Message from the Director

I feel compelled to state that a great many successes have been brought about in the lives of students across the United States as a result of their participation in music education. These can include success in musical performance, yes, but also success in policy, advocacy, curriculum, community building, social-emotional learning, and more. Music education in America has established itself as a net positive for the students who participate in programs as well as for those students’ families and communities. Who can imagine an elementary school without a musical production or a high school football game without the marching band? Over time, music has become an integral part of P-12 schools across the nation.

That said, there remain many aspects of music education that could be improved. This isn’t stated to disparage the good work being done on a daily basis; rather, it is an observation based on sound, empirical research in the field that, through no fault of any one individual organization, has struggled to permeate the way music, and indeed, music teachers, are taught. I’ve had many conversations with practicing teachers about their methods and classroom procedures, often highly effective ones. When I ask where they learned about those tricks (there are few original ideas in teaching…I once had a mentor that said that good teaching was

good stealing!), these teachers often reply with something along the lines of “Well, this was how we did things when I was growing up, and it worked for me!” True enough, but while this line of thinking can be ruminative for the individual teacher and their program, but it can create barriers to systemic change in the overall profession.

Here at Louisiana State University, and indeed in many fine colleges and universities around the world, our undergraduate program in music education is dedicated to the training and preparation of new music teachers. We are certainly proud of our graduates, but they frequently come from large, successful, suburban music programs that do things in a “status-quo” way, recreating teaching styles and ensemble structures that have held steady for generations. Equally often, our students graduate and leave us to go back into the same systems they came from, whether that is middle school orchestra or high school choir or a room full of 20 beginning trumpet players, often utilizing some of what they learned from us at LSU and a whole lot of practical know-how they picked up in student teaching along with a healthy dose of making things up on the fly!

While this approach works for a select few, it’s worth pointing out that it doesn’t work for most young music teachers. The most recent research suggests that three out of every five new music teachers don’t make it past the third year of teaching. As teacher trainers, that’s a poor return on our investment. It’s important to note that the reasons these teachers leave have nothing to do with their pedagogical training, their musical abilities, or their desire to do right by their students. It’s often because they don’t feel like they can control their classes and that “this isn’t like when I was growing up.” It seems to come down to mismatched expectations and a struggle to adapt and overcome. These data have prompted our thinking and helped guide the mission of our lab, and we believe that our research can help improve both classroom instruction and teacher retention.

The title of our lab, the Translational Research in Music Group, is a very deliberate choice. The word translational implies that the research we conduct is grounded questions aimed towards real world applications of those findings for P-12 music teachers. It also means that while we publish our research in academic journals such as the Journal of Research in Music Education or Bulletin of the Council of Research in Music Education, as is expected of faculty members in music education at a large institute such as ours, we also disseminate our findings in other ways. This can include presenting our research findings in an approachable way for P-12 music teachers at conferences like the Louisiana Music Educators Association or the American String Teachers Association. It also means translating our research findings into articles read by practicing music teachers in publications like the Music Educators Journal, the Choral Journal, The Instrumentalist, or American String Teacher. We see it as our responsibility to make our findings both available and applicable to our community.

The other word in our lab title worth focusing on is the word music. Note that we did not say music education. That term has become loaded both within and beyond our field, so we chose not to limit ourselves to just the field of music education. After all, research does not happen in a vacuum. Neither does life. To limit ourselves to only research within the field of music

education deprives us of the rich corpus of data available to us in related fields such as cognitive and educational psychology, general education, sociology, history, ethnography, neuroscience, and more. Researchers in these fields, many of whom have musical backgrounds themselves, are looking into questions surrounding music teaching, cognition, and perception using the tools and methods of their disciplines. Their findings are equally important to our own and help contextualize music teaching and learning in a broader context. The P-12 teaching community deserves access to that information in addition to our own.

Ultimately, the goal of our lab is to create feedback loops between creators, subjects, and consumers of research. While this may seem lofty, it isn’t impossible. Yes, many teachers are set in their ways, but I believe that many more are not. Given the attendance I see at state music education conferences around the country, from small states like ours to large states like Texas or Florida, I see music teachers who are hungry for new knowledge and ways to reach their students and others in their schools. It is our job in the Translational Research in Music Group to see that our work gets translated to the eyes and hearts and minds of teachers in our community and around the country.

Music education research has evolved considerably since its inception in the 1950s. Researchers in our field utilize a variety of methodological approaches, including experimental, survey, qualitative, philosophical, historical, and more to answer questions both large and small about how and why we teach music and pass along our traditions to the next generation. We utilize many of these methods in the TRMG, and along with our partners, welcome you our lab and hope that you find our research findings both insightful and applicable to your own practice. Should you wish to contact us regarding a piece of our scholarship, to create a new community partnership, or just to say hello and build new professional connections, we would love to hear from you. Research is a process of discovery, revelation, and creation, and we’re glad you’ve chosen to come alongside us in the process towards improving the field of music teaching and learning.

David J. Saccardi, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Music Education
Director of the Translational Research in Music Group
Coordinator of Graduate Studies in Music Education
dsaccardi@lsu.edu