Defining "good" music teaching: Four student teachers' beliefs and practices

In this study, I used qualitative data, gathered primarily through participant-observation and interviews, to explore the definitions of "good" teaching held by four student teachers in instrumental music. Their understanding appeared to be constructed individually from a variety of experiences with their parents, peers, teachers, cooperating teachers, and students-experiences that they explicitly and tacitly transformed into principles of "good" teaching. Each student teacher engaged in ongoing refinement of a personal definition of "good" music teaching, consistently filtering potential elements of that model through an interpretive lens-the desire, as the student teachers said, to "be themselves" in the classroom. Observation of their instructional practices revealed that their definitions of "good" teaching were influenced by the university music education courses but that, because of the strength of prior beliefs, each one learned a different version of what was taught. The study's findings raise further questions about defining effective music teaching and suggest the usefulness of qualitative methods for illuminating both the issues involved and the processes by which individual music teachers develop their own "good" teaching practices.