AH: Welcome. And in this, the 50th episode of my podcast, I’m talking with Dr Anita Collins. Her website describes her as an educator, researcher and writer in the field of brain development and music learning, but she is so much more than that. Anyone who knows her work in advocating for music education will know just what an important contribution she makes to this world. Anita was actually the first guest on my podcast more than six years ago, I can’t believe it, in February 2019. So I saved my 50th episode for you, Anita. Thank you for agreeing to return. I’m really looking forward to our chat.
AC: Thank you. I am so, can I say I am so proud of you?
AH: Oh.
AC: Oh, you’ve done an amazing, you’ve made an amazing thing. And to be able to come back and chat to you, and I don’t know it’s I, yep, there’s always, I always feel a closeness and something, maybe because we share the same name, who knows? But it’s something about, yeah, being able to talk about the big things and the little things with you is just such a joy. So thank you.
AH: Oh, the feeling’s mutual, absolutely. There is so much that we can talk about, and you’ve got a wealth of knowledge and insights that I know will have listeners sitting on the edge of their seats. So it’s hard to know where to start, really. But for this podcast, I’d like to focus on music education advocacy. You’re known for your insights into the neuroscience of music education, and I will refer people to our first podcast for that and to the links that I’ll put in the show notes for that podcast. I realised we’ve learned a hell of a lot more about neuroscience and neuromusical research in the last six years, but that’s perhaps for another podcast. So I’ll crack on. You describe yourself as somebody who translates the scientific research of neuroscientists and psychologists to the everyday parent, teacher and student. For those who don’t know you, can you share a brief summary of how you came to be doing what you do?
AC: [Laughs] I laugh because it’s not a straight line. Where do I start from? Basically, the reason I got interested in it is because I was teaching at university. So I was in teacher training. I was teaching the next generation of teachers. And at that point in time, in Australia, they changed the rules about the qualifications you needed to have to teach in university. So I had a master’s degree, and they said you need to have a PhD. I’d always wanted to have a PhD. Always, always, always, but maybe not quite so soon so. But they said, look, you’ve got to at least start it. It’s a long journey if you want to keep your position. So I then went on the sort of quest to find what I should focus on. And I was given two pieces of advice. The first piece of advice was, choose something that everyone else has researched and just sort of piggyback onto on the back of them and make it the easiest journey possible. And the second piece of advice was, pick something you’re going to love as much at the end as you did at the beginning. And that piece of, even though it was going to be hard, no, it was going to make it a harder journey, I waited and wanted to find the thing that I was going to love at the end. And then another person gave me another piece of advice, and she said, about three years into your PhD, you’re going to figure out why you’re doing it. And I was like, shouldn’t say that at the beginning. She went, No, no, there’s, there’s a, there’s always a deeper reason. So I just trusted her, a very wise woman. So what I did with the topic is I let myself read everything for nine months, like I just read and read and read and read and read like bizarre things I thought I’d never be interested in. And honestly, what I was waiting for is the same thing that happened when I was studying in university to be a teacher. I had this moment three weeks in, where it’s kind of like the ceiling opened and the light came down, and the angels sang, and I went, This is what you should do with your life. It was a real, it was a bizarre moment, but it was like, This is what I was meant to do. And I was waiting with the same thing, with my topic. Um, it happened, but in a really odd way. So I was reading, reading, reading, nothing was moving the dial. Nothing was exciting. And then I read something from someone who is the closest person I’ve ever read about. I never met this person who kind of did what I did very, very early on, which is kind of translate the research. He was a music educator, but he had access to neuromusical researchers. And he had four of them or something, and he said, in this article, if you wanted music teachers to know about your research, what would you tell them? Like, what do you think they should know? And I kept reading and reading and reading, and I got to the end, and I was furious. I was so angry, I just went, I don’t need to know any of that stuff, but I do need to know this, this, this, this, and this. And I thought, well, maybe that’s my angels going, this is your space. This is what you should be doing, because it’s made you so angry that they’ve not told you what you need to know. So that’s how I found the topic. And then I did find out why I was doing it about three years in. Because ultimately, what I was trying to answer is I couldn’t read very well when I was young. I was hiding that I couldn’t read, and I was using all these tricks. And I see kids now, and I watch them, and I go, you’re doing exactly what I did. And what I found out is that, basically, in my journey through my life, I wasn’t a very good reader at all. And then I was given a clarinet, but way more importantly, I was taught how to read music. And through that process about nine, six to nine months later, my reading got better, very, very quickly. And ultimately, the answer, or the question I was trying to answer was, did learning a musical instrument change the trajectory of my life, because it rewired my brain so that I could begin to read more effectively? I still struggle with it. Potentially, I’m dyslexic. I don’t know, and I will never know, because the neuroscientists have done all sorts of tests on my brain because I’ve asked them to and they’ve looked at my brain and gone, look, it’s just very interesting. It does things in an odd order and in an odd way, but it gets the job done. And so it’s kind of just doing things in a rewired way, and ultimately, I think I just want to know that the person who placed an instrument in my hand, it gave me that opportunity, and then me learning how to read music and putting those two things together changed my brain so that the trajectory of my life is entirely different to what it would have been. So ultimately, that’s how I got to why I study what I do. Because the lovely thing is, I love it more every single day, every single day, I feel more in love with this whole topic area.
AH: That absolutely shines through and how fascinating that you found your element. There’s a British writer, well he actually moved to the States, but Ken Robinson, you must have heard of him? Yeah? Amazing man, and he wrote this book about finding your element. And you clearly found your element, but it’s really interesting that you didn’t know you’d found your element, and then later discovered where that was coming from. And that’s kind of quite interesting parallel with advocacy, in that sometimes we look at the surface of what’s happening, maybe some of the resistance to what we want to change in people we’re trying to advocate to, but we actually need to delve deeper to the beliefs behind that and the experiences people had. So that’s a really interesting story to start off our podcast. Thank you for that, and fascinating to hear. I guess that leads me on to what led you to start to focus on advocacy, because obviously you started off by being an absolute specialist and geek around neuromusical research, absorbing yourself into that subject, and meeting all sorts of scientists and going all over the world, really, to talk to people who are researching this subject. So then, at what point did you start to focus more on the advocating side of things? Because you’re now, I would say an advocacy specialist as well.
AC: Yeah. I think I was so excited by the research because, so take the music out of my title, and I’m a teacher, an educator. And what I was seeing in the research was they were showing, not necessarily the nature of music learning. They were showing the nature of all learning. They were just using music as a tool to help us understand that. So it brought forth a huge number of different understandings about how we learn and how the brain actually functions. And what got me excited about being an advocate is saying this is not information that just needs to be with music educators or musicians or anyone who likes music. This actually needs, this actually has an impact on the entire educational scene, no matter how old you are. But I happen to focus on kids. But it happens, it happens all the way through life as well. So I got really interested in, how do I share this information with the most amount of impact, so that someone can see past the word music and see to the bigger thing about education and learning and that we have a mechanism that’s kind of just sitting in plain sight that could really, really change and improve a whole raft of things that we are having problems with across the educational system, including literacy and numeracy and attention and behaviour and all of those sorts of things have been shown to be improved by including more music as part of the daily experience of every child. And that, to me, is too exciting to keep to myself. So then that came to the point of like, how do you change minds? How do you, and Ken Robinson is a perfect example, he’s such an amazing orator, so absolutely incredible in the way that he did things that I love watching. I love watching him, but I love watching anyone who communicates something. I actually really often watch comedians because they are the master of timing and inflection and carrying someone along with them, and then spearing them off one side, it’s like, and that’s exactly what I’m trying to do, is to meet someone where they are, understand them, and then help them understand the thing that I’m really passionate about, and then how it applies to them and how it can help them. And I’ll do it in any which way else I want to I can. So, you know, I pull from business, I pull from marketing, I listen to, it sounds strange, listening to things about how cults are formed, like that’s all about, you know, sharing and communicating information and helping people to change their minds or believe in something different. So, yeah, I find it really fascinating. And it’s even, I think ultimately, when I help someone to learn how to advocate, and then they come back to me, three, six, nine, 12 months later with a story or a moment, and they grab me and go, I just did this. I walked I came into the office, and I said, I want to do this, and here’s the research and here’s the numbers, and this is how we’re going to do it. And they said, Yes, and that moment when they tell me that they got permission to do something that they wanted to do makes all the work worthwhile, because someone has been fundamentally shifted by the work that I’ve done, and now we’ll have that that skill forever.
AH: That’s fantastic to hear. And you do that in such a lot of different ways. I was talking to you earlier about the ripple effect of your work. You’re helping teachers, you’re helping students, you’re helping policy makers, you’re helping music education leaders. Can you just tell me a little bit about the various areas of work that you deliver, because one of your big things is the Bigger Better Brains website and community. But also you do a lot of consultancy work, and can you just sort of summarise that for the listeners?
AC: Yeah, I do a lot more consulting than I actually, like Bigger Better Brains is kind of like a side hustle, even though it’s the public facing part of what I do. That part is for, specifically for music teachers, and it’s my testing ground. It’s like, let’s here’s someone’s brought me a problem. What would I create that would share a message that actually helps them to go back that way and solve the problem they’ve got? An example I had recently was a teacher I work very closely with. We have we’re in exam time at the moment in Australia, and kids are saying to us, well, I can’t come to the rehearsal because I’ve got an exam. Now, for me, the research says you should go to rehearsal before an exam because it will prime your brain to perform at its very best once it hits the exam. And our rehearsals are at 7.30 in the morning, and they kick into their exams at nine, and we’re giving them this experience that they’re totally at their heightened performance state. They will do their very best they can in the exam. And it was a wicked, lovely problem of going, how do you share that to say, it’s actually the right thing to do is to go to rehearsal, because you’re actually doing something really good for your brain ready for exams, and you’re lowering stress and raising serotonin and oxytocin and all the wonderful things that we need. So yeah, Bigger Better Brains is my testing ground and I appreciate the massive community we have who really tell me if something works or doesn’t work. And it’s like, yeah, that doesn’t resonate. That’s not great. It’s like, Great, fantastic. Let’s try a different thing. So that feeds my creative soul, which is great. I do, there’s a lot of ongoing work in Australia that started with a TV show called Don’t Stop the Music, which started in the UK, and then we had an Australian version. It was quite different to the UK version, but I was really lucky. I was the on screen expert, and I was the campaign lead, and we had a campaign afterwards about getting instruments and things like that. But through that right, all in the background, I met a lot of philanthropists, and I met one particular one who is from Albert’s publishing, and she’s the fifth generation from Albert’s, and they have a foundation, and through talks and things like that, we said, how do we approach advocacy differently? How do we, how do we change the system? And we kept talking, and in the end, we’ve created this initiative which is now incredibly broad in Australia and has so many groups coming into it that basically is just, you know, a simple mission which is a quality, sequential and ongoing music education for every single Australian child. But what we’re doing is approaching it in a different way. It’s in some cases, about putting research out there, but it’s putting research out there and saying, here’s the nature of the problem, because our problems are very similar to England’s problems. We don’t have enough trained teachers, we don’t have enough resources, we don’t have enough value for music education in the system. But then we give them research which says that, and then we say, and here are the many solutions that you can have for that. And we’re getting real traction in a lot of states around Australia. We’ve just had a Joint Select parliamentary committee in New South Wales, which was called to look at music education in in the state. We’ve got a music education strategy in South Australia, in Victoria, we’ve just had our first big round table. It’s all shifting and changing, and people are starting to go, music education is a primary element of a quality education, and that narrative means it’s like, okay, if it is an element, then how do we make it happen for every child? So they’re actually being really open and saying, Look, not every kid’s getting music education, and they’re definitely not all getting it from a qualified teacher who feels confident and competent to teach. Okay, we now are open about the problem. How do we fix it? And that’s the next thing that I’m working so much on is the implementation. How do we change things and actually solving the very real practical problems? And I’m loving getting into that. It’s really, really good fun. So I do that. I visit lots of schools around Australia every single year, and I usually go and work with them for one or two days. And it’s different every single time. Sometimes I’ll be working with year seven, all of year seven about using music for productivity, or I’ll be having lunch with the whole senior leadership to talk about, you know, where does music sit in the curriculum and if anything, or in the life of the school, really, but in anything that’s really good, because I can get them to all raise up their own personal beliefs about it, and that’s often where their decision making is coming from is when I say, Well, what kind of music did you do? And they’ll say, you know, I was the kid that was told not to sing, but to mouth, because my voice was terrible. And it’s like, right, but you’ve got an ‘arts scar’ which is informing your decision making. Let’s talk about that while we then talk about, okay, what’s best for the school? So I do a lot of stuff there. I’ve started to do a lot more presenting outside my field, like directly outside my field. So I was at an early years summit a couple of weeks ago, on a panel with some amazing people. It was out there going, Why am I here? But they were just all talking about, you know, what are the many things that need to come in for early intervention for our zero to five year old children, that we need to make sure they get the best start at school? And one of those is about having music education, but even more fundamentally, they need to be singing. We need to have more of a singing culture back in this country, which we’ve never really had, and we need to make singing an okay thing to do. So I do a lot of that, and I do a lot of researching. I do a lot of writing. I explore my ideas through writing as well. So every single quarter, we have a magazine, which is my opportunity to say, I’ve been wondering about this. And that’s all coming to, and now I’ve got so many of them, like I’ve now put them together in books, which I’m about to release, and it’s a really nice way to go through, Wow. What’s the evolution of my thinking? How have I and I love the fact that people will allow me to just explore an idea and come to a conclusion, but then the next time, I’ll go back and I’ll go, but now I’ve got a different conclusion, because I’ve moved on. I have a community around me who are willing to let me explore and push the boundaries and see where the end of the bubble is and see how far I can push it. So I’m very, very lucky. So yeah, I’ve got a lot of creativity happening. A lot of, I do a lot of coaching. I’m really loving the coaching. So coaching, people who run music programmes, directors of music in schools, music teachers who are young and want to, like, really, really make a difference, but they’re sort of, they’re only just getting hold of their craft, and they’re so excited about making a difference, and it’s how do you manage them through that? But yeah, just helping individuals find their voice again, in some cases, and in other cases, helping them to harness their energy. But yeah, it’s I do whatever gets thrown my way. I don’t know if that’s what you need.
AH: That’s really great, because I think listeners will want to know what you have to offer. Because I think that in the UK we could really do with your skills. And I know you’ve been working with Hertfordshire music service, and with Berkshire, you are already working in the UK, which is brilliant, but we’d love to see you over here a bit more.
AC: So I’d love to be there.
AH: And I guess all of what you’re doing is summed up in that Bigger Better Brains motto, which is educate to advocate. So your coaching, your training of music teachers, your training of students. I also really love the fact that you’re training students directly, young people, they know instinctively what’s going on in their bodies when they’re making music, and are often pretty articulate about it. Whenever I’ve been doing workshops with young people and talk to them about music, they’re absolutely great and also so curious about the science behind what’s happening when they make music. So I think that’s really powerful. Because if we can help young people to advocate for the subject that they love, what amazing things we can achieve. So I want to get kind of some tips from you, but first of all, before I sort of move on to asking you for some tips. In a sense, I wondered if you can perhaps start that off by giving me an example, or more than one of where changing the framing of a message has completely altered its impact with a decision maker.
AC: It’s a really good question, because the problem is, I have so many things flooding into my head. And I think I read your question before, when we talked about it’s like, Oh, I’ve got a good idea. Now it’s flown out of my head. I think the reframing part, it’s, in some cases, it’s the use part. So I’ll tell you an example recently, literally two weeks ago, that was shared with me. So there was a school in Queensland. They’re having problems with their exit credential, which would be your A levels. And basically what’s happening is music is getting scaled down. So a lot of kids are not choosing to do it in our year, 11 and 12, last two years of school, because they just it just doesn’t enhance their university entrance number. So teachers are fighting against this, and it’s really hard to manage, and they’re just getting smaller and smaller classes and smaller and smaller groups. And what had happened is a school that was close by, that was the medical school in the area, had heard that the kids were being discouraged from taking music in year 11 and 12 because of the fact that it wasn’t going to help their entrance score. And the medical school contacted this school where this teacher was and specifically said, Can you please stop discouraging them and start encouraging them, because we’ve just had our first year of medical students go through, and every single one of them has failed on their fine motor skills. Now these were medical students who were aiming to be surgeons. When they looked at the research, they found that, and this is some of the research I’ve shared a lot, is that surgeons who have learnt musical instruments are far faster and far more accurate with their actual surgery. Even when they’re using robotics, they’re actually the best ones when it comes to robotics. And I’ve spoken to a surgeon recently, and I said, What is it about your musical training? Because they’ve had music in their past that you’re using with their robotics. And he said, It’s all rhythm. Everything is about rhythm. It’s about how these things and it’s actually called by manual movement. It’s like what we do with knives and forks, but it’s all about the rhythm of how these two things are doing different jobs, but they are interacting with each other and the rhythm they are making between them, which I thought was the most amazing thing they said. So that’s a reframing part. And again, this is it’s noticing a shift here in Australia in particular, that we’re starting it to really get into the public view the transferability of skills that come from music learning, and the fact that a medical school said, please make them take music in year 11 and 12, because these are your high flying kids anyway, they want to be doctors. We want to take them in, but we want to make sure that their fine motor skills are as good as they possibly can be, because you still need those as a surgeon. So I don’t know if it’s a reframing, but it’s an it’s what I would call advocacy in action. It’s a real life version of how music learning can contribute to future careers that aren’t musical necessarily, but are also people are starting to see how important it is across the board, not just this very narrow version that we tend to have, that you only study music if you’re going to be a musician, and if you’re going to do it, you have to be exceptional at it. You have to end up doing it as a career and making all of your money from it. And you have to do it on stage, which is when I talk to parents, that’s exactly what they say. I say, what is a musician? And they say on stage, make their money and exceptional. And I say, so you mean Taylor Swift? And I mean, yeah, that’s a musician. I’m going no, but there’s so much more that it could be related to. And I think what I’m trying to find is all the different parts of research that can show how transferable it is, and therefore how vital and important and essential it is.
AH: So that brings me on to advocacy. And the most important, I would say, single, most powerful kind of action you can do in advocacy is to start by understanding the person you’re talking to and trying to influence. And what I really love about something that you’ve termed your BBB+ method, is that the right word, yeah, for advocacy. It kind of breaks down the process of advocacy into a number of steps, starting with understanding the thorn, which is the kind of tricky thing that is preventing somebody from understanding the value that music education can bring but it’s actually going beyond that initial, because I think that’s where we often start, We think, oh, they don’t like music education. They’re not willing to fund music education because of this. But actually, you suggest that people delve a bit deeper and think about the belief behind that, where that comes from, and also what’s really interestingly, what’s fueling that belief. So I wonder if you can tell listeners a little bit more about that, maybe to share some tips.
AC: Yeah, so the first three steps are the thorn, the belief and the fuel. And I know the thorn is a funny place to start, but I was trying to think of what it is, but it’s when someone says something, and you as a music educator or a musically trained person, go, oh, they just don’t get it. Like, so an example would be, oh, my child’s not having fun anymore, they’re going to stop learning their instrument. And that, to me, feels like a thorn, like a prick in the finger that hurts. It’s like, Oh, you just don’t get it. Like, the not having fun is actually a really important part of the process, because when they keep working through that I’m not having fun, and they break through, which they will the benefit to the brain and their benefit to their resilience and persistence is enormous. But if you say, Well, you’re not having fun, therefore you won’t do it, what message are you sending? You’re actually sending the message that every time something gets hard, you give up because it’s not fun, because life’s meant to be fun. And that’s a misconception that we have with this generation of students, particularly. So the thorn is whatever someone says. And I think that’s the first thing I often try and teach people, is, how do you catch the thorn? How do you not dismiss it and go, Oh, hang on, that’s a thorn. Someone said something, or someone wrote something. Another one, someone shared with me the other day was, Well, you’re not really teaching, you’re just having fun with the kids. So she was a primary school, junior school teacher, and she just said, That’s how everyone on the outside perceives what she does and does not see in any way, shape or form, all the sequencing and all the responsive teaching and all of the concepts that she’s just weaving into what looks like a fun experience. But the thing is, it needs to look fun, because actually what you’re doing is asking the kids to do something that’s incredibly vulnerable and scary, because you’re asking them to do all sorts of strange things. But if you don’t make it fun, it just gets too scary, and we as humans go, No, I’m too scared of that. I won’t do it. So the thorn is whatever someone says or writes, or even a quip, even that little off handed stuff. And the worst one ever, which I haven’t heard for a long time, but still sits there as well, You know, you couldn’t be a real musician, so you became a teacher. That kind of devaluing. You don’t need to do anything about it then, but it’s just being able to identify what that thorn is. The next step is to stop for a second look at the person who said whatever they said, or wrote whatever they wrote, and then go, alright, potentially what belief is sitting behind what they just said. And, you know, in some it can be all sorts of things. So with the you’re just having fun with the kids, you’re not really teaching them kind of concept. There could be a whole bunch of beliefs behind that, one of which could be that actually school should just be English, maths and science, or the core things, and it shouldn’t be all these other things are a waste of our time, or it could be that that person themselves didn’t have a great experience with music learning somewhere in their past, and they’re trying to deflect that. There’s all sorts of things we could do in human behaviour. The whole thing about my child’s not having fun anymore, they’re going to give up their instrument. What could be sitting behind there is that they’re paying a lot of money. It’s very stressful financially. They’re not seeing their child practice because they’re stuck in this place where they’re emotionally really struggling with it, and this is placing even more pressure on the parents, because they’re wanting to give them every single opportunity they can, but they need to see some benefit out of it. There’s all sorts of things that can sit behind what somebody said, but I always stop for a second and go, Okay, hang on. What belief is sitting there? And I’ve been looking for statistics, and I’ve found some of them to try and understand how many people have had what I would call a meaningful music learning experience in childhood. So how many people have learned an instrument, been in a choir, all of those sets of things. And it’s different in different countries, in the UK, the only stat I’ve really been able to find is about 20%. So 20% of people have had learn a musical instrument, been in a choir, all those things. I flip that statistic around, and I go, I. Okay, eight out of every 10 people I meet have not had that experience. So they have no personal experience of the music learning process. So when I talk about it, and if I talk about it in such a way, that’s like, I make an assumption that you’ve had this experience before, they don’t know it’s like, it’s the most difficult thing for them to do. So it’s always about what belief is sitting behind that, and the belief and the fuel are quite close to each other as well. I think often I work with boys schools and it’s like, Well, boys don’t play music, they play rugby. And then I think, well, who’s had that? Like, where’s that coming from, and what’s the belief behind it? And a lot of it has to do with music making is a feminine pursuit, and that’s got a lot of history that sits behind it. And it’s a weird thing when I sit there and go, but if I look at an orchestra, most of them are men. So where are we getting that idea from that only girls can do music, for example, and then looking at the person and going, Okay, did they play rugby? Yes, they did. Were they captain of the rugby team? Yes, they were. Did they play in the county or even the country team? Yes. So they’ve got all of their identity coming from rugby, just like someone else might have all their identity coming from being a musician. But those two things for that particular person, don’t sit together and they can’t view that a musician could also play rugby and a rugby player could also play the trumpet, for example. So it’s their background and their view of the world. And the reason why that’s important is to understand where to begin advocating and what language to use. And I think if I deal with the sporting person, it’s always about you’ve got a team of rugby players. I’ve got a team of choristers. They have to work together to make formations, to do things, so they run plays and things like that. My choristers have to follow me and follow each other, and they have to follow all the music. And there’s patterns and all sorts of things that have to happen in that for them to achieve their goal. There’s team, a sense of teamwork in there. There’s team flow, even if they really get into it and trying to get them to see that the two things are just the same. They’re not wildly different. That whole idea that you lose one of your rugby players, it really matters to the team. I lose one of my choristers, it really matters to the choir. And trying to get them to see that. But that’s not one conversation. That’s conversations over months and years with advocacy. I think, where we’ve run into a problem is it’s so obvious to us how important it is because we’ve made our life around it, so we feel like we should only have to say it once or even not at all, and everyone should get it. And the problem is, if eight out of 10 people that we meet have never had that experience, we have to say it over and over again in different ways, in different formats, and it will land. And Australia is a perfect example of that, it’s landed. And P in the general public, I could go out, I’m in an airport at the moment, I could go out and I could talk to someone and say, So learning music. Do you reckon it’s really good for kids to do? And they will all say, Yes, it is. But even more importantly, if I ask them why, they’ll say, be able to say something. It’s really good for them to express themselves. It’s really good because it’s related to literacy. It’s really good because it helps manage their stress. So that’s where it can actually happen. But we have to say it 1,000 times more than we think we should.
AH: Yeah, so much so. All of that stuff is so valuable Anita, thank you so much. And there’s so much more to say about it, because what you’re using is techniques of decision science. You know, you’re recognising that people’s decisions are influenced by deeply held, very emotional beliefs, and even with the hardest nose budget holder, science and actually, neuroscience has told us that people still make decisions with their hearts rather than their heads. So that’s one thing. The other thing is, yes, we all have the curse of knowledge. We know what we know, and we kind of assume other people know it, and if they don’t know it, we think they’re wrong or they’re bad or whatever. It’s hard to step outside of our own curse of knowledge sometimes.
AC: Yeah, but I think music teachers are uniquely positioned, because the more and more I’ve worked with them, they can read people. We’ve just never really gone, Hey, maybe this is our secret superpower. Part of advocacy is actually, first of all, reading the person and being curious about the person and wanting to understand their point of view. And that comes through one of the big five personality things, which is openness to experience, which is really, really high in musically trained people. To be curious about others, to help that understand them, to then go, okay, how can I help you understand me and the thing that is most important to me? So I think, I think we’ve got much more up our sleeve than we realise.
AH: Absolutely, I’ve written a few articles for a few music education and community music publications, and I always start with saying, you have musicians, music educators, community musicians, particularly, because they work with people through music. They are really, really well placed to become excellent advocates, and you’re giving them the tools to do that, which is fantastic. And also, I think sometimes people have the ability, but maybe don’t know where to start. And you break it down into really practical steps and give lots of really valuable learning, which is scaffolded, because people can build on that and go into it as much as they like or as little as they like. This might be a bit of a difficult question, because it’s a big topic, but what can people do practically to sharpen their advocacy skills? What would you recommend? And you can recommend your own stuff here, because it is incredibly valuable.
AC: [Laughs] All my own stuff, yeah. As you said, I’m trying to break it down so that it’s, and again, it’s the teacher in me, and it’s the part of me that kind of goes, how do I help someone develop a skill that they don’t think they have and they don’t know they need, basically, and that’s because I work with teenagers, and that’s all I do all the time, is trying to help them into that mindset. I think one of the things that is really important is know your audience, and the way to know your audience is to ask questions. So I think that even if you’re an instrumental teacher and you’re dealing with a parent, it’s those, you know, the little times when they come and pick them up, instead of just saying, Yep, had a great lesson today, off you go. There’s a point there where you can start to build a relationship with them, even if it’s like, God, the weather’s been terrible the last couple of weeks. You know, all of that, just starting to get comfortable with them, because that’s the way into then getting to know when they’re having a problem. You know, look, Sally’s not practicing anymore. We don’t know what to do. There’s so many arguments at home. But if you started to have conversations already, just about little things, then you can start to have the deeper conversations and the bigger conversations. So I think getting to know our audience. I think when it comes to leadership, getting to being compassionate towards them, I know it’s very hard sometimes, but they’re not two dimensional people. They’re three dimensional people who want to do the best job they can. Just sometimes the way they think the best job should be done is not the best way for you. So I think getting to know them is is very, very important, and helping them understand how what you do can help them, I think, in the end, is very important. I think repetition is really important too. So as I said, saying the same thing in an image, in a letter, in an email, in a speech, in anything you possibly, in a hand out, anything. So they just keep getting peppered with this thing. I often use the example that in the 1950s doctors used to advertise cigarettes with their white coats on, saying, This will help your lung capacity. And now, 35 years later, we have pictures that are absolutely horrific on the outside of cigarette packets. Like, how have we got from there to there? And that’s really interesting. It takes a really long time, in some cases, to change things. But what heartens me is, if we all do it in a similar kind of way, not the same, but a similar way, it will start to become, Oh, yeah, learning music’s really good. And yeah, they’re having trouble at the moment, but I know it’s growing their resilience and persistence in their brain. So we’re going to stick at this, because I know I’m giving them a gift for life, if that’s from a parent, for example. So I think doing that, the other thing I know this sounds very strange, do something unusual, do something different, because I go back to my mum was a primary school teacher, and she used to talk about the teachers who would only ever speak at one level, like the really loud teachers or the really soft teachers. And think about it like the nagging mother is another way to look at it, but after a while, you don’t hear it at all. You’re like Homer Simpson, and he just hears ‘blah, blah, blah, blah’, and I think just like when we do stuff with kids, sometimes when we go, this approach isn’t working. Let’s just flip it around. Let’s do something completely different. And as soon as you do, the kids stop and go, What just happened? I’m not getting the normal reaction I got before. So something has changed, which is the switch in their head to go, Oh, maybe I could behave differently. Now, grown-ups are just kids, grown up. We’re all still human, so I think doing something a little bit differently, instead of trying to go and have a meeting and talk about something, just go, I’m just going to every single week, you’re going to get an email with something attached for Bigger Better Brains, for example, or a link, or I found this, or here’s a photo of that, just something different, where even it gets to the point where, say, for example, as a head teacher who goes, Okay, we’ve had 10 weeks of this now. Have you got something you want to discuss? And it’s like, oh, absolutely I do. Let’s talk about this. So again, it invites a change in behaviour from the other person, if we change how we are behaving. And I think that’s a really important thing to think about is if, if we feel like we’re hitting our head against a wall or, and I never use these, but people talk about fighting for music education, and if we feel like the fight is just not we’re not winning. Attack from a different direction. Do something different, do something unexpected that will actually change the game. I know this is a very strange reference, but one of the battles in Scotland in 1745 or something. No, it was in America. It was in the American Civil War, but it had a whole bunch of Scots who did it. And this is like a very Scottish thing to do, but basically they, the Americans, had all their tanks lined up, and they were ready to fight the next day. So the Scots just went in and took all the bolts out of the wheels to the cannons and took them away so they couldn’t actually move them. And that’s that kind of really unexpected, clever, different thing to do that changes the game. And I think a lot of the time we just have to go. I have control of the game. I’m one of the players in the game. I can behave differently and get a different result. And I know that seems very strange, but I actually think with all advocacy, it’s a really good way to to look at it about what can I do that’s really unexpected?
AH: Yeah, definitely people do switch off. Actually, I was just thinking as you were talking that everything we do in advocacy is actually it’s quite good for parenting too.
AC: Yeah, absolutely.
AH: Well, I’m afraid we’re coming to the end of our time. What I normally do is to ask people to share either three practical pieces of advice or three calls to action for others working in music education, things that you’d like to see happening in the next few years.
AC: I think the calls to action are good. I think one thing I’ve learned, or the approach that we’ve taken in Australia, which has been really interesting, is we so when it’s come to advocacy, particularly from a policy point of view, instead of putting together a group of representative people, which is, for example, you know someone from the exam board and someone from, you know, the music educators, representative group, you know, all those sorts of people. We specifically went, No, we’re going to bring together people in the field, but people who are big thinkers. People who really want to attack the problem and not represent themselves in that. And I think a call to action is there are different ways to enact policy change, and in many cases, it’s doing something from the top and the bottom at the same time. And if I think about it, that’s often how revolutions happen. Something happens at the top end, something happens down the bottom, and it comes together in the middle.
AH: And systemic change, absolutely.
AC: Yeah, absolutely. Systemic change is there as well. And I think too often, if it’s a call to action, it’s don’t just think that changing one thing will change everything. Don’t think that changing one policy or getting one minister on side will change, like, don’t put all our energy into that. Actually do two things at once. One is gaining a groundswell of people who agree with music education being really important and the right of every child. But then also going, how can we change what’s happening on a policy level, and then all the little bits in between. So I think it’s think differently about advocacy. Don’t take as you know, you do this, then you do this, then you do this, because that’s what everyone’s expecting. Be like the Scots. Take the bolts out of the wheels and you will get a different result. And it might, but also it might take a lot of time, and it’s talking about being in it for the long haul, not just wanting to change one little thing. And speaking of which, in Scotland, where I’m working with Scottish government and with the representative groups over there, and we’re seeing that change happen really significantly at the moment. So as an advocacy approach, it does work, and I’m now seeing it work in a couple of different countries, which is really, really amazing and heartening to know that that’s changing. Another one is help people understand the value of what you do. And I keep saying that one, because there’s a lot to it. Help people, don’t talk at them, help them, educate them on what the what you actually do, because a lot of the stuff that we do in music, people don’t see. It’s behind the rehearsal door, it’s behind the lesson door, it’s behind the classroom door, and even to the point where we don’t let people come into those because we don’t, don’t come in yet, just wait until the performance. That’s when it’s going to be at its peak. But what we actually need to do is show how the sausage is made. We actually need to show the learning process. Because so many people, those two out of the 10 are the ones who actually have ever seen it before. So we need to open up our doors, and in many cases, I think with adults, the most important way to do it is to make sure that we get hands on with it. There’s some great things that are done in in lots of different schools in Australia, like they have concerts that are on, but they put out a whole bunch of extra percussion instruments, and they invite the parents to play them. And I’ve never seen fathers turn into George of the Jungle more often than timpani.
AH: That’s fantastic.
AC: The childhood glee they get, but again, you’ve given them the experience that potentially, many of them have never, ever had before. Experience is really, really important to do. Don’t make it so we’re all separated out and they’re on stage and then not do crazy things like getting kids to walk through the audience when they’re singing, and having the parents actually sing along with something, you know, getting instruments in their hand, getting them clapping, getting them do all sorts of different things. So they’re actually part of the learning process, not sitting there as a parent going Well, I have to be here to watch my one child in the 150 kids that are on stage.
AH: And musicians are great at doing those random things, like the, you know, guitarist who gets off the stage and walks into the audience to do their solo, or whatever, you know, so it’s about bringing some musicianship into what you’re doing to advocate, isn’t it?
AC: Yeah. So that reminds me of the last one I was thinking of. It amazes me to watch music teachers who are generally, when you meet them, they’re very quiet, and they’re very reserved, very organised, all that. You get them up in front of an 80 piece orchestra and 150 voice choir, and they become this different version of themselves. They become this performer, and they can tweak and change, and they’re in control of everything, and it’s absolutely amazing. And yet, you get that same person and say, can you sit down with three members of the board from school and explain to them what they do? And they fall into a puddle. They absolutely melt. And it’s like, hang on a second. You have this skill. You channel this skill when you’re being a music teacher and a musician in front of when you’re performing. Take that skill and realise that when you’re sitting with three members of the board, you are performing and the number of times I’ve seen people go, I tried it, and it felt a bit weird, but then I went, No, wow, I am this superhero, amazing person who can do absolutely anything. You’re just three members of the board, you don’t frighten me at all anymore, because I can organize 80 kids and 150 kids, and I can stand up there and know exactly what I’m doing. And I think again, we have a skill that we need to recognise and take and transfer across into our advocacy and not feel like we shouldn’t be saying these things, or we’re selling an idea. Because we’re not. We’re just educating and helping people to understand something they don’t understand yet, and we’re going to change their lives and their children’s lives by doing it. It doesn’t matter who it is, so view advocacy as performance, and great things will happen.
AH: Oh, amazing. I don’t want our conversation to end, but I’m aware that you’ve just got off a flight, and yeah, it’s the middle of the evening in Australia, and so I must let you go, but I so appreciate you taking the time Anita to talk to me today. Been an absolute pleasure, as always.
AC: So lovely to talk to you as well. Thank you.
AH: Thank you. Good luck with all your doing, and I hope we can tempt you over to the UK very soon.
AC: I’ll be there in a flash.