Music-ITE

• Make the Initial Teacher Education (ITE) professional knowledge base more easily accessible;
• Reference effective practices in all subject areas and across phases;
• Increase the quality and range of ITE resources available;
• Raise the status of ITE research and knowledge;
• Promote and effect change by supporting tested knowledge transfer and adoption strategies;
• Provide a personalised support service for teacher educators and those training to teach.

The resource is developed and managed by a consortium of partners, including
Canterbury Christ Church University and the University of London’s Institute of
Education.

Basically, the TTRB is a sophisticated portal through which anyone with an interest in ITE can quickly access a large range of information. This review will provide a brief overview of the main features through answering a range of questions. It will them move on to illustrate how it has affected the work of one teacher educator in music.

• Conference papers;
• LEA reports;
• Government reports;
• A range of journal articles;
• Book reviews;
• Research reports;
• Statistical data;
• Examples of students’ and trainees’ work;
• Links to video resources from Teachers’ TV;
• Links to other web resources.

No! The TTRB does much more than that. The TTRB employs a large team of reviewers, drawn from the ITE community, who review each of the resources and provide a written report about its relevance to ITE.

Most reviews are structured under a series of useful headings including:

• What the resource is;
• The aims of the resource;
• Key findings or focus;
• The quality, authority and credibility of the resource;
• The implications for ITE tutors/mentors;
• The relevance to ITE students.

These reports range in length, but they all provide useful insights that should allow a user of the TTRB to make a judgement about a particular resource’s usefulness and importance. The reviews also contain links to related articles or resources and further links where the user can find out more if needed. There is, of course, also a link to the actual resource reviewed. All the resources reviewed on the TTRB are available online and for no fee. This has had an implication on what is included on the TTRB, e.g. articles published in subscription journals only appear if they have been released by the publisher for open access via the TTRB.

A standard search function is provided. This will be familiar to anyone who has used an Internet based search engine or electronic library catalogue. There is one additional function here that is worthy of note. Users can append search terms from the British Education Index Thesaurus. This provides a useful way of clarifying a search term if one is struggling to identify the precise focus for a particular search. Resources can also be searched by ‘type’, ‘author’ and alphabetically.

A second organisational feature of the TTRB is based around the Professional Standards for Teachers. Users can search resources that relate to any of the individual or groups of standards (professional attributes, professional knowledge and understanding, professional skills).

So, for example, a search under standards Q26-28 (which relate to assessing, monitoring and giving feedback) brings up a whole range of resources including:

• An article from the Assessment Reform Group on ‘Assessment Systems of the Future published by the Nuffield Foundation in 2003:
• Two papers on teachers’ and students’ roles in formative assessment from the Kings Medway and Oxfordshire Formative Assessment Project;
• A review from the Australian Council for Educational Research about ‘using data to support learning in schools’ (2005);
• A Teachers TV programme on assessment for learning in the secondary school;
• A review of the booklet Inside the Black Box written for the General Teaching Council in 2001;
• And much, much more besides!

And don’t forget. each resource has a review, written by someone with experience of ITE, to help the user gain a greater degree of insight about the resource itself.

There are also regularly updated news and events sections that contain details about recent policy announcements, education-related stories from the media, conferences, etc. Both these pages can be subscribed to via RSS feeds (along with RSS feeds on features, latest resources and articles with podcasts). Not sure what an RSS feed is? Don’t worry! There is a page about that too.

But perhaps the one feature of the TTRB that has caused the most interest is the ELibrarian.

Contrary to the term, the E-Librarian is a real, live, human being! If users can’t find what they need on the TTRB, they can ask the E-Librarian to do a search for you. Users should receive an answer within two working days. The E-Librarian likes questions to be as focussed as possible. So a question like, ‘What is assessment for learning all about?” is likely to be ignored. But, ‘Are there any analyses of the benefits of assessment for learning as opposed to other assessment methods within the teaching and learning of music?’ might be more likely to receive a positive response. But users of the TTRB should note a couple of things. Firstly, please make sure that you search the TTRB thoroughly first. The E-Librarian can’t answer all the questions received and has to prioritise accordingly. Secondly, please also check that no one else has asked your question already!

In all of the above roles, I have found the TTRB to be valuable source of information. I’d like to give a few examples.

Firstly, the TTRB provides interesting resources that help construct meaningful and focussed lecture and teaching materials. Recently, I redesigned a lecture and seminar focussed on strategies for teaching songwriting. A search on the TTRB revealed nothing on songwriting itself! But when I began to examine related themes such as creativity, regulated/self-regulated learning strategies, poetry (and strategies for teaching this), and supportive uses of technology I was inundated with useful materials. Helpful reviews of resources allowed me to narrow my search quickly and pick up on items of specific interest. But this did not just help my planning. I have been able to construct a collection of resources for my students next year. I will email them my collection and make sure they follow up on these via the TTRB themselves.

Secondly, as an active researcher the TTRB alerts me to a range of policy and research related publications. Again, tailoring the content delivery of the TTRB through careful searches and the use of selected RSS feeds has meant that I do not have to spend long periods of my own time searching through resources. Instead, resources come and find me!

Finally, personalised content like this is all well and good. But sometimes it is helpful to look through things oneself. By doing this regularly, one can look outside the box of one’s own interest (and prejudices?) and begin to find things of interest. Whilst you can search through resources on the TTRB under subject headings, I would encourage any user of the TTRB to take a more generic view as often as possible. Thinking outside the box of music education can be unsettling and challenging. But I have found that the most useful and interesting work can be done when specific issues in music education begin to collide with more general issues facing initial teacher education. The TTRB is great at encouraging this inter-subject discourse.