Following a BMus and MA at Cardiff University, studying with the world-renowned Bach scholar Professor Peter Williams, I completed my PGCE at Cardiff Met and then spent 10 years in the classroom teaching secondary music. I also taught music at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and Cardiff University, as well as working for the education programmes at the Open University.
I joined Cardiff Met part time in 2012 and full time in 2015, and now lead the PGCE Secondary Music programme. My other responsibilities include taking a leading role in the clinical practice work stream, designing the school placement experience for PGCE students. In 2020, this involved carrying out important work with university and school colleagues on a very short time-scale to create and disseminate a broader definition of clinical practice to take account of remote working in the Covid-19 pandemic.
I am also currently working on my PhD, A study of Key Stage 3 Music Teachers’ Pedagogical Belief in the Context of a New Curriculum for Wales.
In 2018 my colleague Emma Thayer and I collaborated to create a podcast, Emma and Tom Talk Teaching, which has been downloaded over 27,000 times in 80countries.
Outside my work in education, I do my best to carry on working as a professional musician specialising in accompaniment and historically-informed performance.
Publications:
Breeze, T., & Beauchamp, G. (2021). Barriers and enablers to undergraduate music students undertaking a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) secondary music programme.
British Journal of Music Education https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265051721000188 Kneen, J., Breeze, T., Thayer, E., John, V. and Davies-Barnes, S. (2021) 'Pioneer teachers: how far can individual teachers achieve agency within curriculum development?', Journal of Educational Change.
Kneen, J., Breeze, T., Davies-Barnes, S., John, V. and Thayer, E. (2020) 'Curriculum integration: the challenges for primary and secondary schools in developing a new curriculum in the expressive arts', Curriculum Journal, 31(2), pp. 258-275.
Pugh, C., Thayer, E., Breeze, T., Beauchamp, G., Kneen, J., Watkins, S. and Rowlands, B. (2020) 'Perceptions of the New Role of the Research Champion in Developing a New ITE Partnership: Challenges and Opportunities for Schools and Universities', Wales Journal of Education, 22(1), pp. 185-208.
Conference Presentations:Breeze, T. and Thayer, E. (2020) ‘What do cross-curricular approaches look like in the expressive arts? Which ones work? Insights from a systematic literature review’, ResearchED Cymru, Cardiff, 29 February.
Breeze, T. and Thayer, E. (2019) 'Cross-Curricular Pedagogies in Music and Drama: a Systematic Literature Review and its Impact on Practice', The 15th Annual Conference of the British Education Studies Association (BESA), Swansea, 27-28 June.
Breeze, T., Thayer, E. and Kneen, J. (2018) ‘A Connected Curriculum: using collaboration and peer teaching to support an integrated response to curriculum change in Wales’, The 14th Annual Conference of the British Education Studies Association (BESA), Bolton, 28-29 June
