Introduction
Teaching experience is frequently considered an important element that affects the quality of school programmes. According to Steffy et al. (Reference STEFFY, WOLFE, PASCH, ENZ, Steffy, Wolfe, Pasch and Enz2000), teacher development has six phases: the novice, apprentice, professional, expert, distinguished, and emeritus teacher. As teachers move on to different career stages, they gain valuable teaching experience, which could positively affect students’ learning (Boyd et al., Reference BOYD, LANKFORD, LOEB, ROCKOFF and WYCKOFF2007; Conway et al., Reference CONWAY, EROS and STANLEY2009; Eros, Reference EROS2009; Stanley, Reference STANLEY2009; Clotfelter et al., Reference CLOTFELTER, LADD and VIGDOR2010; Rice, Reference RICE2010) and contribute to making healthy school environments (Ladd, Reference LADD2013). These results show that teaching experience is more important than other elements, such as teacher education level or licensure test scores (Rice, Reference RICE2010).
Because the importance of experienced teachers is growing, retaining experienced music teachers has become a major issue among music educators. According to Russell (Reference RUSSELL2008), only 5.7% of string teachers considered leaving their careers in one year, but 22.8% of participants responded that they planned to leave teaching in five years. Similarly, approximately 19.7% of music educators had at least given thought to leaving their teaching positions (Killian & Baker, Reference KILLIAN and BAKER2006), and 34.4% of certified music teachers left their teaching careers after five years (Madsen & Hancock, Reference MADSEN and HANCOCK2002). These figures mean that administrative and workplace supports might be needed to retain experienced music teachers (Killian & Baker, Reference KILLIAN and BAKER2006; Russell, Reference RUSSELL2008; Gardner, Reference GARDNER2010). Russell (Reference RUSSELL2008, p. 217) further argued:
If this option is unlikely due to student numbers, class offerings, or limited budgets, at-risk teachers should be given as much support as possible in the form of mentoring, leaves of absence to attend workshops, or class release time to observe experienced and successful string teachers in other settings.
Much of the discussion of teacher support is found in the research on music teachers’ interests and preferences in professional development workshops. For example, band, string, choral, and general music teachers in the United States reported that new music repertoires, technology, assessment, and standards are valuable workshop topics (Bush, Reference BUSH2007), and 456 Midwestern in-service music teachers favoured workshop topics in technology, assessment, instrument/choral literature, standards, and creativity (Bowles, Reference BOWLES2003). Music teachers, however, tend to consider district-sponsored, in-service professional development workshops as ineffective for their teaching (Bush, Reference BUSH2007), which might indicate that the teachers’ interests are not effectively reflected in teacher support. Therefore, it is necessary to more carefully examine music teachers’ perceived difficulties, concerns, and interests in music classes to provide them with more practical and useful support.
The importance of teachers’ perceived problems in teacher support has led some music educators to examine in-service music teachers’ difficulties and concerns in their workplace. For example, DeLorenzo (Reference DELORENZO1992) studied the perceived problems of 507 beginning music teachers and reported that they had concerns regarding budget preparation and finding time to continue musical growth. Blair (Reference BLAIR2008) organized a mentoring group where three beginning primary general music teachers in the Midwest met and interacted with the researcher. In bimonthly meetings, the teachers actively shared their concerns, especially about classroom management and negative evaluations from administrators. Kelly (Reference KELLY2015) also investigated urban music teachers’ perceptions of challenges and issues. In this study, urban music teachers commonly mentioned that inadequate materials/classroom/budget, lack of parental involvement, lack of respect for the subject in school, and poor classroom management were obstacles they faced in their school settings.
In recent years, several studies have shown that the needs and concerns of music teachers change over their careers (Conway, Reference CONWAY2008; Bauer et al., Reference BAUER, FORSYTHE, KINNEY, Thompson and Campbell2009); that is, music teachers’ concerns might differ depending on their own stages and situations. Previous studies, however, have focused mainly on beginning music teachers, especially in the United States (DeLorenzo, Reference DELORENZO1992; Conway, Reference CONWAY2002; Blair, Reference BLAIR2008; Kelly, Reference KELLY2015). Therefore, it is necessary to listen attentively to what kinds of difficulties experienced music teachers in various cultural and education settings perceive and to think about how to help these teachers so that they can successfully perform in their own music classes. It seems that examining experienced Korean primary teachers’ perceived difficulties in their music classes is important for further improvement in administrative and workplace support in various countries.
Music education in Korean primary schools
In Korea, music was first designated as a formal school subject in 1909. During the Japanese colonial period, ‘Changga’, a popular Korean song, was mainly taught in schools, but over time, various kinds of instruments and songs were introduced in music classes (Seung et al., Reference SEUNG, MIN, YANG and CHUNG2013). Today, primary students are required to take music classes for four years, twice per week. Although music is a compulsory part of the Korean primary school curriculum, it has been considered as a less important subject than maths and science because of the focus on STEM subjects in the Korean education system (Moon, Reference MOON2009).
All music classes in schools provide general music, including western music and traditional Korean music (Yang, Reference YANG2010; Lee, Reference LEE2016), and string, band, and choir are sometimes taught as extracurricular programmes, depending on school districts’ budgets. Recently, more funding from the Korean Ministry of Education has been provided for school orchestras and music programmes (Korean Ministry of Education, 2016).
The Korean national curriculum specifies three major areas of music: expression, appreciation, and making music a way of life. In expression, there are three activities: singing, playing, and creating (Korean Ministry of Education, 2015a). The music standards related to expression are the following. Students can: (a) sing or play while understanding musical characteristics, (b) express musical characteristics with body movements, (c) change words of familiar music pieces, (d) change rhythmic patterns of familiar music pieces, (e) express in various ways using sounds around themselves, and (f) sing with appropriate posture or play with correct techniques. There are two standards for appreciation. Students can: (a) appreciate music while understanding basic elements of music, and (b) describe their own feelings while appreciating music. Finally, making music a way of life has three national standards. Students can: (a) participate in music-related events in and outside of family, school, and society, (b) discuss their feelings after participating in music activities, and (c) recognize music used in everyday personal life (Korean Ministry of Education, 2015b).
In Korea, only teachers who have a teaching certificate in music can teach music in secondary schools, but any certified teachers in primary schools can teach music; as a result, no music teacher qualification is specified in the Korean curriculum for primary schools. In general, prospective primary teachers take six to nine credits in music education courses during a teacher education programme (Seung & Chung, Reference SEUNG and CHUNG2014). Because of limited hours in music courses, lack of professional workshops for primary music teachers, and the importance of a teacher’s music performance skills, most primary teachers tend to feel they have limited expertise in music (Jung, Reference JUNG2011; Park, Reference PARK2017).
Method
I used a phenomenological approach for this study. Patton (Reference PATTON2002) explained that the various definitions of phenomenology research commonly focus on ‘exploring how human beings make sense of experience and transform experience into consciousness, both individually and as a shared meaning’ (p. 104). The phenomenon, as Patton (Reference PATTON2002) explained, may be an emotion, a relationship, a job, a programme, or a culture; in this study, the phenomenon is the shared difficulties that experienced Korean primary teachers perceived in music classes. Their experiences were gathered, analysed, and compared to identify the essence of the difficulties (Patton, Reference PATTON2002).
Participants
I used purposeful sampling (Patton, Reference PATTON2002; Creswell, Reference CRESWELL2007) to find participants in this study. Patton (Reference PATTON2002, p. 230) explained its characteristics:
The logic and power of purposeful sampling lie in selecting information-rich cases for study in depth. Information-rich cases are those from which one can learn a great deal about issues of central importance to the purpose of the inquiry, thus the term purposeful sampling.
The initial criteria for selecting participants were the following. First, the teachers had to be beyond the induction stage; that is, they needed to have more than five years of teaching experience in a primary school. Second, the teachers had to be interested enough in music that they had majored in music education in undergraduate or graduate school. Third, the teachers needed to have actively participated in professional development workshops for music sponsored by school districts. A music education professor at a national university of education introduced to me a group of teachers whom she taught in undergraduate or graduate school. Among them, five primary teachers, Jean, Juri, Darin, Ming, and Yoori (pseudonyms), volunteered to participate in the study.
Jean, who had almost 25 years of teaching experience in a primary school, wrote her master’s thesis about recorder pedagogy based on Arts Propel (http://www.pz.harvard.edu/projects/arts-propel). She was a member of the curriculum committee for primary music and an instructor at in-service primary teacher music workshops.
Juri majored in music education and had taught in a primary school for 10 years. She could play piano and guitar and used these instruments for her music classes. She had taught a choir for three years.
Darin had worked as a primary school teacher since 2005. She majored in music education in undergraduate and graduate school, and could play the piano and the recorder. She shared that she had actively participated in professional development workshops for music, including music technology and traditional Korean music education.
Ming, a pianist, reported that she had worked as a piano accompanist in church since she was young, so she naturally majored in music education at a national university of education. After she began working as a primary school teacher, Ming continued conducting a choir at her school for almost six years. Ming had almost 10 years of teaching experience.
Yoori had a special interest in instruments, and she had actively taught recorder and orchestra classes. She was also a violinist and played in the Gyeonggi Teacher Philharmonic Orchestra. Yoori mentioned that she had participated in online teacher training courses to support in-service music teachers’ professional learning. She had approximately 10 years of teaching experience.
Procedure
I, as a researcher, met with the primary teachers at a university located in Gyeonggido, Korea, and explained the nature of the meetings, which had been designed to focus on primary teachers’ experience and concerns in music classes. After the initial discussion, participants decided to meet a total of eight times and talk about their difficulties in teaching music activities, such as singing, playing, creating, and listening. Participants selected and prepared the specific discussion materials that were used during meetings, and my role was limited to being an observer. We met once or twice a month from August 2014 to January 2015, and all meetings were video-recorded for further analysis.
After each teacher meeting, participants were asked to write in their reflective journal and send it to me via email. Some examples of the journal prompts were:
(a) What was the process of today’s meeting? What did you discuss?
(b) Which conversation was the most important to you? Why?
Although I offered the prompts, I also asked the participants to write more freely about their experiences in the meetings. Each participant sent a total of eight journals, and each journal was three to five pages long.
After the teacher meetings ended, I held extended individual interviews between April and May 2015 with the five teachers. Interviewing is one of the most common methods in qualitative studies (Merriam, Reference MERRIAM1998). The purpose of individual interviews in this study was to intensively investigate data from observations and to encourage experienced primary teachers to look back on the past regarding their own music classes. All interviews were conducted in the teacher’s classrooms and audio-recorded for further analysis. I used an unstructured interview format, but I did begin the interviews with this question, ‘What was the major difficulty you or your colleagues encountered in music classes?’ Subsequent questions were chosen depending on the teachers’ perspectives and the issues we explored.
Data analysis and synthesis
To analyse the stories of experienced Korean primary teachers based on observations, journals, and interviews, I used phenomenological analysis (Bernard & Ryan, Reference BERNARD and RYAN2010). While focusing on this phenomenon – perceived difficulties in music classes – I read the collected data repeatedly and identified recurring keywords, phrases, and statements that were directly related to the phenomenon. Then, I wrote tentative definitions or explanations about the recurring themes and eliminated repeated data. Once I had delimited the data, I revised each theme’s name and identified quotes that exemplified the essence of the phenomenon.
The credibility of this qualitative study was enhanced by data collection triangulation, member reflection, and my expertise (Patton, Reference PATTON2002; Tracy, Reference TRACY2010). The combinations of observations, journals, and interviews allowed for different points of views to cross-check the consistency of the findings. The participants reviewed the data analysis and shared their concerns, questions, and feedback. In addition, as a teacher educator, I have teaching experience with pre- and in-service primary teachers and, therefore, I had adequate background knowledge and information about the phenomenon.
Findings and discussion
Teachers’ musical abilities
First of all, the primary teachers’ musical abilities are important issues for them; all of the teachers in the study recognized their own musical abilities as being critical elements that affected the quality of their music classes. One example occurred while the teachers were discussing singing classes for primary students. The teachers commonly revealed that they had difficulty in singing, especially when they introduced new songs to their students:
Darin: When I taught ‘Aenongdaenong’, it was really difficult to sing the song … When I was a beginning teacher, I hated singing, so I just played music and asked students to sing along with it.
Jean: I had a colleague who taught a school choir and won several prizes from a regional music festival. I was curious how she taught the choir, so I observed her classes several times. Then, I realized that she sang a lot in her music classes … I don’t have this ability … I think that most primary teachers do not have singing skills (laugh).
Juri: The pitch of Korean music transcribed in a staff notation is too high to sing, so I hardly sang Korean music.
In this case, the teachers tended to focus on their lack of singing skills rather than on teaching strategies. Some of them hardly sang in their music classes, and Jean showed her concern in her journal that the lack of teacher modelling might affect the students’ singing abilities: ‘I think that the lack of teacher singing would make it difficult for students to learn and sing new songs … For me, the most difficult part of music classes is singing.’
The teachers also talked about a sense of inadequacy with music creation activities, which made them feel afraid of teaching music composition and improvisation:
Darin: I … hardly prepare music composition and improvisation activities for students …
Ming: I understand. These activities are difficult, even for me.
Yoori: I personally have a stereotype. I thought music creation activities were equal to music composition … Because I am not good at music composition, I only focused on singing, playing, and listening.
During a personal interview, Darin said that even after she earned her master’s degree in music education, she still had concerns about music composition and improvisation activities:
Frankly speaking, I have not seriously prepared music composition activities, and even after I got my master’s degree, my worries were not dissolved … I think I am not a qualified teacher in music, especially regarding music creation activities.
All five participants commonly mentioned that they had concerns about their lack of musical abilities; that is, experienced primary teachers in Korea focused more on their musicianship and its impact on students in music classes. This finding is inconsistent with Bowles (Reference BOWLES2003) and Bush (Reference BUSH2007), who found that in-service music teachers in the United States were predominantly interested in topics and issues related to pedagogical knowledge, including assessment, technology, and Orff approach. One explanation for this finding may be the lack of performance opportunities during teacher training programmes in undergraduate and graduate schools in Korea. Conway (Reference CONWAY2002) found that applied lessons and group ensembles were a part of the most valuable experiences in teacher preparation, because these activities helped pre-service music teachers achieve musical growth. Prospective primary teachers in Korea, however, take only six to nine credits in music, which are solely focused on education areas, so they hardly have an opportunity to develop their musicianship through performance classes or music ensembles. Also, a majority of music-related professional development workshops for primary teachers in Korea focus on music pedagogical knowledge (Park, Reference PARK2017). As a result, there is almost no place where primary teachers could express their creative musical ideas and develop musical skills through performing, composing, listening, and conducting.
Evidence from this study clearly indicates that experienced teachers’ musical skills and abilities are important elements for them to achieve professional advancement. Furthermore, performance opportunities would give in-service music teachers a chance to think about why and how they teach music (Conway et al., Reference CONWAY, EROS and STANLEY2009). Therefore, musicianship workshops should be continuously provided for in-service music teachers’ professional development so that they could improve their musical abilities and plan and implement more effective music classes for students.
Traditional Korean music
It should be noted that experienced teachers frequently mentioned that they had difficulty in teaching traditional Korean music. As teacher meetings progressed, participant statements regarding traditional Korean music were more prevalent during their conversations. For example, they commonly pointed out the difficulty in teaching a danso:
Jean: What was the most difficult part when you taught an instrument?
Darin: For me, it is a danso … It is impossible to check individual embouchure … I tried to use several strategies to help students make sounds, but there are several students who cannot make sounds at all.
Juri: It is critical to make sounds for a danso … Last year, I checked individual embouchure and posture. It took a lot of time.
Ming: I don’t know whether it is okay to use a danso reed to help students focus on fingering.
Darin: Do we have a danso reed? Can we use it?
Ming: I think so. With a reed, students can focus on their fingering. They don’t have to pay attention to blowing and fingering at the same time.
Students in Korea are required to learn to play a danso, which is a traditional Korean bamboo instrument. The embouchure hole of a danso is larger than that of a recorder, so many students have difficulty learning to play this instrument. Participants seemed to understand the importance of traditional Korean music, so they were proactive in identifying teaching strategies to help their students easily make danso sounds. However, they had concerns throughout the discussion regarding the usefulness and validity of their teaching strategies and methods for traditional Korean instruments.
Additionally, the difficulty level of traditional Korean music presented in the music curriculum and textbooks seemed to worsen the situation. For example, Jean said in her interview:
Most primary teachers complain that the traditional Korean music in music textbooks has become more difficult … How can I teach these kinds of music that I find too hard?
During the meeting, the teachers reflected on how this difficulty level of traditional music affected their teaching practices in music classes:
Yoori: How about traditional Korean music listening? I hardly did it for students.
Ming: It is very difficult …
Juri: There is Jongmyo jeryeak in music textbooks. Jongmyo jereak was composed for a rite for worshipping the late kings and queens of the Josen Dynasty, so it is necessary to teach the definition and types of Jongmyo jerye. Also, students need to learn different kinds of traditional Korean instruments, such as haegum and daegum.
Ming: But that’s too difficult for students. Students tend to consider traditional Korean music boring and difficult.
It is important to note that the teachers felt teaching traditional Korean music more difficult than teaching Western music. This concern may reflect the growing importance of traditional music in the national curriculum in Korea (Korean Ministry of Education, 2015b). Recently, the importance of keeping Korea’s national identity and the development of cultural characteristics among young people in a globalized society have grown in Korea (Yang, Reference YANG2010). As a result, the contents of traditional Korean music are deserving greater importance, and various activities, including listening to different periods of traditional Korean music and playing traditional instruments, have been introduced in primary music classes (Lee, Reference LEE2016). This situation requires that primary teachers have a higher level of knowledge about traditional Korean music, so even expert teachers feel the difficulty in dealing with the broad contents of traditional Korean music. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a variety of educational materials and resources on traditional music for primary teachers in Korea.
Perhaps it is not surprising that teacher support should be distinguished depending not only on teaching area (Bush, Reference BUSH2007) and career stage (DeLorenzo, Reference DELORENZO1992; Steffy et al., Reference STEFFY, WOLFE, PASCH, ENZ, Steffy, Wolfe, Pasch and Enz2000; Blair, Reference BLAIR2008) but also on social, cultural, and educational settings. Local and global social and cultural issues in education might cause various difficulties and problems that music teachers need to deal with. Also, music teachers in one culture might have difficulties that differ from those in other educational environments, and teacher support that worked in one cultural context may not work as well in another. Therefore, more studies are needed on how teacher support can be successfully transferred from one cultural context to another.
Students’ motivation for music learning
In teaching the four major music areas – singing, playing, listening, and creating – all the teachers were continuously looking out for ways to get students interested in music classes. The conversation below provides a glimpse into their concerns about students’ motivation:
Jean: What do you usually do for singing classes?
Yoori: Singing class is difficult for me … I do not know what I need to do for 40 minutes. I ask students to sing several times, but students seem to feel bored when they just sing for 40 minutes … How can I make singing classes interesting? I always think about it.
Jean: I have the same worries.
A similar concern was also found in the conversation when teachers talked about music listening:
Yoori: When I do music appreciation class, I usually use the same piece of music … When I play the same music several times, students easily get bored.
Ming: Do you usually play a whole piece, from beginning to the end?
Jean: I usually do. The pieces of music shown in textbooks are not too long.
Ming: In fact, students easily get lost when they just listen to music without any activity, although classical and Korean traditional music is about two minutes long.
Jean: Right.
The finding that experienced teachers are concerned about their teaching confidence has been addressed in previous literature (Steffy et al., Reference STEFFY, WOLFE, PASCH, ENZ, Steffy, Wolfe, Pasch and Enz2000; Eros, Reference EROS2009). The primary teachers in this study were beyond the survival stage, so they focused on motivating students, instead of classroom management that beginning music teachers are most concerned about (Blair, Reference BLAIR2008; Kelly, Reference KELLY2015). Especially, music in Korean primary schools is considered a less important academic subject than maths and science by both parents and students (Moon, Reference MOON2009). As a result, respondents of this study seemed to be eager to motivate and encourage students to actively participate in music classes.
Interestingly, these data indicated that participants thought about creative teaching strategies to attract students. In other words, experienced teachers consider intrinsic motivation as an important element for successful music classes, instead of external rewards or negative punishments. Intrinsic motivation is closely related to creativity, self-regulated behaviour, and mastery–goal orientation (West, Reference WEST2013), and the teachers seemed to understand the importance of intrinsic motivation for effective music classes. However, during their conversations in this study, specific methods and strategies to encourage students to be intrinsically motivated were not easily observed. This suggests that support for music teachers towards increasing intrinsic motivation among students may be necessary. Maehr et al. (Reference MAEHR, PINTRICH, LINNENBRINK, Colwell and Richardson2002, p. 365) suggested several methods to increase intrinsic motivation:
First, the amount of variety and diversity in tasks can help maintain student interest … Furthermore, allowing students to choose among a variety of tasks also provides more opportunities for students’ needs for autonomy to be met, and thus enhances intrinsic motivation … If the teacher can help the students see the personal relevance and the meaningfulness of the content for their own learning, this can then facilitate an adoption of a task-goal orientation as well as enhance personal value.
The results of this study suggest that researchers need to study a variety of learning tasks to specialize in music teaching, to promote students’ autonomy in music class, and to make music relevant to students’ lives.
Conclusions and recommendations
Teacher support for retaining experienced teachers is necessary, and thus, researchers are beginning to consider music teachers’ interests and concerns in devising teacher support. Bush (Reference BUSH2007, p. 11) argued:
Professional development has the potential to help teachers deal with change and improve their skills. However, research in PD has lagged behind many other topics in music education. We know that delivery needs to be high quality and the focus needs to be on matters that are important to teachers.
This study attempted to expand the scope of research about music teachers’ needs by investigating the difficulties that experienced Korean primary teachers perceived in their music classes.
The teachers commonly mentioned that they had concerns about their own musical abilities, which suggests that formal and informal performance opportunities would allow experienced music teachers to not only develop their musicianship but also become more effective in their teaching (Conway et al., Reference CONWAY, EROS and STANLEY2009). It is important to consider, however, that many countries are offering various teacher training programmes, so this finding may be limited to experienced teachers who perceive a lack of performance opportunities in teacher training programmes.
Many researchers acknowledge that teacher support should differ depending on teaching area (Bush, Reference BUSH2007) and career stage (DeLorenzo, Reference DELORENZO1992; Steffy et al., Reference STEFFY, WOLFE, PASCH, ENZ, Steffy, Wolfe, Pasch and Enz2000; Blair, Reference BLAIR2008), and the findings of this study raised a new question about teacher support based on cultural and education settings. The Korean primary teachers discussed difficulties in teaching traditional Korean music, especially at a time when the importance of Korean culture is growing. This finding suggests the potential benefits of investigating the educational characteristics of schools, districts, cities, and countries and providing different teacher supports according to these circumstances.
As discussed in literature, experienced teachers are interested in their confidence on building students’ motivation rather than focusing on their own survival (Steffy et al., Reference STEFFY, WOLFE, PASCH, ENZ, Steffy, Wolfe, Pasch and Enz2000; Eros, Reference EROS2009). The teachers in this study had several years of teaching experience; however, they still focused on concerns about getting students interested in music classes. Perhaps it may be difficult for teachers to be responsive to students’ changing needs and interests. An implication for future research is that teacher support for experienced music teachers should consider students’ intrinsic motivation in music classes (West, Reference WEST2013). There is scope to consider the ways of investigating learning tasks focusing on teaching music, the interrelationship between teacher autonomy and student autonomy, and of making music relevant to students’ daily lives.
