Abstract
My previous “From the Editor” column, titled “What Belongs in the Preservice Music Teacher Education Curriculum Part 1” and co-authored with former Journal of Music Teacher Education (JMTE) Editorial Assistant Zack Nenaber, reviewed the preservice music education requirements from the National Association for Schools of Music (NASM), discussed literature from education and music education in the area of core practices, and reported on questions considered at a JMTE and Society for Music Teacher Education (SMTE) meeting held in December 2025.
Participants in that dialogue included members of the JMTE Editorial Board: Colleen Conway (Editor in Chief) from the University of Michigan, John Eros from California State East Bay, Sommer Forrester from the University of Toronto, Dan Isbell from Pennsylvania State University, Zack Nenaber (Editorial Assistant) from the University of Michigan, and Jessica Vaughan Marra from Seton Hill University. Members of the SMTE Executive Board also participated: Christopher Baumgartner (Areas of Strategic Planning and Action Coordinator) from the University of Oklahoma, Tami Draves (Chair-Elect) from the University of North Carolina–Greensboro, Sommer Forrester (Eastern Division) from the University of Toronto, Daniel Hellman (Conference Coordinator) from Missouri State University, Shannan Hibbard (North Central Division) from Wayne State University (MI), Ann Marie Stanley (Chair) from Pennsylvania State University, Olivia Tucker (Western Division) from the University of Utah, and Brian Weidner (Communication Chair) from Butler University. I wish to acknowledge these scholars again for their contributions to both columns.
Key ideas discussed in the first article included the need for (a) functional musicianship, (b) teaching skills (including planning, delivering, assessing, music error detection, and differentiation of instruction), and (c) relational/interpersonal skills (with a disposition toward reflection and lifelong learning). In Part 1, we highlighted the “promising practices” being used by music teacher educators to accomplish these tasks. In Part 2, I examine some of the challenges in this work.
In framing the notion of challenges, I begin with literature regarding undergraduate music education student development and discuss the concept of adaptive expertise. I then discuss challenges to teacher preparation that were shared at the JMTE/SMTE meeting including functional musicianship and transfer of concepts across the curriculum, as well as the need for more student choice through detracking of the curriculum. I conclude with a gesture toward the notion of an “impossible profession,” where sometimes we simply have to do the best we can.
Undergraduate Student Development
Conkling (2016) argued that undergraduate music learners should be understood not just as students acquiring technical skills but as emerging adults navigating identity, work, relationships, and financial pressure. Her work places music majors within broader higher education trends, noting rising enrollment costs, increasing student employment, and the fact that many undergraduates follow non-linear paths through college and work. She shared Arnett’s (2014) theory of emerging adulthood to frame the undergraduate years as a time of identity exploration, instability, and self-focus, which is especially relevant for music students who are often navigating identities as both teachers and performers and deciding both who they want to become and what kind of work they may pursue. A central point of her chapter is that music learning in college should be viewed as both specialized professional preparation in music and music teacher education. Conkling shows that although music curricula emphasize technique, repertoire, and musicianship, alumni data suggest that broader competencies such as collaboration, creative thinking, critical thinking, and persuasive communication are highly valued and often more useful than narrowly defined performance training. This has direct implications for preparing undergraduate music education students to be adaptive experts (as discussed in the next section), as Conkling supported designing learning experiences that are meaningful, collaborative, and reflective, so students can transfer musical knowledge across settings and adapt to changing professional demands.
Conkling recommended shifting from a model of music learning as isolated skill acquisition to one of participation in meaningful musical practice (fieldwork) and argued that undergraduates develop best when they are placed in learning spaces that require mutual engagement, responsibility, continuity, and interaction with more experienced practitioners, including in classes, lessons, chamber music, and large ensembles. Her work suggested that undergraduate music education should help students not only become competent teachers and musicians but also learn how to collaborate, problem-solve, and reimagine their professional identities in response to real-world conditions. These ideas are core qualities of adaptive expertise.
Adaptive Expertise
Adaptive expertise offers a productive frame for music teacher education because it emphasizes teachers’ capacity to respond flexibly to complex, uncertain, and changing classroom situations. Ball and Forzani (2009) argued that teacher preparation should center on the actual “work of teaching,” including the specialized practices teachers use to support student learning in real time. Ball and Hill (2008) similarly focused on measuring teacher quality in practice, suggesting that teacher knowledge must be understood in relation to the instructional decisions teachers make while teaching. Hammerness et al. (2005) described teacher learning as the development of knowledge, skills, dispositions, and reflective capacities that allow teachers to meet the needs of diverse learners. For music teacher education, this broader teacher education literature supports preparation that moves beyond technical routines and helps teachers adapt instruction to the realities of ensemble rehearsal, general music classrooms, culturally diverse repertoire, and varied levels of student musicianship.
Several studies show that adaptive expertise can be developed through structured reflection on teaching practice. Baldinger and Munson (2020) examined debrief discussions with teachers and developed an emergent model for how these conversations supported adaptive expertise following “practice-based rehearsals” of teaching (not music teaching in this study). Their work suggests that teachers can learn adaptively not only by teaching but also by observing, analyzing, and discussing teaching episodes. This has clear implications for music teacher education because peer observation, conducting lab ensembles, microteaching, and post-rehearsal conferences can be designed to help preservice teachers consider alternative instructional moves rather than simply evaluate whether a lesson “worked.” In this sense, debriefing becomes a site for developing pedagogical imagination, where future music teachers learn to ask what else they might have tried, why a student response occurred, and how musical learning could be supported differently next time.
Other empirical studies emphasized the importance of real-time collaboration and teacher thinking during instruction. Soslau et al. (2018) studied co-teacher “huddles” during student teaching and found that these brief, focused conversations helped teacher candidates make immediate adaptations to instruction. The huddle structure is useful for music education because cooperating teachers and student teachers can quickly confer during rehearsals about pacing, student confusion, balance, intonation, classroom management, or whether to shift from full-ensemble to sectional work. Männikkö and Husu (2019) examined teachers’ adaptive expertise through personal practical theories, finding that teachers’ adaptiveness was related to the ways they drew on fixed or open teaching orientations during classroom events. For music educators, this suggests that adaptive expertise is not merely a collection of strategies but also a reflective stance toward one’s own assumptions about rehearsal, repertoire, student ability, assessment, and musical growth.
Recent research also connects adaptive expertise to professional development, culturally responsive teaching, and field-based teacher learning. Moran et al. (2023) studied preservice teachers’ development of adaptive expertise through professional development and residency placements, showing how structured field experiences can connect conceptual learning with practice-based decision-making. Severson-Irby and Parkhouse (2025) investigated how critical action research supported educators’ adaptive expertise in culturally responsive education, emphasizing sustained, job-embedded professional development rather than brief workshops. Together, these studies outside of music might suggest that adaptive expertise in music education should be cultivated through repeated cycles of planning, teaching, observing, reflecting, revising, and inquiring into student learning. Such a model could prepare music teachers not only to reproduce familiar rehearsal routines but also to make principled, responsive, and culturally informed decisions in the unpredictable conditions of music classrooms and ensembles.
Adaptive Expertise in Music Education and in the JMTE/SMTE Discussion
In Conway and Hibbard (2019), Shannan Hibbard and I placed these ideas directly within music teacher education by arguing that preservice music teacher education must “push the boundaries” of conventional preparation and help future teachers develop reflective practice and adaptive expertise. We problematized narrow language, such as “teacher training” and “best practices,” which are common in the field. I believe this perspective is important for music education because preservice teachers must learn to make pedagogical decisions in rehearsal settings where student performance, listening, technique, expression, motivation, and ensemble interaction unfold simultaneously. Adaptive expertise, therefore, becomes a way to describe the kind of professional judgment music teachers need when a planned music lesson or rehearsal strategy does not produce the desired musical or educational result.
Several JMTE/SMTE members made comments at our December 2025 meeting that centered around this notion of adaptive expertise in music education. Sommer Forrester shared:
A big part of this degree is going to teach you how to take the skills that you have so that if in five years, you are faced with teaching something outside of your wheelhouse, you can apply the skills you have to a new musical context. In response to what is most important in the music education curriculum.
Shannan Hibbard shared: “Adaptive musicianship, the ability to work in musical environments that are maybe not familiar.” She also shared:
I think teaching is . . . a series of trial and error for a lot of us, . . . because most of the students that I see finishing are going out into environments that look really different than the student teaching placements we’re putting them in.
John Eros said,
The jobs that are out there are just such a moving target. And if there’s a solid basis in place in terms of musicianship and pedagogy and skills . . . then . . . the choral singer can go out and be a fantastic band and orchestra director. There are still going be gaps in their preparation . . . but they have a basis that they can operate from.
Dan Isbell shared: “We do need to be a sort of a jack-of-all-trades, and you need to be flexible.”
Challenges in the Preservice Music Teacher Education Curriculum
Functional Musicianship and Transfer of Concepts Across the Curriculum
As was discussed in Part 1 of this column, functional musicianship emerged as key on the list of “what belongs in the music education curriculum?” Dan Isbell highlighted: “If you’re struggling to hear chords out of tune, and you’re not able to take the group apart and find those out, you’re going to be spinning your wheels.” However, several members on the call shared concerns about how skills learned in courses like theory and aural skills transfer. Shannan Hibbard shared:
The way they’re learning those concepts are not practical for teaching students aural skills, audiation, and theoretical concepts. The theoretical concepts and oral skills that they’re doing in those courses don’t necessarily translate directly to the way we need them . . . we should be teaching very differently.
Sommer Forrester suggested:
Helping students make those connections across their classes . . . if you look at their curriculum . . . they could articulate how . . . what they’re learning from class number one connects to class number two, or how they perceive it’s . . . contributing to the application of what they’re going to do when they go out into the classroom.
I shared in the context of that meeting that: “Students take all of these groups of classes, and they kind of check the box on the classes, and it somehow is not dawning on them that they have to transfer these ideas into a teaching setting.”
More Student Choice
When I asked questions in the meeting about what does “not” belong in the music education curriculum, that led to a discussion about the need to give music education students more agency in shaping their preparation. However, participants generally did not argue for unlimited choice. Instead, they emphasized “structured choice,” suggesting that students should be able to pursue developing interests while still receiving broad preparation for the realities of PK–12 teaching. Hibbard shared: “I would allow a lot more flexibility in the curriculum for students to follow the passions that they’re developing along the way, to have exposure to new ideas, but then to be able to pursue those ideas.” This suggests that student choice is not just about electives for their own sake but about helping students develop identities as music educators by exploring new areas of interest.
Sommer Forrester agreed with the value of student autonomy but raised a caution about programs where too much is elective-based saying: “It makes me very nervous to think about students graduating who have created an entire elective base in one specific area of music teaching.” She added: “I just wonder if there’s a way to create that autonomy within a little bit of a structure that ensures that there’s a comprehensiveness.” This quote captures one of the central tensions in the discussion: students should have agency, but the curriculum still needs to guarantee preparation across the range of possible teaching contexts.
Detracking of the Curriculum
Related to choice was the need to move away from rigid curricular tracks such as instrumental, choral, or general music tracks. I defined detracking for the group as access and flexibility, not uniformity. Detracking means that a clarinetist interested in elementary general music, or a vocalist interested in instrumental methods, should be able to pursue that pathway without fighting the curriculum. I stated: “It doesn’t mean that everybody takes everything. It means that students have an opportunity to choose regardless of what their primary instrument is.”
Participants argued that tracking can limit students’ preparation, especially when graduates receive PK–12 certification but are prepared too narrowly for only one type of teaching position. John Eros shared: “We don’t have a track. Everybody takes the same courses” and framed this as a strength. For Eros, the benefit of detracking is that students graduate with broader preparation: “I think having them leave with the broader training is a strength.” He acknowledged that breadth may reduce depth in a particular area, but he viewed this as a necessary trade-off: “They’re sacrificing depth, but at the same time . . . they don’t know where they might find themselves.”
Shannan Hibbard gave a strong critique of her institution’s heavily tracked curriculum: “In our current curriculum, the instrumental students are heavily tracked.” She specifically identified the absence of elementary general music preparation for instrumental students as a serious problem: “The instrumental students do not take a full elementary general class, which is bananas to me.” She then named the mismatch between certification and coursework: “Those students are receiving the certification of K–12, but really don’t have the courses that support that certification.” This quote strongly supports the theme that detracking is not only pedagogically desirable but also ethically and professionally necessary. If students are certified to teach PK–12 music, their coursework should prepare them for a range of PK–12 settings. 1
In sharing about the tracked curriculum at his institution, Brian Weidner shared:
They build this cohort and this camaraderie together as a giant group of freshmen, and then we divide them . . . we divide the vocal from the instrumental. And they don’t really interact again until they’re seniors. And, like, what is that? That’s just creating . . . furthering the divide.
This quote frames tracking not just as a curricular issue but as a cultural one. It shapes how students understand music teaching, who they see as colleagues, and what kinds of musical teaching they imagine as “theirs.”
Chris Baumgartner described a situation where students in an instrumental track later realize they want to teach elementary music:
We get kids sophomore year, let’s say, on the instrumental side, “Well, I want to teach elementary music,” so then we have to create all these substitutions. . . .We start subbing methods classes, we make sure they take guitar, we do . . . you know, we kind of hodgepodge a degree together. They’re usually some of our best ones, so why are we dividing this way?
Chris went on to suggest: “Maybe all those techniques classes that we have, including voice, or voice ped, are all lumped together, and you get to pick.” Brian responded that his institution was starting that:
“That model that Chris just described is what we’re instituting next year, is all of our techniques classes are going to, here’s the pool, take your pick. . . .Everyone needs to have these core experiences, and from there, we can start to individualize and differentiate around where student interest is at, where student trajectory is at, and where students’ skills are at.”
This model aligns with the larger theme of structured choice: students still complete techniques coursework, but they have more freedom to choose courses aligned with their goals, interests, or areas of need.
Discussion
Across the meeting, participants seemed to converge around a model that would include the following:
Core competencies all music education students must develop.
Flexible pathways beyond those competencies.
Less reliance on rigid tracks based on primary instrument or voice type.
More opportunities for students to choose techniques, methods, field placements, and specializations.
More attention to what graduates will need in PK–12 classrooms.
Together, these statements show that the group is not advocating for a curriculum with no structure. Rather, they are imagining a curriculum that is less tracked, more competency-based, and more responsive to individual students.
To me, the conversation suggested that student choice and detracking are not opposing ideas. Instead, participants seemed to favor a curriculum with:
A shared foundational core for all music education students.
Broad preparation across instrumental, choral, general, elementary, secondary, and possibly community music settings.
Opportunities for students to pursue individual interests.
Enough structure to prevent students from graduating with major gaps.
Participants were not calling for more electives or fewer requirements. Rather, they were imagining a curriculum that is both flexible and comprehensive, allowing students to develop personal interests while ensuring that all graduates are prepared for the broad and unpredictable realities of PK–12 music teaching. Olvia Tucker reminded the group that,
The NASM guidelines . . . they are way more flexible, I think, than sometimes our colleagues in other areas want to see, but I think we need to keep saying that. It doesn’t need to look the same everywhere, and it shouldn’t.
Impossible Profession
I conclude with a gesture toward the notion of teaching as an “impossible profession.” Scholars in education and other helping professions have used this phrase not to imply that teaching is futile but to name the deep uncertainty, relational dependence, and moral risk built into work that aims at human improvement. Cohen (2011) argued that teachers, like therapists, social workers, and pastors, work in human improvement professions because they seek to deepen knowledge, broaden understanding, sharpen skills, and change behavior. Yet, as Cohen explained, teachers must depend on the cooperation and intelligence of students, attend carefully to student thinking, and make consequential judgments in conditions that increase rather than reduce complexity. Cohen concluded, “It therefore seems fair to say that human improvement professions are impossible” (p. 15).
Within music education, Higgins (2012) extended this argument by opening his chapter with Freud’s claim that educating, healing, and governing were among the “impossible” professions. Higgins proposed that if teaching is an impossible profession, “music education is a really impossible profession” (p. 213). His argument is especially useful here because the tensions he named are precisely the tensions that surfaced in our JMTE/SMTE discussion: liberal and vocational aims, high and low culture, the dual identity of musician and teacher, and the mismatch between musical practices and school institutions. Abramo (2016) later used Higgins’s framing specifically in instrumental music teacher education, arguing that music teacher educators must prepare preservice teachers for the “unnatural” and “impossible” profession of music teaching.
Shannan Hibbard and I also drew on this idea when we wrote, as mentioned earlier, that preservice music teacher education must push the boundaries of conventional preparation while supporting reflective practice and adaptive expertise (Conway & Hibbard, 2019). More recently, Douglas (2022) returned to Cohen’s notion of teaching as an impossible profession in science education, which suggests that the phrase remains useful across fields for naming the complexity of preparing teachers for work that can never be reduced to technique alone.
This brings me back to the central question of this column: What belongs in the preservice music teacher education curriculum? If music teaching is already an impossible profession, then preparing 18- to 22-year-olds for that work may be an even more impossible task. We are asking young adults who are themselves still forming personal, musical, and professional identities to become flexible musicians, responsive pedagogues, culturally aware curriculum makers, ensemble leaders, classroom managers, advocates, collaborators, and lifelong learners. We are also asking them to prepare not only for the first job they imagine but also for a profession that may ask them to teach different students, different music, different technologies, different communities, and different school structures for the next 40–60 years.
No undergraduate curriculum can fully accomplish that. A 4-year degree cannot anticipate every teaching assignment, musical practice, community need, policy shift, or cultural change a future music teacher will encounter. This does not mean that preservice music teacher education is inadequate or that the curriculum does not matter. It means that the curriculum must be understood as a beginning rather than a guarantee. We can provide strong foundations in musicianship, pedagogy, relational work, reflection, and adaptive expertise. We can help students learn to transfer ideas across contexts and to keep learning when the work changes. We can also be honest that, in music teacher education, there will always be gaps.
Perhaps the goal, then, is not to solve the impossible task of music teacher preparation once and for all. Perhaps the goal is to design programs that help future music teachers enter the profession with enough musical skill, pedagogical imagination, humility, courage, and adaptive capacity to keep becoming teachers. As impossible as that task may be, it remains necessary and worthwhile. To prepare music teachers is to prepare people to sustain one of the most human forms of teaching: helping others make meaning, make sound, and make musical lives together.
