Assessment and Critical Feedback in the Master-Apprentice Relationship: Rethinking Approaches to the Learning of a Music Instrument

Abstract

In higher music education institutions around the world, one-to-one teaching dominates the way in which students learn a music instrument. With the expert performer-teacher as centre of the learning process or master, students as apprentices are typically subjected to intensive weekly direction and feedback, frequently culminating in performance exams assessed by expert musicians. This form of learning features a mode of assessment which is predominantly one way, that is, the transmission of expectations and value judgments from master to apprentice, even if criteria are applied and aligned to learning outcomes during performance exams. This chapter examines the one-to-one lesson as a vehicle for enabling students to develop critical assessment and feedback skills, after which it seeks to theorise the need to reconsider the knowledge transfer, assessment and critical feedback systems of the one-to-one lesson. It also proposes a new conceptual model for the learning of a music instrument at the higher education level.