• We’ve got the blues

    Our fifteenth post in our (re)learning to teach music series. The posts over this week and next week focus on the tasks in Gary Spruce’s chapter ‘Culture, society and musical learning’. This is week three of the collaborative blogging of the tasks in Learning to teach music in the secondary school.  What activities might you…

  • Dots, lines and more

    Our fourteenth post in our (re)learning to teach music series. The posts over this week and next week focus on the tasks in Gary Spruce’s chapter ‘Culture, society and musical learning’. This is week three of the collaborative blogging of the tasks in Learning to teach music in the secondary school.  Think of the ways…

  • Communicating the message

    Our thirteenth post in our (re)learning to teach music series. The posts over this week and next week focus on the tasks in Gary Spruce’s chapter ‘Culture, society and musical learning’. This is week three of the collaborative blogging of the tasks in Learning to teach music in the secondary school.  What are your thoughts…

  • Questioning the young

    Our twelfth post in our (re)learning to teach music series. The posts over this week and next week focus on the tasks in Gary Spruce’s chapter ‘Culture, society and musical learning’. This is week three of the collaborative blogging of the tasks in Learning to teach music in the secondary school.  What questions would you…

  • Culture, society and musical learning

    Our eleventh post in our (re)learning to teach music series. The posts over this week and next week focus on the tasks in Gary Spruce’s chapter ‘Culture, society and musical learning’. This is week three of the collaborative blogging of the tasks in Learning to teach music in the secondary school.  What do you feel…

  • Creativity: emotions and healing

    ‘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…

  • A dialogic teaching companion to music

    I’m working my way through Robin Alexander’s A Dialogic Teaching Companion (2020). I’ve reached the centre of the book where Alexander introduces his revised framework.  I won’t reproduce the framework here as I think the book is worthy of reading (and purchase) but I am interested in how a dialogic framework could help structure a…

  • Walkthrus: Explanation and Modelling

    I had a great two terms of supervising coaches on the Accelerate Teaching Programme. Supporting new instructional coaches gave me insight into the experience of the participants and particularly the strength of the rubrics that underpinned the work on the various modules. The rubrics enabled participants to have purposeful conversations with their coaches about their…

  • A cogent statement of purpose for music

    Our tenth post in our (re)learning to teach music series. The posts over this week and last week focus on the tasks in John Finney’s chapter ‘The Place of Music in the Secondary School’. We have now completed our two weeks with John’s chapter and we move to the Gary Spruce chapter two. Alex Laing…

  • Justification: soft or hard?

    Our ninth post in our (re)learning to teach music series. The posts over this week and next week focus on the tasks in John Finney’s chapter ‘The Place of Music in the Secondary School’. One more and we complete our two weeks with John’s chapter before we move to the Gary Spruce chapter two. To…