ESTA MA Music – Woodwind
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 (Woodwind) 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
Heads of Department – Woodwind
PAUL HARRIS
Winner of The August Manns Prize
Paul has established an international reputation as a musician and educationalist. As a pupil of John Davies at the Royal Academy of Music (where he now teaches), he won the August Manns Prize for outstanding performance in clarinet playing.
He regularly presents workshops, seminars, recitals and masterclasses in the UK, the USA, Denmark, the Far East, Australia and New Zealand. Among his performances include the Mozart, Finzi, Spohr, and Weber concertos; many recitals and performances of various chambers works including most of the clarinet quintets, the Kegellstadt innumerable times with violist Robert Secret, the two Krommer Double Concertos with Jean Cockburn, and he regularly plays in a woodwind, two clarinets and piano ensemble.
He has given first performances of various Malcolm Arnold works including the re-discovered Wind Quintet Op.2 and he has contributed to a CD recording of works by lesser-known British composers. The clarinet prodigy Julian Bliss was a pupil. He has been a judge for the BBC Young Musician of the Year and the Classic FM’s teacher of the year and he works regularly with NYWO and NCCO as their woodwind tutor.
He is presently writing a new book on clarinet playing. His books on education (which include two clarinet tutors, a variety of works from short solo pieces to concertos and a ballet, and other books that deal primarily with stimulating and helping young players to develop their musical skills) have won awards.
Paul’s innovative teaching methods and (over six hundred) books have found support all over the world and combine thoroughness, imagination and practicality, the defining qualities of his outstandingly successful work.
