ESTA MA Music – Percussion
About the course
The instrumental teaching profession demands constant reflection and improvement from its practitioners. This course will help you to validate your personal development and formalise your academic qualification to teach.
Our programme of study is designed to enable you as an instrumental or vocal teacher to progress from the stage you are in your career and to take a fresh look at the way you approach your teaching.
Your studies will be online, engaging with tasks including webinars, meetings with your mentor, taking part in discussion groups, reading, making videos. You will reflect on and develop your teaching focusing on the context in which you work. This will help you to question things you may have taken for granted, explore work with and without notation and develop a holistic approach to your teaching.
You will be assigned a mentor who shares your specialism (e.g. brass, bowed strings, piano, voice, woodwind, percussion, plucked strings) and your mentor’s job is to guide you through the course, lead study sessions and feedback on your work and progress.
Being a student on this course is all about developing as a reflective practitioner, someone who is willing to stand back and look at their work and contemplate changing aspects if both you and your students will benefit. Your course leader will provide an overview of the whole course, lead study sessions, and also make assessments of all students’ work to ensure fairness.
To gain the maximum benefit for your investment in this programme of study you should plan your diary carefully to make sure you have all the deadlines for completion and submission of work highlighted – and then please take notice of them.
This programme is delivered by ESTA and validated by the University of Chichester.


Who is it for ?
Moving on from the ESTA PG Cert in Teaching, the ESTA MA (Percussion) Practical Teaching provides students with the opportunity to reflect more deeply and demonstrate the application of learned theory in their own personal teaching setting.
The instrumental teaching profession demands constant reflection and improvement from its practitioners. This course will help you to validate your personal development and formalise your academic qualification to teach.
Participants will:
Develop practical skills in teaching musical and technical material, fostering an engaging and student-appropriate approach to music learning and performance
Foster an investigative and inquisitive approach to teaching by developing skills in both research and reflection
Actively develop communication skills to enable effective teaching
Develop skills in curriculum planning that are highly relevant in the profession.
Who teaches the course
A Musician, Educator, Author, Composer, Ethnomusicologist and Teacher Trainer. He has over thirty-five years’ experience as a professional Musician and Educationalist.
As a Drummer and Percussionist Andy has played with some of the leading Recording Artists and Orchestras in the world for Film, Television, and Recording Sessions as well as many West End Shows. As an Ethnomusicologist, Andy has travelled widely around the world especially in Africa, South America, South East Asia and India playing and learning about music of other cultures and regularly lectures on the Music of Diverse Cultures.
Andy Gleadhill is internationally acknowledged as a leading authority on teaching World Music. Andy has had many papers and articles published on World Music and Music Education topics and his books have been published on African Drumming, African Drumming Book Two, Indonesian Gamelan, Brazilian Samba, the Music of India, Caribbean Steel Pans, Composing with World Music, Classroom Percussion and Percussion Buddies. He wrote the chapter on Music for the recently published academic book “Popular Culture, Pedagogy and Teacher Education in Education” (Routledge 2014). Andy has worked at every level of music education from Early Years settings to Post Graduate teaching at Conservatoires and Universities around the world. For over ten years he has been, and remains, a visiting lecturer in Ethnomusicology at Bath Spa University where he teaches on the specialist secondary music PGCE course.
Andy was for many years the head of Bristol Arts and Music Service and the director of the Bristol Centre for Music and the Arts which he built into a leading music support service and where he pioneered the introduction of world music styles for class instrumental teaching, setting new standards in accessibility and inclusiveness. He went on to establish and become the first head of the Music Education Hub “Bristol Plays Music”. Andy has also served on the Music Hub Advisory Group for Arts Council England. He is a member of the Royal Society of Musicians and serves on the Executive Committee of the British Musicians’ Union. Andy has recently delivered workshops and lectures to the annual conferences of the Music Masters and Mistresses Association, the National Association of Music Educators, the Federation of Music Services, Music Mark, Music Learning Live, the Schools Music Association (ISM), the International conference on Innovation and Creativity in the Hands of the Young (Iceland), the International Conference on Arts and Humanities (Hawaii, USA), the Second International Conference on Popular Culture in Education (Hong Kong), the Schools Music Association (Incorporated Society of Musicians, U.K.), the Scottish Association of Music Educators (SAME) and Music Learning Live Asia (Singapore). Andy also works as a consultant to the Ministry of Education in Singapore, the Government of Malaysia and the Ministry of Defence Service Children’s Education (UK). He is active as a composer having had his music recorded and published as well as broadcast by the BBC. Andy has also worked as an examiner for the Guildhall school of Music and Drama and Trinity College London, has co-authored the Trinity/Guildhall Drum Kit examination syllabus and has been retained as a consultant to the ABRSM. He is currently a consultant to RSL Awards (Rockschool).
Andy now balances his work as a professional musician and Education consultant with delivering World Music Workshops, Training and Professional Development to Schools, Colleges, Universities and both music and generalist teachers around the world through his unique intensive training and bespoke mentoring schemes.
Course content by unit
Unit 1: Teaching percussion instrument technique to children and young people learning percussion instruments
Posture/Playing positions
Grip
Independence
Balance between hands
Encouraging the tone from percussion instruments
Mallet technique
Rudiments
Warm up exercises
Orchestral Percussion
Tuned Percussion
Timpani
Drum Kit
World Percussion
Studio technique
Working as a section member/Playing as part of an ensemble
Care and maintenance of instruments
Unit 2: How children and young people learn to play percussion instruments
How learners learn
Simultaneous Learning
Learning spiral
My learners now
Understanding, assimilating and consolidating.
Skills, knowledge and understanding
Learning music musically
Developing aural awareness/perception and acuity
Pupil/teacher relationships
Learning scales and studies
Starting a lesson