Pathways of Musical Creativity: The Effects of an Intervention for Enhancing Teacher-Student Interaction during Music Lessons in Primary Education

The dissertation Pathways of Musical Creativity shows that students’ musical creativity can develop in an intervention with Video Feedback Coaching for teachers, mediated by their support of students’ creative autonomy during classroom interactions in music lessons. Autonomy support entails fostering students' self-determined learning by providing space for their own choices and interests. The intervention introduced teachers to music-pedagogical strategies for enhancing classroom interaction in order to transition from a teacher- and method-centered style to a student-centered and autonomy-supportive interaction approach. This PhD research also took the nonverbal components of teachers' autonomy support into account because classroom interaction in music lessons is also nonverbal and musical in nature.
Teachers changed their interaction style during the intervention to one that supported more autonomy, and they were less likely to return to mainly instruction and modelling. Although for verbal autonomy support a beneficial effect was observed, teachers found it more difficult to provide higher levels of non-verbal autonomy support in music teaching. In turn, students showed more originality and variation in their creative thinking and acting in music. Although over half of the classes engaged in playing more complex rhythmical patterns over the course of the intervention, at group-level no effect for this aspect was found in comparison to a control group. These findings suggest that in both primary education and teacher education, more focus should be placed on enhancing classroom interaction and supporting students’ creative autonomy support in music lessons.