Abstract
Those of us in music educator preparation know the familiar student cycles. They come to us as students considering the education profession, and they leave as young professional music educators. As I write this, the most recent cadre of student teachers has just returned to campus for their final meeting prior to graduation. They seem more confident, more professional, and maybe even older and a bit taller than when they left campus 14 weeks ago. In my particular case, as I imagine is true of many others, we have more students that we can place in local schools, so they do their student teaching across the state, often several hundred miles from campus. They are observed occasionally, and they send daily e-mails to us and to their peers, but for the most part, they don’t see each other or us for the semester. So perhaps our on-campus meeting is especially dramatic. My favorite time during this long meeting of paperwork and certification details is the time reserved for the soon-to-be graduates to offer advice to next semester’s student teachers. Their comments are wise, funny, heart-warming and brutally honest. Our upcoming student teachers seem to learn a lot; but I am certain that I learn even more from their insights. They leave as students and return as colleagues, excited about new prospects or even confirmed teaching jobs. They have turned the page to a new life chapter.
As teacher educators, we have seen this new chapter repeat itself semester after semester. Students head to student teaching assignments as students and return as professionals. Observing this metamorphosis caused me to consider the potential impact we teacher educators have over time. The idea of teacher impact is certainly not a new one and many may be aware of inspiring quotes on the topic. According to Henry Brook Adams, the 19th-century historian and journalist, “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” And the concept of teacher influence crosses cultures; for example, a verse from the Talmud translates as “When you teach your son, you teach your son’s son.”
But I had never taken the time to transfer the generic concept of “influence” into actual amounts. Let us consider the numbers. How many teacher educators are there in our profession? The National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) website lists 644 member schools with “most” offering teacher certification. So for the purposes of this thought, let us say that conservatively 600 NASM-accredited universities graduate music educators, and that, again conservatively, each one has 5 music education graduates per year. That’s 3000 new music educators a year (ignoring the possibility that some did not enter the profession). That would mean that for the 20 years that the Journal of Music Teacher Education (JMTE) has been in publication, 60,000 new music educators have completed our programs and entered the schools. And we are the educators who have prepared that group to be new teachers. It is a sobering responsibility as well as an exhilarating thought.
Influence of the Individual Teacher Educator
Now consider the individual teacher educator. An individual teacher educator, who graduates 5 music educators a year, would have prepared 100 music educators across 20 years. Adjust according to how many students actually graduate from your particular institution.
Then consider a further series of hypothetical amounts. How many K–12 students do the 100 new teachers reach? Let’s estimate that each K–12 music teacher sees 100 to 500 students a year. Secondary directors may see 100 or more. Elementary music teachers (arguably the hardest working people on the planet) may see 500 or more since many teach every child in the school. That would mean that 100 teachers across 20 years of teaching would directly influence 200,000 to 1,000,000 children (100 teachers × 100–500 students per year × 20 years). Then consider that one teacher educator prepared those 100 teachers. That one single teacher educator potentially influenced a million school children. Really? Yes, I checked my figures again. One teacher educator, as we have described it in our hypothetical situation, has the potential to influence a hundred teachers directly, but indirectly to influence a million students over 20 years. And the numbers get even larger if you happen to graduate more than 5 teachers per year, or if you personally stay in the teacher education profession longer than 20 years. That’s right; even using conservative hypothetical numbers, across 20 years one teacher educator can influence a million school children.
Now consider the potential influence of the written word such as the JMTE. What might be the influence of a single JMTE article on an individual teacher educator or on music teacher education in general? The ripples of influence could undoubtedly spread in unanticipated directions simply because the article was available. The 210 authors who published in JMTE in the 20 years since its inception certainly have broadened their potential spheres of influence in largely unidentified and perhaps undeterminable ways.
I know there have been precisely 210 different authors during the first 20 years of JMTE’s publication because of an unexpected incident. At the 2012 NAfME national conference in St. Louis, two nearly identical posters were presented—“The First Twenty Years: A Content Analysis of the Journal of Music Teacher Education, 1991–2011” and “The Journal of Music Teacher Education: A Content Analysis of Articles 1991–2011.” The authors involved had not collaborated and in fact did not even know each other until they met at the research poster sessions. This chance incident provided the unusual opportunity to examine the results of two entirely independent examinations of identical data.
Given the rarity of such an occurrence and the obvious applicability to JMTE, the Society for Music Teacher Education Executive Committee asked both authors to submit their manuscripts to JMTE for blind review. In the name of full disclosure, it should be noted that my students and I were the authors of one of the manuscripts. The two articles, revised and approved via the usual peer review channels, appear in this issue.
Influence of Differing Research Interpretations
There are many similarities between the two articles. Both authors remark on the success of this relatively young journal, noting that issues in the first 10 years contained roughly 30 pages but increased to 105 by 2011. Both agreed on the overall numbers of articles. Both agreed that the way thought is framed has shifted from a preponderance of conceptual or interest articles (defined in the current JMTE Guidelines to Contributors as “having underpinning in research, but not resulting in new data”) to a majority of research articles (defined as “producing new data”). Both agreed that among research articles, most were quantitative in nature, but recently qualitative studies were published with increasing frequency. At this point, according to available content analyses (Lane, 2011), JMTE publishes a larger percentage of qualitative research than does any other major music education research journal. And finally, both noted that of the quantitative studies, the vast majority were surveys.
There were rather distinct differences between the two articles. Conclusions about the content of the articles and the ways each was examined varied dramatically. Both authors followed the same procedures of categorizing each published article, but the actual categorizations differed. Killian, Liu, and Reid examined how articles were categorized in the journal itself (peer reviewed or non–peer reviewed, research vs. interest vs. commentary). Nichols focused on methodology apparent in each article, labeling each as history, critical, speculative, applied, research reports, book reviews, or reviews of literature. The results of the two varied categorizations allowed distinctly different insights.
Both sets of authors developed a list of topics that appeared in the 282 articles. One developed 14 topics and one arrived at 15. But only five topics appeared in both articles, even allowing for labeling differences. These included “student teaching,” “curriculum,” “teaching methods/techniques,” “retention/mentoring,” and “other/miscellaneous.” All other topics were distinct to the individual article.
Does the lack of agreement mean that one categorization was wrong and the other right? I don’t think so. I think it simply offers insight into how differently minds work. Frankly, I was surprised at how many differences there were. Did I expect that everyone would look at the world the same way I do? In an essay that is well worth rereading, “No One Knows Research But Me,” Clifford Madsen (1974) addressed our tendency to believe that our own analyses are the one and only way to view data.
And why does any of this matter? It matters because it demonstrates how important it is to specify exactly how data are collected and analyzed, how important it is to replicate data, and how important it is to avoid looking at data (and indeed the world) as if there were one single answer. My husband tells of a highly influential design class he took as an undergraduate. The instructor presented a problem and each student prepared three different design solutions that followed that guideline. Everyone believed that their first idea was the best and that they had the “right answer.” What happened, of course, was that once all the designs were publically displayed, it became apparent that there were multiple good solutions. The lesson learned, and one that affected my husband for the rest of his life, is that there is more than one solution. Your solution or the first one you think of may not necessarily be the best. Considering two studies based on identical data, but drawing different conclusions, makes the same point.
Just as research does not have one single right answer (there are multiple ways to view the same data), it seems apparent that teaching does not have one single right answer (there are multiple ways to teach a skill or concept and not every strategy will work with every student). Likewise, there is not one single right way to prepare teachers. We learn from examining the work of others and evaluating it for use in our own settings. I would suggest that you join your teacher educator colleagues at the 2013 Symposium for Music Teacher Education in Greensboro, North Carolina on September 26–18, 2013. It’s a great time to exchange information and consider the ideas of others related to teacher preparation. Proposals are due April 15, 2013.
The potential to influence the entire music education profession clearly is in the hands of teacher educators. To say that this is a massive responsibility is an understatement. We know that the path will not be the same for every teacher, and no single strategy will be effective for every teacher educator at every institution. It is up to us to search for answers, strategies, techniques, and procedures that will allow, encourage, and facilitate our students to become the best teachers possible. It matters to us, to them, and to the multitude of music students they will teach.