Bernie Heard

When music is at the heart of a classroom that does provide opportunities for young people to find their way to really excel in the classroom. Hi, my name's Bernie Heard, I am the manager of the National Music Teacher Mentoring Program. The program was founded by Australian conductor and educator, Richard Gill. It was created to develop confidence and competence for classroom teachers to embed music education and creativity in their classrooms.

Karen Morrow

The program is important because it shares Richard Gill's philosophy that all children should have access to musical programs. And for me, music is more than just music, for me, music sets kids up for successful learning across the other KLAs. I really want classroom teachers to understand that they need no background experience in music because there's this block in primary teaching where people say, 'Oh, I can't teach music, I've got no formal music training and I haven't a clue what I'm doing and I need to know what I'm doing in order to teach my children.' Well, there are so many rich resources, especially given through the National Music Teacher's Mentoring Program, and with a willingness to learn and a little bit of direction, there's only a few things, only a few basic concepts to really teach in primary school and they're repetitive and it's a matter of understanding what pitch is and then looking for songs and looking for material to reinforce those different concepts.

Michelle Everson

My name's Michelle Everson, I work at Gorokan Public School, and I'm teaching a beautiful 1/2 composite class this year. I was very lucky to have Karen as my mentor, she's so enthusiastic and Karen never made me feel that I wasn't up to scratch, that I didn't know what I was doing, and even when she would jump in to help me out, that's what it felt like, it felt like I was being helped and supported. She's just been a wonderful person to work with. The things that you learn you can incorporate into your daily routine. Music teaching is not in isolation, you can incorporate it in what you're doing in your various lessons during the day. I am definitely a lot more confident now than I was at the start of the program. I feel that I know where to go to ask for help, and I feel that I can use our music teacher as a great resource.

Jason Clenton

The program's been really important at our school because, like any school, a quality music instruction is quite a limited resource. So, to actually have a mentor in the school who will come and work with your teachers and with your students, it actually builds the capacity in everyone. Through great teachers, we can actually give children the opportunity to create with music and to perform with music. So, having quality teaching in your school around a music program is a real asset to any school.

Jacqueline Lockyer

The National Music Teacher Mentoring Program has been important at Yandelora School. We value the opportunity for our teachers to access really high-quality mentoring and to build their confidence, to teach music across the school, in specific music lessons and in other KLAs where we embed music activities and practices into our teaching and learning. For a lot of our children who are non-verbal, a lot of our children with high anxieties, autism, we find that music really helps them be calm and helps them to regulate.

Joanne Archer

It's been really great to have an experienced mentor who has experience and knowledge in music curriculum and how we can work to adjust that to meet the learning needs and styles of all the students here. I've had so many questions that I thought were outside the box, but my mentor has worked with me to be able to address those questions. To get confidence in music has been one thing, to help me know I'm on the right path, keep going, but yeah, just to have someone who's passionate about music, instil that in me, and to keep going on that journey has been wonderful. It has helped me grow in confidence as a teacher and the offshoot of that is, it is helping our students with their learning.

Bernie Heard

The goal of our program is to ensure that every young person in Australia has access to high quality music education throughout their schooling, and this is a really important part of that process and a real opportunity for our mentors to make an active contribution to that.

Michelle Everson

I just think it's a wonderful program and I think that anyone who has the opportunity to do it should jump right in and have a go.