About
Jesse is a Singapore-based artist-educator and piano specialist with over a decade of professional teaching experience.
Over the past 10 years, he has successfully carved out a unique musical niche in Singapore, specialising in contemporary pop instruction and jazz improvisation, while remaining highly proficient across a wide range of musical genres.
Jesse’s path to becoming an educator was deeply unconventional. As a child, he dreaded music lessons, feeling confined and judged by the rigid structures imposed by both his parents and teachers. Consequently, he never envisioned a long-term career in education; he originally intended to teach for just a couple of years as a temporary means to supplement his income while pursuing his bachelor's degree. However, as he immersed himself in the practice, he found himself unexpectedly and increasingly drawn to the transformative power of the profession for both teacher and student.
Today, Jesse continues to balance his dual identity as a performer and an academic. He maintains an active presence in the local music scene, playing live shows on a regular basis and composing original music whenever inspiration strikes.
A passionate lifelong learner, Jesse recently completed his Master of Arts in Arts Pedagogy and Practice. He fully intends to advance his research and practice by pursuing a doctoral degree in a related field in the near future, all while continuing his work as a performer and mentor to the next generation of musicians.
Scaffolding Creative Expression: A Dialogic, Adaptive Approach to Teaching Music Improvisation Using Bloom's Taxonomy
Both music educators and students in Singapore increasingly display a decline in motivation regarding their creative craft.
This deficit in motivation is exacerbated by a division in conventional improvisation pedagogy—which traditionally overly prioritises simplistic exercises or highly sophisticated frameworks, leaving a critical instructional gap for intermediate learners.
This study addresses this divide by proposing a dialogic, adaptive approach to teaching music improvisation, utilising Bloom’s Taxonomy as a guiding framework to scaffold student progression. This dialogic framework relies on continuous, co-constructed conversations, whereby teaching prompts are continuously recalibrated based on each student's current musical capabilities and emotional state.
By shifting lessons away from traditional top-down instruction, the adaptive mechanism ensures learners actively negotiate meaning—thus co-authoring their individual creative improvisational pathways in real time. Operating within an action research framework, this study tracked one instructional cycle involving three students in one-on-one settings within their homes.
Qualitative data from teacher reflections, student interviews, and audio recordings of the lessons were analysed to assess pedagogical efficacy. The findings indicate promising advancements—despite distinct starting proficiencies and baseline motivation levels, all three students demonstrated notable growth in both musical skills and intrinsic motivation.
These results suggest that structured, dialogic improvisation can successfully bridge pedagogical gaps and revitalise student engagement. Globally, these insights offer a scalable model for modernising and democratising improvisation instruction. Locally, they challenge longstanding perceptions of music education, in the hopes for a more sustainable, creativity-driven curriculum in Singapore.
Professional practice
My current research looks for what happens to the student experience in music classes when the pedagogical focus shifts from one centred around following instructions towards one that is centred around building and nurturing self-directed, imaginative musicians.
I’d like to believe that my classes are quite different from the typical music lesson. I focus quite heavily on my students’ creative agency—as compared to the usual robotic, mindless repetition of exam pieces and technical skills that are the hallmark of traditional individual music lessons.
Chng Xin Xuan
Paul Wong
Jerry Teo
Xu Yanzhe
Gaby Rae
Michelle Zhang
