. In ensuring consistent, systematized rigor, interview procedures followed guidelines (Smith et al., 2009). Participants had a chance to elaborate on questions and discuss personal ideas and concepts. All interviews were transcribed, and then coded for common key words and phrases. Multiple readings were accompanied by note-keeping, from which words and phrases were then extracted. These were then summarized into chunks of data that allowed for initial groupings of emergent themes (Charmaz, 2003), which were then sorted and further gathered into “participant feedback experiences.” These were drawn up in a table (Pothoulaki et al., 2012), and then grouped into sub-categories from which major themes were deduced (Barrett & Stauffer, 2009) (see Table 1). Data are presented in a way that reinforces participant voice throughout via thick description and verbatim quotations that revealed both individual cultures and phenomena under analysis.
Essences of Meaning, Sub-Categories, and Major Themes.
As a phenomenological study, participants reflected on and discussed events, experiences, professional growth, realization, and development, recollecting teaching episodes in time and over time. Some teachers discussed their evolving concept of what effective feedback has become. The informal and relaxed nature of the interview process, and the practical nature of the topic were conducive to most participants freely offering examples. Epoché exists throughout the study, involving an intuitive reduction (Valle et al., 1989), bracketing assumptions and intentionality as an invisible thread that connects participants to their actions and agency toward feedback (the phenomenon) (Merleau-Ponty, 1947/1964).
Data collected were assessed for bias through comparison and control between interviews (Lincoln & Guba, 1986; Yin, 2003). All participants were assured of confidentiality and anonymity if so desired, following Smith’s (1995) suggestion that rapport and trust are important issues in qualitative interviewing. The primary techniques used to address the trustworthiness (validity) of this study were data-collection triangulation (Patton, 1990), member checking/verification of information with research participants (Stake, 1995), and attention to investigator expertise (Seidman, 1991). Observing a focus on how teachers negotiated aspects of feedback, the study maintained a socio-cultural perspective of co-constructed learning whilst categorizing data across various major themes (Pothoulaki et al., 2012). These pool categories were further honed to reflect three dominant themes.
Findings
Teachers discussed reflections of strategies, contexts, and approaches to feedback given to students, providing intriguing data as to what and how feedback was negotiated in instrumental music lessons. At the end of the interview, teachers were asked to reflect on the frequency of feedback they gave across an average 40-min lesson; 21 responded with around 3–4 times per minute, the remaining four suggested 4–6 times per minute. Immersing in reflections of feedback incidents foremost in these teachers’ recollections, major themes organized are: knowledge and skills transfer, positive attribution, and musical and relational qualities. The findings are reported through these areas guided by overall feedback, feed-up, and feed-forward approaches. Question 4 was a polarizing one, in which there was a strong middle ground, and also vehement perspectives toward both (mutually exclusive for some). Participant responses traversed many sub-themes, and this was particularly so in the area of quality of communication, which was seen as both a skill and promoter of students’ personal attributes.
Knowledge and skills transfer
In lessons, dialogue was dominant, though gestural feedback was noted as a conscious, though perhaps less deliberate, and focused method of communication. A second initial point was the use of an authoritative or judgmental voice in feedback and its use in the delivery of performance information. Four teachers asserted that they mostly used their voice with a tone of authority that supported a viewpoint that could not be contested—that is, the feedback was stated as fact, rather than a positioning device used as a construct for behavioral change. However, across the remaining sample this sentiment was “couched” as one of many ways feedback could be delivered across a range of pedagogic strategies. One teacher, Gerald, acknowledged his authoritarian tendencies, and also his ways of softening dialogue, recounting phrases used, such as: Now, I would like you to; Good, now please do this . . . Yes, do more of this . . .
Susan qualified herself as a somewhat stern teacher, though her reflections of requests to students, such as: Hmm, yes, good, now go on with it . . . I really insist you do (this) . . . Ok, now do (this) . . .
Stephen’s recollections of what he called “direct instruction” came with the admission that he at times could be quite soft, whilst also harboring a tendency to “get excited.” Some of his recollections included: Well yes, perhaps you could try (this) . . . I liked what you did there, do it again
Through to more abrupt utterances: Wait, stop! Don’t do that! Now why did you do that? That could have been more . . .!
Simon described himself as student-centered teacher cognizant of efficiencies that studio teachers must utilize in their approach to student learning. A case in point is offered by Simon’s recollection: A student was articulating quite heavily and unmusically for the excerpt at hand. I closed the book and directed the student to thinking and feeling where they were articulating-where was the precise point at which the tongue was hitting the teeth. Rather than persevere with the music, I simply asked the student to at first lower the impact point inside the mouth, sense the sound, and then raise the tongue. “There that’s it! a round, precise beginning to the sound was reached, and the student also discovered how to change level of attack through manipulation of the tongue arch.
Even though explicit and authoritative, this episode was one of exploration, experimentation, and trust by both teacher and student in the investigative process.
Teachers’ support for students’ knowledge and skill acquisition was articulated in terms of focused coaching and feedback. Some teachers referred to coaching being delivered through an exercise loop, in which the teacher utilized concise directions, reminders, encouragement and approval. Mark maintained that My lessons have micro moments where there seems to be a synergy between my direction and the students’ openness to advice. They are fleeting, spontaneous “in the moment” accomplishments. Sometimes just as we seem to be able to go into another gear, I might say something obtuse for the student to comprehend, or their concentration wanes, and the moment is lost. But I try to get these (synergistic) moments happening.
For this teacher, feedback was delivered as an ongoing dialogue even as the student played. Mark commented that “the students learn to play over my encouragements—they get immediate response in the moment, they don’t have to stop” At the end of each loop, the teacher gave nonspecific praise, with more idiomatic and specific feedback at the culmination of an “episode” denoting a move from general and praise-driven feedback to feed-up directions.
Teachers referred to an iterative dimension that grew in intensity across the lesson. Sue remarked:
I seem to go through cycles- instruction and playing of 4-5 minutes - a gradual building in intensity and focus, and then release -they are great for working through technique and repetitive actions, and then we relax and have a chat about what happened- and start another cycle again. I think those cycles are fewer but longer for better players.
Feedback on technical skills was described by some as a drilling sequence that for most teachers was mirrored with dry, short, but focused remarks that embedded assimilation of skill, process, and ultimate mastery. For other teachers, feedback was a much more complex communicative approach, beyond being merely authoritative and inducing the blind following of orders. Questioning and discussion promoted a range of assertive, affiliative, and connective approaches that supplemented knowledge/skills transfer.
Positive attribution
Teachers also described feedback they felt promoted positive attribution. Participants resoundingly emphasized the need and capacity for teachers to be flexible and patient, and make music fun and enjoyable, though how this manifested in the lesson was subjective. Teachers reflected on the need to “meeting students where they are at,” to “being creative, imaginative, and inspirational,” as well as “knowing and understanding the students as people first, and learners second.” As one teacher remarked, I think numerous teachers get caught up in the minutiae of the instrumental music world. They forget that they aren’t just teaching the instrument, they are teaching a person—there can be a universe of misunderstanding between the two.
Acknowledgment of students’ learning trajectories was linked to the notion that music teachers are more than teachers of music. Some participants commented on creativity, emotional development, interdisciplinary connections, personal development, and teacher-student collaboration being firmly within their educational purview.
Whilst most teachers commented that enthusiasm and passion were significant factors in their teaching, there was a stratification of teacher reflections toward the notion of student enjoyment. Whilst 20 teachers (80%) acknowledged student enjoyment as a driver of their feedback, five (20%) did not. Of those that did, enjoyment was manifested in feedback, such as: “The way I greet a student at the beginning of a lesson”; “Incorporating (student) lives and life events as an emotional platform to their music making” . . .” Using metaphor, or threading nature, or history into the pieces we play together” . . ., and also “The way I offer a unique way of learning that is different to the rest of their teachers and school experiences.”
Teachers reflected on lesson structures that evolved upon a series of exercises and characteristic treatment. These for some were somewhat happenstance events, and for others, a well-organized iterative loop that spiraled student learning: Gary describes how he initiated each exercise verbally and with a piano cue, often reinforcing the first few notes of singing before giving way to the student. He coached the student, and when the exercise was finished, offered advice before proceeding to the next exercise. Coaching advice in Gary’s context refers to remarks made in/during student work, which tended to be directive and positively framed. Gary spoke of a lesson being a journey, moving “up the gears” as the lesson become more focused and intense. Feedback first gears for Gary began with: Yes, very nice, keep going . . . excellent breathing . . . focus on shape of the phrase, well done!
This would be followed up with: Ok, terrific start, a nice rich core sound, air flowed really nice, worked hard on this, sounds beautiful! Good maintaining of control. Now when you got to the ascending phrase, what happened? Tell me, what did you feel inside your body? Where was your mind at? Here’s where we need to be careful about . . .
Dialogue in this situation covers positive attribution, and promotion of motivation. As a reflection of “in action” thinking, it includes specific feedback on performance, praise, and feed-up sensations and cognition toward a goal. The episode is enhanced by the concluding remarks that hold a powerful function. This is a “feed-up moment” in which the student is enculturated into a sense of bodily, cognitive, and self-regulative “entanglements” all related to the improvement of musical function. One positive series of “incantations” supports the power and impact of the following series of more directive comments. These latter comments tend to be more explicit and direct to what the student needs to do to get better.
Rebecca reflected that she focused on students’ performance responses, whilst at the same time tried to maintain a dialogue that balanced continual diagnosis, positivity, and prescription of instruction. For some teachers, providing functional feedback/feed-up/feed-forward within a learning loop was considered a powerful and effective range of pedagogic strategies. This approach was threaded with the asking of questions that elicited performed responses. Rebecca reflected that dialogue in her approach was urged more at the end of the cycle, encouraging reflection, a reset of goals, and self-appraisal by the student: “How did you feel that went,” “does that feel more musically satisfying,” “I can hear a difference, can you?,” but followed by moments of feed forward: “Yes, maintain that breathing,” “maintaining an ear for clarity of articulation,” and “continue to isolate this phrase . . . push the tempo beyond what you need here . . . so that it feels comfortable.”
This reveals a more ordered approach with dialogue at the conclusion for this teacher, but a clear “running through the gears” of feedback/up/forward. These reflections of feedback episodes evidence the integration of Wood et al.’s (1976) typology of scaffolding, applying direct maintenance, “reducing degrees of freedom,” “marking critical features,” and ensuring “frustration control” as discrete pedagogic skills strategically applied.
Musical and relational skills
Part of the research design was to ascertain from teachers their consideration of the importance of feedback on music skills and relational attributes. From the 25 responses, eight (32%) considered relational skills very important, whilst 15 (68%) considered a balance between music and relational skills to be important. Some participants responded holistically to this question, reflecting on their learning journey as educators and teaching qualities they valued: Ralph: The ability to teach and communicate with students holistically is much more important than just focusing on instrumental performance attainment. With experience comes a wisdom of knowing what works with certain students. Robyn: Expectation of student, parent, and the school culture play a large part. For some students my feedback and persona drive excellence, for others it’s about retention and community. Steven: I vary across more musical and relational attributes of my feedback—but I maintain an authenticity of what dedication to practice means to me. I can be quite friendly in the lesson, but the take home message is always about coming back to the next lesson better than you were on the feedback given.
Reflections of specific music-related activity referred to technical proficiency, expression, improvisational ability, reading capacity and accuracy, but so too immersion in the learning relationship that promoted the joy of music-making. In response to stimulus regarding specific music skills, Janet responded that: They come into our studios wanting to place trust in us to guide them through learning and developing a love of music making. This starts and ends with dialogue and feedback, that makes our connection to the student real and meaningful.
Bruce echoed the sentiment, held by the majority of teacher participants: Just as important [as musical skills] are the relational skills that bring student and teacher together on the same wavelength, that helps foster a love of music and music learning. It is important to develop a good relationship with the students because without respect, a studio can be a hard place to be in, for either of us.
A number of teachers discussed relational qualities that they felt were important to the feedback process. Teachers mentioned “being a listener,” “being empathic,” “maintaining a perception of need,” “being receptive and insightful,” “observing oneself through learners’ eyes”—emphasize the high-level improvisatory and “in the moment” decisions teachers need to consider as they negotiate learning moments as not just advancements in music skill but as elements of feed-forward that promote sustained connection and student commitment to acting on advice.
Sonia remarked that Kids today have competing demands, online activities with instant gratification—instrumental (music) education needs to keep up—Discovering a personal medium between being friendly to the students and being an authority figure who is there to be listened to and acted upon—they aren’t mutually exclusive.
John added that Dry unengaging feedback has limits, whereas empathic approaches allow me to transition it to a process-oriented and goal setting orientation without losing the student along the way.
The question of reflecting on relationality for many cut through to teachers’ personal philosophy of education, signaling an intersection between skill attainment, student connection and cohort retention. Whilst some teachers were steadfast in maintaining an aloofness and dominating, authoritative presence, several experienced teachers discussed how they had evolved over time to enhance “musically” oriented feedback with relationally interactive presence that promoted task orientation to processing and regulation of thinking. These data reflect the importance of being able to connect with the student beyond the technical step, with interpersonal feedback a dynamic and important ingredient. It points to a cognitive–affective approach that fuses the attending to musical aims with the cultivating of musical affiliation and belonging for students. It outlines consideration of feedback practices and effective discourse optimally transmitting feedback with a democratic disposition of care for how students seek it, accept it, and use it.
Discussion
Feedback and teachers’ approach to it in the music studio is complex. The interrelationship between the learner, the educator, the environment, the practice/knowledge culture, and the specific task all play a variable in “how to do feedback.” These reflections of teacher’s feedback, and their recollections of intention and action indicate that feedback for some can be seen as a tool for the teacher, delivered by the educator for the purpose of improving the student’s immediate performance. For others, feedback is an evolving or highly developed and calibrated organization of action and discourse that unite activity and in a pure sense of the term, pedagogy that “leads the child” affectively by connecting to content with sympathetic behaviors that allow insights into understanding each-others’ minds (Wegerif, 2006).
Simplistic unilateral and behaviorist views of feedback may be in the past (Biggs, 1993), but these findings of one-to-one teaching between expert music educator and learner provide an expose into what the role feedback can look like in the music studio. This study shows a variance in teacher approaches and personalities that make the meeting of teacher and student minds in the music lesson an intriguing encounter. Participants articulated a range of feedback protocols spanning essentially didactic and teacher-centered, to constructivist and student-centered approaches that shaped the direction and intent of dialogue in varying ways. Insights across the dimensions of feedback, feed-up and feed-forward revealed how teachers approached feedback across a range of authoritative, supportive, affiliative and dominance traits.
Feedback involved teachers’ modeling, scaffolding, and dialogic coaching of student development across a range of aural, cognitive, technical, communication, and performing skills. Teachers used a range of dialogic prompts that promoted positive attribution. Playing a part in developing affirmative behavioral loops, quality of teacher talk may distinguish expert teachers from their less-expert counterparts (Colprit, 2000).
These teacher-led actions and behaviors comprise organization, control, assertiveness, as well as friendliness, warmth, reciprocity in feedback approaches and attitudes. Feedback via dialogic, democratic interplay can offer a relational avenue through which encouragement, aspiration, motivation, and love of music can be shared (Teachout, 1997). This aspect of feedback constitutes a highly complex and intense form of learning, interaction, and dynamic micro-social bounce of interpersonal exchanges between teacher and student.
This study reveals that multiple factors can influence teachers’ receptivity and sophistication in the use of feedback, but there are variables, such as cultural expectations, environment and experience that shape levels of expertise and teacher self-concept in applying them. In secondary schools’ music, elements of individual excellence, equity, and community can mean very different things across school communities. So to, do the approaches and skills music teachers need to calibrate to best maximize their impact.
Whilst the “feedback sandwich” may have reached its use-by date, guidelines for feedback within a constructivist framework may only be the beginning to understanding the application of a social psychology perspective to feedback in music teaching. This study highlights the limitations of Hattie and Timperleys three-step approach, in that there is greater complexity of interaction occurring in the instrumental music lesson, and these differentiated and calibrated approaches can provide intense enculturations for students in how to think and work with adults -something schoPrincipals and teachers in general classroom environments can learn from. Some key overarching principles that might help generate healthy educational habits through informed feedback strategies that can support optimal ideals are through: creating feedback cultures and task designs that apply feedback, feed-up, and feed-forward approaches; Sequencing that provides opportunities to engage in productive, dialogic exchanges between teacher and learner in which feedback can be perceived as a tool; teachers utilizing feedback as a system of promoting learning and illuminating student actions, endeavor, and enjoyment through balanced performative guidance, relationality, and care; and teacher cognizance of differentiated approaches, calibrated and discrete applications of feedback that engage learners in an ongoing loop linking performance targets, actual performance, and strategies for improvement that “bridge the gap.”
Conclusion
This study analyzed reflections of instrumental studio music teachers’ feedback, in an attempt to distill the properties that render it useful for teaching in the instrumental music studio. With the social activities of instrumental teaching remaining a cloaked environment (Gaunt, 2010), there is great need for music educators to reflect on their modes of feedback, their aims, actions, and how this may differ to what they actually enact in practice.
Evident in secondary school settings, the music studio places the expert musician with a willing learner in a unique learning relationship. The dialogic, relational, and musical interplay that occurs in the lesson all points to the importance of feedback that connects the student with the instrument, with the teacher, and with a desire to learn. Empirical studies reveal the didactic nature of feedback exchanges, and the lack of engagement of students in responding to feedback messages, highlighting the need to re-orientate thinking on feedback for sustained music learning.
Carless et al. (2011) argues that a “more fundamental reconceptualization of the feedback process” is required (p. 2). This study highlights the complexity and idiosyncrasy of teachers’ feedback contingent on several variables. It does show the importance of building provisions for “feed forward” into teaching and learning cycles. This can promote performative learning loops that allow students to engage in feedback as a conversational tool that changes behavior and practice, allowing educators to better calibrate their guidance, discourse, and engagement with student effort.
Limitations to this study include the small and specific context of the participant sample, and the reflective, recollective nature of the data post event. It highlights the need for further in situ study of teacher feedback procedures. Differentiated understandings and skill levels based on experiences of early career and expert teachers is acknowledged, pointing to further study of refined elements of effective feedback that sustains enduring music learning.
This study provides impetus to drive initial teacher education and professional development programs toward detailed, impactful feedback practices as part of a pedagogical “tool-kit.” It emphasizes that complex music teacher skills include knowledge and performance, but also relational and communication skills that values and promotes students to remain curious and joyful in our music studios.
