ESTA MA Music – Voice
About the course
The vocal 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 (Voice) 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
Janet Munro MA (Music Education) BA (Music Education) DRSAM (Singing Teacher) Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, is a soprano and singing teacher who was educated at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now RCS), Royal Academy of Music , Middlesex University and the Institute of Education.
After many years as a professional singer, Janet’s focus is now on Music education, teaching singers of all ages and in a number of different genres as well as mentoring singing and instrumental teachers. Janet is a module and component leader at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance on the post-graduate course The Teaching Musician and under-graduate and post-graduate courses in instrumental and vocal teaching.
In addition Janet gives individual singing lessons to Musical theatre students on the under-graduate BAMT and at Junior Trinity. Students have gained places at all the UK conservatoire as well as wining major prizes and scholarships. She is also a teaching mentor for the Association of Teachers of Singing on their Pathways Programme and has worked as a mentor for the CTABRSM. Janet has a number of research interests including all aspects of vocal pedagogy. As part of the Musical Impact Project she did a research study Investigating awareness and incidence of acid reflux among UK conservatoire student singers with Dr Patricia Holmes and presented a paper on it at the International Symposium on Performance Science in Reykjavik in 2017. She also presented a workshop Adapting Repertoire for Male Students during Voice Change at the Pan-European Voice Conference in Copenhagen in 2019.