Effective feedback: There’s a lot we can learn from instrumental music teachers

Martin Leigh, Director of Music, King Edward's School, Birmingham Dylan Wiliam thinks that ‘there’s a lot we can learn from music teachers’. He describes how instrumental music teachers expect their students to become ‘self-regulating learners’ and teach them how to ‘practise productively’ at home between lessons (cited in Hendrick and Macpherson, 2017, p. 39). The implicit model of instruction, feedback and assessment here is both instructive in itself and applicable in every subject area. That teachers want our students to succeed is axiomatic; we are idealists and altruists, and little pleases us more than that precious moment when a student knows more than us, can jump higher and think deeper than us, when they thrive without us. We also aspire for our students to learn self-regulation and independence (Zimmerman, 1989). It’s an irony, then, that we need to teach them explicitly how to gain autonomy from us; but instrumental teachers can help us to learn how (Ki