Background: Traditional instrumental education often prioritizes technical reproduction through a master-apprentice hierarchy. While this directive approach can be useful for acquiring specific technical skills, it often limits opportunities for students to develop independent artistic agency and their own musical voice.

Aims: This paper proposes CORE, a conceptual framework that redefines musical creativity not as a transmissible skill, but as an emergent property arising from collaborative processes. It aims to provide educators with a practical heuristic to design environments where creativity is invited to emerge rather than enforced.

Method: The framework is grounded in established music education literature and the authors' own empirical research. To ensure the model is useful for teacher training and policy design, we employed a parsimonious selection of key components, prioritizing theoretical transparency and practical applicability over complexity.

Results: In the CORE framework, Creativity (C) results from the dynamic interplay between three elements:

• Didactic Organization (O): The teacher acts as a "constraint curator," designing ill-defined problems supported by enabling constraints.

• Self-Regulation (R): The student acts as a self-regulating agent, employing creative metacognition to navigate ambiguity.

• 4E Cognition (E): The interaction is situated in a context where cognition is Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, and Extended.

Conclusions: The CORE framework suggests that developing creativity requires balancing teacher-led structure with student autonomy. By explicitly cultivating self-regulation skills within a carefully designed ecosystem, music education can empower students to become resilient, creative agents capable of shaping their own musical worlds.

Key References: Burnard, P. (2012); McPherson, G. E., & Zimmerman, B. J. (2011); Schiavio, A., & Benedek, M. (2020); Juarrero, A. (2023).

Finnish music education is grounded in teachers’ professional independence and capacity for critical reflection to foster students’ autonomy (see Juntunen, 2015). Autonomy-supportive teaching promotes student agency, self-regulated learning, motivation, and well-being for both students and teachers (Moè et al., 2022; Reeve et al., 2022). Yet research reveals a gap between these ideals and classroom realities, as many teachers still display controlling (Jiang et al., 2019) or chaotic (Bouten et al., 2025) styles that thwart students’ basic psychological needs (Deci & Ryan, 2000).

This presentation introduces two approaches to help bridge this gap: the Circumplex Model for examining teachers’ motivating and demotivating styles (Aelterman et al., 2019) and a comics-based reflective tool designed to enhance teachers’ reflexivity in one-to-one instruction. This sub-study, part of an ongoing doctoral project, aims to help teachers reflect on discrepancies between their beliefs and classroom practices in becoming more autonomy supportive.

Five Finnish instrumental teachers and five of their students participated in two semi-structured interviews and a group discussion. In the first interview, participants selected preferred teaching styles from 14 research-based comics depicting seven autonomy-supportive and controlling approaches and explained their choices. Teachers were also introduced to Reeve et al.’s (2022) Autonomy-Supportive Instructional Behaviors (ASIBs). In the second interview, students and teachers identified comics representing their real experiences. Interview and discussion data were thematically analyzed using ATLAS.ti.

Preliminary findings indicate that students of more controlling teachers sought greater autonomy, while those of more autonomy-supportive teachers occasionally desired more structure. Teachers struggled to balance autonomy and control, revealing also clear discrepancies between their ideals and practices. Participants found the comics valuable for pedagogical reflection and the ASIB checklist useful as a practical classroom reminder for teachers. The results suggest that these tools can help teachers navigate in the borderland between (de)motivating teaching styles and strengthen autonomy-supportive practice.

Learning a musical instrument can be one of the most gratifying experiences for a child; however, it may also be a cause of frustration (Costa-Giomi, 2005; Evans, 2009; McPherson et al., 2015). To understand the causes of attrition and lack of persistence in children and adolescents participating in instrumental music education, Deci & Ryan's (1985) self-determination theory (SDT) is most commonly used (Földi & Józsa, 2022; Kavčič Pucihar et al., 2024; Oliveira et al., 2021; Wieser et al., 2024; Wieser & Müller, 2025).

Drawing on the SDT framework, we designed an intervention to study the changes in the behavior of musical instrument pupils when their basic psychological needs (BPN) for relatedness, competence, and autonomy are specifically supported in teaching, and whether these changes would lead to greater learning persistence. The intervention was held at a local music school, where 55 pupils were taught by eight students from the University of Ljubljana's Academy of Music and Faculty of Health Sciences. Pupils had 8-10 weekly 45-minute lessons in addition to the curriculum. Students were instructed to use a teaching approach that supported pupils' BPN. We employed a qualitative research design (Creswell & Creswell, 2023) to study the effects of the intervention.

Analysis of focus group interviews with music school instrument teachers and written reflections from university students revealed observed changes that fell into six categories: motivation, well-being, attitude toward the instrument, learning outcomes, teacher-student relationship, and teaching approach. Pupils' increased motivation and sense of well-being, as well as a more positive attitude toward their instrument, were most highlighted.

These findings suggest that supporting the BPN of pupils who play musical instruments can lead to greater motivation and improve well-being, both major contributors to learning persistence (Schatt, 2024), as well as a shift towards a more positive attitude towards playing a musical instrument.