by Luke Wallace
Luke Wallace is a music specialist with 10 years experience teaching music in primary classrooms and conducting choirs and ensembles. As a NMTMP mentor he worked with teachers at the Arncliffe West Infants school in Sydney, where most teachers participated in music mentoring over six years in a whole-school-mentoring approach. This approach resulted in tremendous growth in music activities in the classrooms and new after-school music programs. Luke reports that new teachers arriving at the school could see the power of music all around them and wanted to acquire the necessary skills to deliver music in their classrooms. In a surprising twist for Luke, mentoring has changed his teaching also.
In Luke’s opinion, an effective mentor is someone who is inspiring in the way they teach music but is also “humble enough to take the backseat and allow the person that they’re working with to step into the spotlight”. Mentors need to be good listeners and able to build relationships with teachers they are mentoring. While mentees may lack musical training, they are typically experienced classroom educators, passionate, hard-working and have in-depth understanding of their students.
Luke believes in music mentoring by example, something he was taught by the founder of the NMTMP, the late Richard Gill AO. Luke describes his approach, “The activities start with me doing most of the teaching and everybody else observing. And then slowly move towards the other teachers doing more of the teaching and me doing more of the observing. And then there’s a two-way feedback process”. One of Luke’s feedback strategies is to allow the mentee to begin the feedback process by assessing their own teaching. Most people tend to focus on negative aspects of their performance, but Luke believes it is important to start with positive feedback and then guide the mentees towards discovering more effective ways of teaching with gentle suggestions.
Luke helped his mentees to overcome their fear of singing in front of students and of music teaching, in particular music notation. Explaining basic notational structures and providing relevant supporting materials helped build teachers’ confidence. To this day, Luke has a student artwork from a mentee’s class where the music notation in the speech bubble makes sense rhythmically. Luke reports, “That was a lovely moment, in that the student had successfully learned written notation and used it outside of the music classroom, but also the teacher was so excited by that and wanted to share that with me”.
Reflecting on the personal benefits for him, Luke notes that music mentoring has had an impact on his own music teaching. He describes how having to reflect on his own practice, being observed by his mentees, working with different students in a different school, and broadening his understanding of student learning has enhanced his own teaching practice. One of his challenges was to try and summarise a large amount of music curriculum content but not over-complicate his approach.
Bringing the joy of music to children from non-English speaking backgrounds has been very rewarding for Luke. Having a common language in singing songs and playing musical games generated fun and joy and led to increased student participation, creativity, and motivation in other curriculum areas such as literacy and numeracy. Music mentoring has been very beneficial for the mentor, mentees and children. “It’s been a great program to be involved with, and I hope to be a part of it for a long time to come”, says Luke.
