Reinventing Music Teaching

What kind of musician should a conservatoire produce today? At the Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music, this question has become the starting point for a wider reconsideration of music teaching, learning, assessment, and institutional practice.

The Reinventing Music Learning initiative began from a concern that changing individual courses would not be enough. If PGVIM aspires to develop musicians who possess high-level artistic expertise while also being able to think independently, adapt professionally, and create value for society, then institutional purpose, graduate attributes, curriculum, teaching, assessment, and the student experience must become more deliberately aligned.

This panel shares the School of Music’s ongoing attempt to make that alignment visible and workable. It traces discussions among faculty, external specialists, and institutional leaders around what a PGVIM graduate should become, and how these aspirations can be translated into actual learning experiences. Two areas, Major Instrument/Major Skill and Performing Musicianship, have become early testing grounds. Work in these areas has explored student agency, integrated musicianship, reflective feedback, artistic decision-making, responsibility, resilience, and assessment based on development rather than performance outcomes alone.

Bringing together the Dean and members of the team undertaking this work, the discussion will examine not only what has changed, but what has proven difficult: aligning institutional and individual aspirations, changing assessment alongside teaching, balancing artistic standards with flexibility, and connecting specialist music training with the realities graduates will encounter beyond the conservatoire.

Rather than presenting a finished model, the panel shares a process of institutional learning, its questions, experiments, progress, and unresolved tensions. Reinventing music teaching ultimately asks not simply how we should teach differently, but what our students are being prepared to become, and what music education is for.