338: Dr Anita Collins on the Research Behind Integrated Music Teaching

It made me understand how through trial and error, through many different ways, we have found how to teach music because we've learned how our body processes it. And then we've worked backwards through those steps to full understanding, if that may, or full articulation of what it is and giving it words and noticing things. But the more we have that, the more we tend to love the process. We go, we love listening to new and different music because it's just so different.

You're listening to the Integrated Music Teaching Podcast from Top Music. Tune in weekly as we interview music teachers and experts from around the world to explore creative activities and ideas that build learning connections in students. Our integrated music teaching approach will deepen your students' understanding of musical concepts, engage them in critical thinking, improve their reading and performance, foster their curiosity, and prepare them for a lifetime of music-making. Hi teachers, it's Tim Topham here and welcome back to the Integrated Music Teaching Podcast. On today's show, I'm joined by a returning guest of the podcast, the amazing Dr. Anita Collins, fellow Aussie and inspiring teacher and researcher. When I was first coming up with the idea of integration as the key to making music learning more successful, I really wanted to get some research behind it and find out what evidence there is that this approach can be more effective than that more linear, disconnected, or pigeonholed approach that's so often a focus and feature of more traditional and classical pedagogy. And so it didn't take me long to realize that the best person to speak to was definitely Anita. Anita was actually a keynote speaker at my Piano Pivot Live 2020 conference and has been on the show, I think it was episode 194, which you can go back and check if you'd like to. And I always love speaking to her about music teaching and everything scientific. So in today's interview, here's what we're going to be covering. We're going to be talking about how the car manufacturing concept of just-in-time production Is relevant in our music studios.

Yes, that's true.

That's been the first time I think we've connected car manufacturing with music education after 338 episodes anyway. Thanks, Anita. How emotion and meaning is vital in education. How to make stronger memories. We're going to be unpacking the research of Stefan Kolch. We're going to talk about how to make teenagers more open to different styles of music. And if there's one quote that I just loved, this is one that we'll be talking about as we unpack today's episode. Anita says, if you do every lesson as a scale, piece 1, piece 2 and theory, there's no novelty there. And so, actually, that's why students don't make any really good memories of that continual system. It's when you break the mould that they go, oh, something's different. What happened there? Let's make a memory. So, if you're interested in helping students make better memories, form better connections, make more meaning in their learning and be able to recall information better, and understand a deeper way that music is connected, then this is 100% the episode for you. Dr. Anita Collins is an award-winning educator, researcher, and writer in the field of brain development and music learning. She is internationally recognized for her unique work in translating the scientific research of neuroscientists and psychologists to the everyday parent, teacher, and student. Anita is best known for her role as on-screen expert and campaign lead For the Don't Stop the Music documentary that aired on the ABC in Australia in late 2018, as well as prominent TED Talk videos. She is currently an expert education advisor for professional orchestras, public, independent, and Catholic school authorities, Australian and international media production companies. She's a research expert for university, advocacy for nonprofit organisations, and a founding director of the Rewire Foundation. Anita is also a full-time music teacher at Canberra Grammar School here in Australia. I don't know how she does it all. Here is my discussion about integrated music teaching and creativity in music education.

Let's go.

Anita Collins, it's so great to have you back on the show.

Thank you so much for having me. It seems like an age.

It has been an age. It seems like an age since you were actually one of our keynote speakers at Piano Pivot Live. That was start of 2020, before the world changed.

Oh my God, wasn't it?

And you had bushfires and now we've got floods and—

Oh, that's right. I was stuck in the airport. I remember now.

We had to beam you in live. It was, it was great fun anyway. Um, so look, for those of you who don't know you, quick, a little quick summary of what you do and maybe what, what you're famous for, because there's a very cool video out there, isn't there?

Okay, what do I do? I never know what to say. Okay, my— I am a music teacher first and foremost, and I'm a practicing music teacher, meaning that I still practice my, my craft, and it's important for me to think of it that way. I have taught at universities. I taught in teacher training as well. So, teaching teachers, which has been very much informed what I do. But my area of research when I had to do a PhD is neuroscience and music education, which is when you get into a— when you do a PhD, come up with a really good thing to say when people go, oh, what are you doing? And it should be nice and short so that people go, oh, that's nice. And then they don't ask you anything.

And then they move on.

Yeah. Um, so basically, um, I became fascinated by this research because I wanted to be— I basically wanted to be a better teacher. That's all I wanted. I want— if I understand what's happening in the brains of my students, maybe I can teach them better. And that was as simple as it was. What I found was this field which is incredible, and I couldn't believe that music teachers and educators in general didn't have access to this research. So now my work is to take this research Boil it down into bits that we can sort of understand, change the language, and then present it in ways that people can start to use it in schools, and particularly music teachers can start to understand why— how their students are learning, why every student is different, and why some things work with some students and not others, and why— how we work those things out as teachers, like how can we pick up information. So And along the journey and along the way, I was lucky enough to write a TED— the script for a TED-Ed video, which is called How Learning an Instrument Benefits Your Brain. I got to do a TEDx talk, which is called something along the lines of What If Every Child Had Music Education from Birth? And I've got to be on a documentary on the ABC called Don't Stop the Music with Guy Sebastian, but more importantly, with like hundreds of gorgeous kids. And I got to write a book called The Music Advantage. So that's where I'm up to.

And, and as you say, you still teach, you still research, and you run an organization called Bigger Better Brains, which we should give a plug to before we wrap up. But in the meantime, look, I'm really excited because one of the skills that you have is to distill this neuroscience-y brain talk down to stuff that music teachers understand. And that's why I was really excited when I was talking to you about my new integrated music teaching model. Which invites all music teachers to deepen their understanding, deepen their students' understanding of music by making connections between musical elements and theory and practice through creative activities. You are able to go, ah, okay, I can see how this kind of fits with some of the research I've done. And so that's what I wanted to talk with you about today. The goal of this whole process is that music lessons become more exploratory, teachers ask better questions, and students become more curious to understand that bigger picture of how music works. So let's talk about firstly what I call the linear or pigeonholed music lesson. So that's the lesson, the traditional lesson that goes, all right, come in, student. All right, let's hear your scales. All right, now let's do piece number 1 and then let's do piece number 2. And then we'll go over, we'll just go to the table over there. We'll do some theory. And this is, of course, the opposite of what I'm teaching with integrative music teaching. But I think you used the phrase just-in-case learning for this as a model. Can you tell us a bit about that and what the options are here? Yeah.

Okay. So I like, while my field is music, I read everything. I pick up stuff and I go, ooh, that's interesting. Let's have that idea work with over here. 'Cause a lot of the times, say for example, in business, they're using one sort of idea and then I can go across to an arts thing and go, oh, but it's the same idea. They just use different words. And I love to remember little phrases that remind me of something. One of the things on it, so this is a long draw. Listeners, just follow me. Um, there's a, there's a, um, theory of car manufacturing design. Okay. Stay with me. Um, so what it is, is that do you build 100 cars? And then once you've got your 100 cars, do you then put them on sale and then wait for people to buy them? Or do you build 10 cars, send them around the world, get people all excited, and then they order their car and that's when you build it. Now, anyone who has bought a car recently, um, and I had to wait, I think it was 7 months for my most recent car, which is a very long time, knows that we do it around the way of, of, um, this, you know, sort of you get excited about the car, then you order it, then they go and build it. And that's called just-in-time manufacturing, meaning you make something when it's needed and when there's a, there's a need there, as opposed to just in case, which means let's make 100 cars and then wait for people to buy them. Then we've got to store them, you know, all that sort of other stuff. I often think about, and it's been this really interesting thing about, I don't know, you'd call it linear learning. I just call it the previous mental models we have of how music learning happens. And most of us have them because that was how we were taught.

Yes.

But learning itself has developed. So one of the things is to get ourselves into this new way of learning, we've actually got to break a whole bunch of the rules, which are not just rules in our head, they're actually rules in our bodies because we've been taught them over years and years and years and years and years of repetition. So it's about, for me, about shifting that mental, that mental model. And theory is a fascinating one because even when I went into schools, we used to go, this is a prac lesson and this is a theory lesson. And theory lesson, we sit down at the tables, and a prac lesson, we get our instruments out. And I The new theories around learning are that there's a reason why that doesn't work, which is because we are not connecting the theoretical understanding of something, the understanding up here with the understanding of what they're actually doing with their bodies. So just in case versus just in time is— so just in case is you sit down and you do your— I still remember the one I used to do with all my Year 7s was a bright yellow Dawson Holland theory book.

For the non-Australian listeners, just picture a theory workbook. And they were in bright colors for each of the different grades. I remember them as well. It was Master Your Theory, I think.

Master Your Theory.

Absolutely.

I can still— I could probably design the front page.

All the Aussie teachers are going, yeah, I remember that one.

Yeah, yeah, we know. And it's this really, really— this idea that we sat down and we did our theory and like we do scales or we do cadences. Cadences was the big one I remember. And then going, okay, but then in 40 days' time, you're going to get onto the keyboard and you're going to actually do cadences. And the whole idea is you teach them this piece of theoretical information, which is quite complex, and then there's no connection to the body and to the musical making and even the sound of these things for a number of days. And it's similar when we, we do exactly how you explained with scales— piece 1, piece 2, now let's do our theory. There's a danger unless the teacher connects all of those things together for the student that they will never connect them. So just in Time theory learning or theoretical learning or conceptual learning is about when it comes up in a piece, that's the time to actually teach about that thing. Because suddenly it's a, we need it now. It's information when we need it versus information at some other time that we're meant to somehow connect. And the more we understand about learning, but also the more we interact with this generation of learners, They do not learn in that way. There's so much other information coming in for them that they can't— their memory systems are not nearly as good as they need to be to make those connections. So we need to adjust how we're teaching, and that's where just-in-time versus just-in-case comes from for me.

I think— thank you for the background on that. I think there's a— you can even take that metaphor a little bit further. The other thing that— the other reason car manufacturers went for just-in-time, I think, was partly to avoid warehouses stocked full of stuff that was sitting there costing them money. And if we take that metaphor to music, if we, you know, fill the student's brain with theory, unlike car manufacturing, the warehouse won't still be full when they need it. It will have depleted over time because memory disappears.

Yeah.

So, I think that's another reason why the dusting— sorry, I think I used the wrong one before, but the just-in-time, using the theory at the moment of practice, it makes so much sense. And the cadences— sorry, go on.

Oh, I was just going to say one of the things we actually— because memory and emotion are the 2 things we understand the least about the brain because everyone's memory system and emotional system are unique. And one of the things that you do when you do connect that just-in-time, so when you need it, Is that the brain goes, "Oh, I needed that." So there's a heightened emotion there to go. I didn't understand something, and now I do. That's an emotional reward, and it goes, "Yay, I like that." So imagine it puts a little tag on there and goes, "Oh, I'm gonna put a little way of finding that on there." And then when they understand it a little bit more, puts another different tag on there. They remember their teacher explaining it, or how it sound, or how it felt. So a memory is like this little file that gets all these different tags on it, almost like searching. You know, when we search on our computers for a word, and we get all these different things. That come up. That's how a memory is made. So when you do it just in time, you actually make a stronger memory. You don't have to fill up all that space and time and energy with trying to remember something or recall it. And it goes more powerfully. It goes kind of like goes into a bigger filing cabinet that has more tags attached. So it's just more powerful learning and it's more efficient as well.

I want to dig into that in just a second because you made me think that one of the— so the Integrated Music Teaching model that we use has a 3-step approach, which I've talked about in previous podcasts. One is to analyze the music for the elements, and second one is to work out how you could connect these elements. But the third one, and I think that links to what you were just saying, is what creative activities could you use to make the integrations actually happen? Because my feeling is that If a student can remember, oh, I remember that fun time when my teacher was jamming out on the 12-bar blues and I used the blues scale, there's a strong memory, super strong memory that will help with the recall. And that's what I think you're talking about, memory and meaning.

Emotion.

Yeah, let's come back to the meaning. But is that what you— is that the kind of thing you're talking about?

Yeah, exactly. Another way to look at it, it actually helps students to progress more quickly because the memory, the moment you took to make that memory, which is highly emotive, which creates high levels of meaning, therefore creates high memories. So think of memory, emotion, and meaning as a triangle. That then means they can leap onto the next thing and onto the next thing and onto the next thing, because once we make a memory of something, we can then retrieve it. And the stronger the memory, the easier we can retrieve it. And then we can keep going. But the other thing to keep in mind is that every time we make that emotional connection, every time we set the reward network off in our students' brains, the enthusiasm they have for learning heightens. And it's— it is like, like a really, really, really good drug. It goes, oh, I want to do that again. I want to learn more about that. They get a stronger connection to you as the teacher because you initiated and created that big Dang reward feeling. And they've jumped, they kind of leapfrogged a whole bunch of other learning and they can jump forward. So it just, it's that helping to help that student become that amazing student who bounces into your door and goes, what are we doing today? And that creative bit is almost like the unpredictable part of it. And unpredictable or novel, which is what the research calls it, novel things are the things we remember, the ones that are out of the ordinary. If you do every lesson as scale piece 1, piece 2 theory, There's no novelty in there. And so actually, that's why students don't make any really good memories of, of that continual system. It's when you break the mold, they go, oh, something's different. What's happening here? Let's make a memory.

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That's all one word, so that's IMT Yeah, and it's, it's kind of like improvising in your teaching as well. And I think that's an important part of this model, is that you have to be open to being kind of improvisational as you go in order to both create these activities and— but also to respond to what the student's giving you back. So it, you know, it's not the kind of model that will work if it's Yeah, if it is that linear approach or if it's the same method all the time or the same pieces. This is about being an improvisatory teacher as much as teaching improvisation to your students. Whoa, I'm getting quite meta with myself. I just want to come back just to cadences quickly, right?

Yeah.

I remember in the book, you know, the leading note rises to the tonic and watch out for your perfect fifths and all that kind of stuff. One of the activities I've taught for many years is 4-chord composing. And one of the features of that is that, you know, if a student comes up with a 4-chord progression, after playing chords 1, 2, 3, and 4, the 4 chords, they're going to go back to 1. And so it's important that the 4th chord, the last one before going back to the tonic, is either the 4 or the 5, generally, to make a cadence. And this is when I teach about cadences, because it's so obvious to students if they go from the 7 to the 1 or the 3 to the 1, it doesn't sound as complete.

Why is that?

We can start talking about it. And in minor keys, you can start talking about why do we raise the 7th? Why is the 5 a major chord in a minor key? Anyway, I don't want to go too much into depth, but that's the perfect example of practical theory connection to the music.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'm not— it's one of the things, it's the only thing I've ever failed in life. I'm going to admit this right now. I failed keyboard in university. The only thing I've ever—

Oh, you heard it here first, everybody.

Oh my God.

You're, you're, you're French horn?

No, no, I'm a clarinet. I'm a clarinet player, but we had to do keyboard for 2 years. This is one of those subjects that was like, right, you've got to do. And I just, it was the left and the right thing. It's actually when I started to go, you know what, I learned differently and my brain is properly wired. And just understanding, because I was watching other people do it and I'm going, oh, that's not how I, that's not how it happens for me. Where was I going with this story? Oh, but what I love— I work with a whole bunch of people who can play piano, and I love them to bits because as soon as I need to demonstrate something, I grab them and go, can you come and do this? But what I love getting them to do is we understand in our ears what, what the musical rules are. Not us musically, all humans. As soon as you're exposed to music, you learn what the musical rules are. But you don't learn them by saying the third goes— you learn them by going, that's not finished, or that is finished.

Yeah.

That we have these, all these rules. So the whole idea of teaching cadences from the start as an oral thing of going, if I go from here to here, what story is it telling you? And it's really funny, I said it one day and I had this group of quite lively Year 8 kids and they started going off on a story. They started going, oh, it's this person, they're in the woods and this has just happened and someone's popped out. And I'm going, It's not what I meant, but let's run with it.

Yeah, let's go with it.

And then with the teacher that was with me, I said, you know, can you just do some other 4-chord progression? And then they'd stop and they'd go, oh, then this just happened. And it's like they knew all the rules and the meanings that, that had. So then we went, okay, let's take us— let's write a story and let's write a set of cadences that would tell us that story musically. And suddenly, just-in-time learning was, I need to understand why that one sounds like it finishes and that one sounds like it's interrupted. And then I was allowed— they gave me permission to teach the rules, but it had a, it had a meaning first. It had a reason for them to learn it because they were so enamored with this idea that music could actually tell a story and they could make the story up and they could make up a series of chords that told them.

Yeah, and you scaffolded it in a way that made them curious to go, why? Why is this happening? Why does this sound like this? So yeah, that's exactly what we're talking about. Now, you shared a research paper with me where you had taken a learning model. How do I pronounce the person's name? Kolch?

It's Kolch. Yeah.

Kolch. Yeah. A learning model, non-musical learning model. Based on neuroscience, and you can explain this better than me, and then you put it into language that music teachers can understand. And one of the words that I really picked out was, and we mentioned this, we talked about this when we first chatted, was that I use the word connection and the science uses the word meaning more so than connection. So can you tell us about this, uh, this model and how it relates to what we're talking about today?

Yeah, sure. So, um, Stefan Kolsh is one of my favorite researchers because he's, he's fascinating and he looks at things very, very differently. Um, but what he did is he put together a model from a whole bunch of other papers and said, regardless of your level of musical training, this is how the brain processes musical sound. So from the time it enters the ear, as it goes through the auditory processing network, And we kind of finally make what we would call sense of it. Now remember, music works across time. So this is not just one note and we make sense of it. This is this constant thing, which is constantly moving because music's constantly moving. But what he did is he went through a whole bunch of steps and quite a numerous number of them, but it's sort of like we hear the music as its whole. And then our brain takes it apart for its parts, rhythm. Melody, it relates it to something, and then it goes, we're going to put some of those back together. Then it goes, have I heard something like this before? So it's kind of like what's been similar, what's been different. Then it goes through to putting all those sounds back together again, and then it puts that sound— I know this sounds strange— it enacts it into our body. So, and then the very final part of it is the immune system gets set off. So if I change the way I described it, The music goes in, it gets taken apart, it gets referenced to what we've heard before, it then gets put back together, it then goes into tapping our foot or our hand or bobbing our head. And as soon as that occurs, the immune system gets set off. And as a linear thing, I thought it was super cool. But then of course there's other parts to it. So at every point the brain then goes, what does this mean to me? So there's this big overarching thing called meaning. And then it says this big other part says emotion. So how do I feel about it? And what does this mean to me? Meanwhile, my brain is taking these things apart, putting them back together, analyzing them, comparing them. So then it's sort of, it's an example of the fireworks that they originally saw in the brain. This is it all broken down. So what I then do is I—

And this all happens in milliseconds, right?

Absolutely milliseconds. Every time I watch someone start going, Okay, there it is.

It's just tapping along. Is it? It's remarkable.

But then you think, okay, what happens in a symphony when it's going for an hour? Like, where our brains are going wild through that time, and yet we don't feel tired at the end. Most of the time we actually feel exhilarated. It's even more if we're performing. So it's this— it's a cognitive challenge that ends up making us feel cognitive— cognitively alive. So it's— that's why it's, it's quite extraordinary. I then put it into non-neuroscientific language.

Always important for musicians.

And then I sat— honestly, this is what I did. I printed it out, put it on the wall, and I stared at it for ages and went, what does this mean? Does this mean anything? What is it? And I'm walking— I put it in my house, so I walked past it all the time. And then I suddenly stopped at one point and went, you know what? We teach music exactly backwards to the way that our brain processes music. So we start with rhythm and melody, and that's where it feels— well, we actually start with movement a lot of the time.

Yeah, we think about, uh, Dal Crows and, uh, Orff and Kodály.

Yeah, little kids clapping hands, everything. We start with movement, and then we actually work backwards, and all we have now are the words to describe what happened and to identify when they happen. But someone who's not musically trained at all will still go through exactly the same process of developing it. So It made me understand how through trial and error, through many different ways, we have found how to teach music because we've learned how our body processes it. And then we've worked backwards through those, through those steps to full understanding, if that may, or full articulation of what it is and giving it words and noticing things. But the more we have that, the more we tend to love the process. We go we love listening to new and different music because it's just so different. It's just like that— I haven't heard that before, that doesn't match anything I've heard, that makes me excited— versus that doesn't match anything I've heard, therefore I don't like it. So that, for me, it actually also taught me with teenagers where the very point is where they go, this is bad music or this is good music, because they reach this comparison point and they go— It's unfamiliar to me. I don't like unfamiliar, so I'll say it's bad. And I went, as soon as I said— so what I did with the kids is I started working with saying, this is what your brain's doing, this is where it's stopping you. And they went, ah, so if I just don't let that happen, will I learn more? It's like, yes. And they went, okay. So it changed their attitude. It was a really interesting process. Anyway, that's—

No, that's, that's fantastic. And is there anything wrong with the fact that we start with movement and body percussion and all that kind of stuff?

No, not at all. We are sensory embodied beings and we need to start at that. And if anything, what this research has taught me is that we veer away from it too much.

Too soon.

We think we're walking brains and we forget that actually our brain goes all over our body and we need to actually keep that embodiment learning as much as we can. And the more I watch pedagogies develop, the more that they are using more of the body. or expression through the body or understanding through the body to reach that point. And not just in music, but also in, in other ways of learning as well.

I got 2 quotes from your paper. The first one, which summarizes what you've just said, said, the key features of the Kolch model are the largely sequential left-to-right progression of the stages of music processing, with the consistent reference to the meaning and emotional content of the information being processed. And so, and that's where I talk about this building of connections. The ultimate goal of that is to create meaning. It's like, what, what is the point of this? Ah, if the student can go, oh, okay, I get that that references this and that will help me do that. And I heard that in this piece and, oh, maybe that's in that one over there. Those connections help form that meaning, which is a key part of this model.

Yeah, which is the aha moment when they go, ah, we played this in— we— they do it in band all the time. We did this in warm-up and And now we did this rhythm in the warm-up and now we're doing it in our first piece. It's like, wow, look at that. And we're also doing it in the same key.

Yes.

But it's not that we have to set that up, but they have to have the aha moment. And then we have to reinforce that that was a good thing to have so that they also continue to search for those connections. I think for me, connection has a strong social part, psychological part to it. So a sense of connection. From my background, meaning is about creating that cognitive schema around what is the thing that I'm learning. So it's just, it's again, it's interesting. It's just, there's no right or wrong word. It's just making sure that we understand how that word's being used in this context.

Yes. And the second quote I got, which was, and we talked about this briefly before, research into memory encoding and retrieval has shown that the emotion related to an experience can significantly affect the meaning that is created. The memories are used as a reference for the next time we hear or process a piece of music. Of course, we see this in a negative sense when emotion is created by bad experiences, and of course that, that's, you know, adds a whole other dimension to the memory that is there. But in a meaningful positive context in music, This is where I think being more creative and exciting and novel, as you said, can really enhance the ability for students to encode and then retrieve memories and meaning when we do that in our lessons.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the more we can use the unexpected or the wilder suggestions is good. I know that one of my friends who teaches in a studio You know, there's a window just behind you. She's got a whole bunch of whiteboard markers. And all of a sudden, she'll jump up or the kid will jump up if they need— you're explaining something and you'll be using words and motion and you need to see it visually. So now the kids have got really used to the fact that they jump up to the window, draw all over it with the whiteboard markers. So do you mean this goes with this? Or like they end up writing music or, you know, practicing something even to the point where I've— because it's a piano teacher as well, I've seen them practicing up against the window. They've drawn their own little thing. But it's all that novel part of, I get to draw on a window. You can get it. I get to draw on a window where you're not going to do it. And I've got colors and I can do things. And it's really— it doesn't engage every single one of the students, but the option is there. And the novelty part of it, of this whole room or this whole space, or is our learning space that we can use by moving around, clapping, drawing, you know, doing anything. And again, We are sensory beings. We need to learn through a sensory mode, and the piano is— or the instrument is not the only sensory mode we have.

Well, it's been so cool just to unpack that with you. Is there anything else, uh, that you wanted to say on this particular topic? I think we've covered it pretty well. I mean, I know you could go on and on.

Um, no, other than just, um, I think I'm still at that point for me where the I'm learning from this. I've learned that my students are my teachers, and watching how they interpret something and not expecting them to interpret it in a given way that I expect teaches me more about them than it does about me thinking that I know what's going on. So every student for me, every adult for me, every— anyone for me is a teacher. And I think the more I watch and the more I listen and the more I wonder and I'm curious, the better teacher I become.

And that's what we want for our students as well, that sense of curiosity to be something that we can impart on them and encourage them to. Thank you so much, Anita. Now, before we sign off, you better tell us about Bigger Better Brains. Okay.

Bigger Better Brains is for music teachers. It's the work I do to take that research and put it into courses and post it. You can see heaps of posters behind me. Stickers, books, anything I can come up with, and also getting ideas from the community as well about things that you need that can help with students and help them understand and get fascinated about what's happening in their brain, but also very much with parents, helping them understand the music learning process from inside their own child's brain. Instead of interpreting what's happening outside, go actually help them understand what are the processes that you're taking their child through. that will help them to, um, to develop musically but also cognitively. So that is all the work I do there. There's heaps of resources. Um, we're doing— we've got courses, live courses, and we're also very excited about doing a BBB event next year.

Ooh.

Something big that brings people together. So yeah, come and check it out or write straight to us and say, I really need this, and we will make it.

And the web address?

Uh, biggerbetterbrains.com.

Easy to remember.

There you go.

With a name like Tim Topham, I should like bigger, better brains, shouldn't I?

Yeah, exactly.

Love the alliteration. Anita, it's always such a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you so much for unpacking this for us and making it so clear. It's just great.

No worries. Thanks.

Well, for those of you who have been wondering about how the research backs up this idea, I hope that was useful for you, and I hope it gives you some ideas about how you can make more meaning through creativity in your music lessons. That's the end of the show for this week. I do hope you've enjoyed it, and I look forward to catching up with you again this time next week. Bye-bye, everyone. How do you keep up to date with all the latest trends and research into music education? How do you connect with other teachers around the world and make sure your teaching stays fresh and relevant for students of all ages and stages, both now and into the future? I created our Top Music Pro membership to be the one-stop shop for music teaching resources, training, support, and community, and I'd love for you to come and join us inside. With over 40 comprehensive training courses, hundreds of teaching demonstrations and lesson plans, free monthly sheet music, discounts, and all the business and pedagogy support you could ever need, Top Music Pro is the community you've been looking for. If you're ready to level up your learning from the podcast and join thousands of other teachers in our global network, head over to topmusicpro.com today. If you enjoy this show and want to hear more of our work, be sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're listening today. For links and resources mentioned in this episode, visit us at topmusic.co/podcast or check out the show notes. I'm Tim Topham, and this is the Integrated Music Teaching Podcast, a production of Top Music. Thank you so much for listening. Enjoy your week ahead, and I'll catch you next time.

Thank you.