Case study on teacher teams in whole class ensembles

The study aims to help understand how general music teachers and instrumental instructors collaborate in whole class ensemble settings in Austrian secondary schools. These whole class ensemble settings are commonly known as band, choir, or string classes. There have been some studies in Germany, where researchers investigated aspects of collaboration and co-teaching as part of broader inquiries, but there has not yet been similar research conducted in Austrian contexts. To add to the originality of the design, the research will include a one year long professional development program for the participating educators. The study will focus on the participants individual views and perceptions of working together in a team during planning of lessons as well as actual classroom action. The objective is to find out, if and how these perceptions and views change over the course of the school year, and whether that subsequently leads to changes in team-work generally, or teacher actions during the whole class ensemble lessons more specifically. That might help to identify potentially effective factors of the professional development program, which might be transferable to other contexts in the future. Participants will consist of four teams, each including a general music teacher and an instrumental/voice instructor, who team-teach whole ensemble classes and take part in the 60-hour training together. The professional development program will be lead by two external facilitators, and the content of the program will be developed jointly by the facilitators and the researcher. The training days will include important topics with regard to collaboration, lesson planning and evaluation; but there will also be ample room for participants to talk about their own classroom settings, their needs and wishes as they surface. The methods used for the investigation will be mostly qualitative, including interviews with each participant, focus groups , audio recorded planning meetings and video recorded classroom lessons before, during and after the professional development program. All participants, including the students in the whole class ensemble classes, will fill out a short questionnaire at different timepoints in the schoolyear, and a few additional student interviews will be conducted to find out if they perceive changes in the classroom actions and co-teaching over the course of the schoolyear. The interviews and recorded video/audio material will be transcribed and analyzed using software and analyses will follow the guidelines of Grounded Theory Methodology. As one outcome, the study will allow to condense the views and perceptions of the individual educators into in-depth case descriptions. The research will add to knowledge about the impact of professional development programs for in-service teachers in music education, and thereby help to develop future in-service as well as pre-service teacher training.