Category: Uncategorized

Issue 13 of the Chartered College of Teaching journal Impact was pleasing to receive. I’ve gathered every issue so far (joined the College at the beginning) and the issues get better and better. As part of the Chartered Teacher (leadership) pilot we undertook a CPD review in our settings and the theme of this new…

‘Luce found a path to healthy by investing energy into a creative project’, writes Marie Forgeard in her chapter in the The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity. She opens her chapter talking about a writer and social worker Gerri Luce who began writing during a hospitalisation. Forgeard mentions that even ‘clinicians noticed that some individuals receiving…

I’m so grateful to Sherry St. Clair for sending a copy of her new book, Coaching Redefined. She charts her journey towards a new paradigm of coaching in the first chapter, and mentions the story of LEGO and their quest to engage more girls (as so few in America were playing the bricks). I love…

‘Most pupils end up as artistic illiterates’ and ‘arts education … cannot produce creative pupils in the proper sense of the term’. What is the proper sense of the term ‘creative’? And why does music and art in schools prevent proper creativity? Is a realistic expectation only to cultivate appreciation in the arts and should…

I never imagined I would complete fifteen years of teaching. I never imagined I would do fifteen years of anything and when I was half-way through my MMus I was set on going immediately into a PhD. My brother-in-law was teaching at a boarding school during my MMus year and my sister told me about…

Whilst the kitchen is being removed from my home (and a new one is gradually installed) I started to notice some of the books I had forgotten I had. Dennis Child’s ‘Psychology and the Teacher’ (2007) caught my eye (partly because of how thick the book is). ‘The word curriculum is on everyone’s lips these…

Developing composing through talk: Does the use of a ‘composing talk tally’ in the KS3 Music classroom improve the quality of creative response? Below is my research project I submitted (with some elements removed) for the Chartered Teacher Programme and it was very small scale study that sought to see if I could influence creative…

After an enjoyable year of professional development (that included the RSA Evidence Champions Network, Chartered College of Teaching Chartered Teacher Programme and the King’s Academy Learning and Teaching Programme) I thought I would start to revise some of the reading that was required and reflect as I look ahead to my professional development plans for…

The ‘transformative power’ of the arts: History of an idea by Eleanora Belfiore is an interesting read in The Routledge International Handbook of Creative Learning. Belfiore highlights the claims many of us are guilty of making that ‘being involved with the arts can have a lasting and transforming effect on many aspects of people’s lives……

We can find a justification for music as an important part of human development right back to Plato. In the Middle Ages, music continued to be seen as a tool for the ‘formation of the adult who would best fulfill those functions expected of him or her by the society of which he was a…