The experience you bring to teaching early childhood music is unique to you. Perhaps you have taught music to older children, or dabbled in early childhood music. Perhaps you have experience with other methodologies or a combination of methodologies. Perhaps you have taught only privately, or only choral or instrumental music. There are both advantages and disadvantages to coming from somewhere else. The greatest advantage may be your experience in whatever approaches or methodologies you have previously embraced. The greatest disadvantage may be your experience in whatever approaches or methodologies you have previously embraced! Trust that your experience, or lack thereof, gives you a perspective that is invaluable.

Teaching music offers a teacher a lifelong process of learning. Teaching little children, with their innocent little musical minds, offers the greatest opportunity for uncovering, witnessing, and understanding the process of music learning in its greatest purity. Getting to the core of the process of music learning will be different from whatever you have previously experienced. It will not happen overnight. Nor will it happen by resisting change, by teaching from a smorgasbord of methodologies, or by falling back on what is comfortable or habitual. It requires continued willingness to venture into the classroom and try new things, developing a level of expertise with all that is new so that you can witness the ongoing process of music learning in early childhood in your own children.

The experience you bring to teaching early childhood music will inform your teaching, offering a contrast to your new explorations in the classroom, a platform from which to view the unfolding of the principles and practices you have been studying, as they come alive in your own classroom. The insights you gain from wherever you have come will be insights you may not have gotten had you had different or greater experience coming into this coursework.

We live in a time of sound bites. It would be convenient to learn about the process of music learning via Twitter, or to conclude while taking this coursework that this thought is worth a try but this one isn’t, or this technique is worth adding to your bag of tricks without the rest. Becoming a master teacher takes time, study, and a willingness to explore and implement new ideas in the classroom, without concluding after a short time that whatever we have done in the past is good enough. Children deserve our growing edge, and they have as much to teach us as we have to teach them. We just have to be willing to suspend our old beliefs and practices long enough so that we can fully implement and experience what we have been studying, enough to witness it come alive in children, and then integrate who we have been with who we have become.