Category: Uncategorized

City of London School for Girls provides students and staff with iPads, and all departments are encouraged to explore how best to integrate the use of mobile technology into the classroom. The music department has adopted the MusicFirst Classroom – an online platform where students can access cloud-based software and create a portfolio of work…

Guest blog from Dr Steven Berryman, Director of Music at City of London School for Girls and Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. Also, Founding Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching. Published 18/1/19 on IRIS Connect https://blog.irisconnect.com/uk/hitting-the-right-notes-improving-teaching-practice-with-the-chartered-teacher-programme As a musician, practice is part of daily life. Or I tell my pupils that it is.…

Guest blog post for Music Education UK – January 2019 https://musiceducation.global/research-informed-music-teaching/ Being a research-informed teacher is increasingly the norm. Social media allows us to engage with colleagues from across the globe, engage in debate about best practice, share teaching approaches and discover new resources. Social media also allows us to engage with academics and researchers…

It’s endlessly inspiring to see the honesty and generosity of teachers who share so readily their classroom practice and leadership efforts in blogs, tweets and anything else that exposes these experiences to critique and conversation on social media. We’re an incredibly brave profession for sharing and being open to debate. On Friday I enjoyed spending…

I have been teaching the new Edexcel specification and my colleagues and I have enjoyed getting to know the anthology. There is a return to a meatier anthology, including some meatier works (great to see the Rite of Spring!). Without the Year 12 exam there is now an opportunity to make profitable use of the…

I’ve now read the three articles in the Chartered College of Teaching’s Impact journal – Issue 3 Summer 2018. This edition of the journal focused on developing effective learners (which was also the theme of the Third Space event in Oxford back in July 2018). The articles I read explored oracy/classroom talk which is the…

I’ve decided to blog about the literature review assignment for the Chartered Teacher Programme – mostly so I had a useful record of the reading that I would be doing as I refine the area of interest, but also to see if it helps with the thinking behind the eventual research project I will undertake.…

‘Education strikes a bargain with learners; trading innocence for experience. So, let’s not be in doubt: schools do kill a kind of creativity, but rather than ask how we can prevent this, perhaps we should be asking whether the creativity that they offer in its stead is more empowering, more liberating, more generous, more valuable. …

To save school music, we need to show that there’s more to it than learning instruments for fun, says this head of music. Think back to your school music lessons. What do you remember most? Perhaps it is learning to play a wobbly version of Tubular Bells on the keyboard that sticks in your mind, or…

Here’s an extract of my talk I was due to give at the MMA Conference at Eton College. I am sure we are all excited (and nervous?) to see how our students’ compositions will perform this summer. In the conversations I have with colleagues in other schools there is a consistent feeling of the unknown,…