• Imagining a plan for cultural education

    With the announcement following the publication of the White paper in England that work would begin on a National Plan for Cultural Education many will have applauded the announcement, and many will see this as part of a long history of policy and approaches that sought to champion cultural education. Music education has received considerable…

  • (Re)learning how to teach music in the secondary school

    (Re)learning how to teach music in the secondary school

    Thanks to Twitter and a group of fellow music educators I have started a collaborative blogging effort to work through a selection of the tasks in the edited volume ‘Learning to Teach Music in the Secondary School‘. The venture was inspired by a tweet I saw from Christine Counsell. The cog sci is a useful…

  • What if the exam itself gatekeeps

    Reading the entry figures in Whittaker et al. (the 42% of schools no longer entering any pupils for GCSE Music, the 43% fall in A-level entries since 2011) I find myself thinking less about the headline numbers and more about what happens inside the qualification for the pupils who do get entered, because that’s the vantage point…

  • Reconceptualising the ecosystem: a response

    I’ve just read Whittaker, Anderson, Kinsella and Fautley’s recent paper in the British Journal of Music Education, (Re)conceptualising an integrated music education ecosystem in England, and I’ve been sitting with it for a while before writing anything down. Partly because the Birmingham group’s model is good (genuinely useful, generously offered, explicitly unfinished) and partly because I read…

  • From doing to understanding: the value of practitioner enquiry

    I had been working my way through Robin Alexander’s A Dialogic Teaching Companion as preparation for a research project. There’s a moment early on where he writes about dialogue being ‘the true foundation of teaching and learning’. I keep coming back to that, particularly as I think about the HMC Action Research Hub and what…

  • The Future of Teaching; Profession, Purpose, and Possibility

    The future of teaching is not primarily about technology. It is about the strength of the profession itself. There is a great deal of noise around education at the moment; particularly about artificial intelligence, about disruption, about transformation. And while some of that is important, I think there is a risk that we focus too…

  • Pedagogy: exploring crocodiles

    I spend ages preparing sessions for early career music teachers; you don’t get much time to work with them and there’s pressure to make every minute count. Thankfully there is lots of good thinking in books such as this one that save some time in selecting the ideas, the provocations and the exemplification of practice…

  • People, Place, Purpose

    I enjoyed returning to Royal Opera House Leaders for Impact programme on Friday to join a panel about leading cultural education. Marvellously this programme is now into its sixth year; I was part of Generation 4, joining the programme as I started a new role in Bexley. The timing was ideal; I welcomed the collegiality…

  • Creative Survival, Creative potential

    Reading more about creative potential recently and capturing some quotes that were interesting; more to read! It is now common knowledge that creative efforts represent the key to innovation, advancement, and even survival. Creative potentials and efforts are vital for health, innovation, and so many forms of progress… Potential may sound like a risky topic,…

  • Valuing Creativity

    I kept coming across the inclusion of ‘value’ in the definitions of creativity; a creative output would typically be described as ‘original’ and ‘of value’. As a composer I wondered what value could mean; to whom? A quick Google Scholar search led to the discovery of Weisberg’s 2015 paper that shares my query about the…

  • A creative personality

    Teachers’ perceptions of creativity are complex, but too often they are not complex enough. When asked what child creativity is, a great majority of teachers would probably define it with reference to at least one aspect of creative thinking. Most frequently, it would probably be originality (“non-schematic thinking,” “creates new solutions”) or fluency (“has lots…

  • The craft of creativity

    Creativity is largely considered today synonymous with success. It is the success enjoyed by creative people who are accomplished in both their personal and professional life; the success of innovative institutions capable of thriving in the complex and dynamic work environments of today; the success of countries that cultivate a healthy creative industries sector and…