Teaching for Effective Learning in Music

Learning is a natural process for human beings (Newell, 1990). We are preprogrammed to learn. In our everyday lives, during our interactions with others and with the environment, we are constantly engaged in learning. This may be deliberate and intentional or incidental and without conscious awareness. All forms of learning share one common element - they involve change in the individual learner. This change is sometimes observable in behaviour but not always. Typically, we think of learning as the deliberate acquisition of skills or knowledge but learning occurs in relation to emotions, attitudes and beliefs, including those about ourselves. Whether what we have learned is retained in the long term depends on the extent of our ongoing engagement with it and how important it is to us. Indeed, whether we attend to particular stimuli in the environment at all depends on the brain‟s assessment of the extent to which they might be important to us. Central to the unconscious selection of what to attend to and what to learn is the self, which itself is learned and developed through our interactions with others. The self is also central to our conscious motivation to learn. It plays a central role in determining what we want to learn, how we go about learning it and whether we persist in learning.