Painting a Big Soup: Teaching and Learning in a Second-Grade General Music Classroom

Through collaboration, a music teacher and a researcher attempted to learn more about the teaching/learning processes in one second-grade general music classroom. While some components of the teaching/learning processes that occurred in this music classroom were identified through tins qualitative study, the most important findings were those that emerged during the collaborative process of analysis and interpretation of data. Through active participation in the analysis process, the teacher came to understand the impact of the emergent issues on the teaching and learning in her own classroom and, as a result, made some concerted efforts to change her teaching. Her reactions point to the importance of providing teachers with opportunities to examine their own work and to consider how issues related to teaching and learning processes manifest themselves in their work. They also suggest that unless teachers have these opportunities, discussions of issues related to their teaching may be meaningless to them.