Three Things I Want to Protect in Education as a Teacher, Conductor and Principal

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to see education from several different positions.

As a teacher, I am closest to the moment when learning actually happens. As a choral conductor, I think constantly about how many different individuals gradually become an ensemble. As a principal, I also have to consider curriculum, teacher development, systems, resources and the long-term direction of an educational organisation.

These roles do not always reveal the same problems, but together they have brought me back to several ideas that have become increasingly important.

As education continues to adopt new tools, systems, assessment methods and technologies, there are three things I find myself wanting to protect: student agency, professional judgement, and genuine human relationships.

None of these ideas is particularly new. Yet perhaps because they are so fundamental, they can also be easily overlooked when efficiency becomes the dominant concern.

1. Protecting Student Agency in Learning

Education still requires adult guidance.

Children need structure, boundaries, appropriate challenge and clear expectations. If being “child-centred” simply means allowing children to do whatever they prefer, that is not what I understand student agency to mean.

What matters more to me is whether children gradually begin to understand what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how they might adjust their own learning.

In music, for example, we naturally want children to sing in tune and perform rhythm accurately. But if a learner continually waits for the teacher to identify every mistake and decide every next step, much of the judgement still belongs to the adult.

A meaningful shift happens when the child begins to hear for themselves.

They begin to notice that an entry was not together, that a phrase lost its shape, or that a musical idea might work differently if they changed something.

At that point, learning is no longer simply the completion of instructions. The learner is beginning to participate in the thinking.

Arts education offers a particularly rich environment for this. Music, visual arts, dance and drama rarely contain only one possible answer. Children continually listen, observe, feel, choose, try and reconsider.

This is why I increasingly hope that we do not only teach children answers. We also help them gradually develop the ability to think, attempt, evaluate and revise.

Agency does not remove the teacher's guidance. Good guidance should gradually help professional judgement become part of the learner's own thinking.

2. Protecting Professional Judgement

Education now has access to more tools than ever.

Curriculum frameworks, learning platforms, assessment data, AI, teaching materials and standardised systems can all help educators work with greater structure. Within an academy, good systems are also important because quality should not depend entirely on the memory or experience of one individual.

But I increasingly remind myself that systems should support professional judgement rather than replace it.

The same lesson plan can produce very different learning experiences with children of different ages, abilities and levels of readiness.

A teacher still needs to judge when to maintain an expectation and when to adjust the complexity of a task; when a child genuinely does not understand and when they simply need another attempt; when immediate support is necessary and when it may be better to remain quiet for a moment and let the learner search for an answer.

These decisions are difficult to capture fully in a standard operating procedure.

They require knowledge of child development, understanding of the subject and careful observation of what is actually happening in the classroom.

From a principal's perspective, this is also why teacher development cannot consist only of telling teachers what to do. Professional growth should gradually help educators understand why a particular approach works and how to make thoughtful decisions when circumstances change.

An educational organisation with systems but no professional judgement can become mechanical. An organisation with individual judgement but no shared standards can become inconsistent.

The challenge is not to choose one over the other, but to allow professional standards and professional judgement to strengthen one another.

3. Protecting Human Relationships in Education

Education ultimately still happens between people.

Whether a child is willing to attempt something difficult, admit that they do not understand, or accept feedback often depends not only on the teaching method but also on whether they feel that they are being taken seriously.

Trust also matters between teachers and families, within teams, and between an academy and the community it serves.

This does not mean everyone must always agree.

Education naturally brings together different expectations, different experiences and different ways of understanding a situation. The goal is not to remove all disagreement, but to retain enough trust and clarity that when perspectives differ, we can return to the child's learning and long-term development and continue the conversation.

Relationships also require boundaries.

A healthy educational relationship needs respect, clear responsibility and appropriate principles. Warmth without boundaries can become unclear; rules without understanding can remove too much of the human dimension from education.

Conducting constantly reminds me of this.

A choir is not simply many independent voices happening at the same time. It begins to become an ensemble when individuals learn to hear one another.

Each person still has a voice, but gradually becomes aware that their voice also affects the whole.

This is one of the reasons I value arts education so deeply.

It teaches children that expressing themselves matters, but listening to others matters too.

These Three Things Are Connected

Over time, I have realised that student agency, professional judgement and human relationships cannot really be separated.

Without professional judgement, respect for the learner can easily become a lack of direction. Without relationships, even excellent teaching strategies may struggle to reach the learner. And if children remain permanently passive, even a well-designed curriculum may fail to develop independent learners.

So when I think about the future of Tone Color Academy, I increasingly ask questions beyond what new programmes or systems we should add.

Are our learning experiences helping children develop their own judgement?

Are our teachers continuing to grow professionally rather than only following procedures?

Are our systems helping people work together more effectively, rather than allowing the system itself to become the goal?

There are no immediate or perfect answers to these questions. They require us to keep returning to classrooms, rehearsals, curriculum discussions, teacher development and conversations with families.

Technology will continue to change, and educational tools will continue to evolve. In the years ahead, we will undoubtedly encounter methods and challenges that do not yet exist today.

The faster this environment changes, however, the more important it becomes for an educational organisation to know what it wants to protect.

I hope we can protect children's growing capacity to make thoughtful judgements, protect educators' ability to think professionally, and protect the human connections that no system can fully replace.

Perhaps what education most needs to preserve is not one particular method, but the clarity to recognise what should not be easily lost even when our methods continue to change.

About the Author

Chris Lai
Arts Educator | Founder & Principal of Tone Color Academy

Chris works across children's music, choral and multidisciplinary arts education. His writing brings together teaching, conducting, curriculum development, educational leadership and ongoing reflection on children's growth and meaningful learning through the arts.

About Tone Color Academy

Tone Color Academy is a multidisciplinary arts education academy based in South Puchong, offering programmes in music, visual arts, dance, drama and public speaking.

The academy continues to develop its curriculum, teaching practice and learning experiences around child development, teacher professionalism and long-term educational value, with the belief that arts education should support not only technical skills but also expression, judgement, collaboration, creativity and the ability to work through challenge.

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