Course participants with their certificates
I spent the weekend teaching the Association of British Choral Directors’ Initial Conducting course, in its new two-day format. I wrote in the past about the educational value of the previous structure of four one-day sessions a month apart. The practical downside of it was that it was hard for people to attend to the whole course, and the whole-weekend format was devised in response.
When preparing for the weekend it felt at first like trying to fit a quart into a pint pot, but as there is the expectation that people will typically do the course more than once before being ready to progress to the Intermediate course, it turned out to be actually quite manageable. And the core practical work has always been strongly tailored to individual needs, with people at somewhat different stages learning together, so in that sense it hasn’t really changed.
