• Missed Opportunities

    Our seventh 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’. What opportunities are missed for collaboration across the arts? Vaughan Fleischfresser @VFleischfresser Since becoming a father, my physical activity philosophy has…

  • Making a distinctive case

    Our sixth 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’. Can a case be made for strongly distinguishing the arts from the rest of the curriculum? Are the arts concerned with…

  • Creative and imagination; teachers as musicians

    Our fifth 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’. In what situations do you consider yourself to be most musically creative? When is it that you feel most musically alive?…

  • Concessions and Change: Enduring Principles?

    Our fourth 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’. On page 7 of Learning to Teach Music in the Secondary School (3rd Edition) John Finney provides a quote from the…

  • A matter of civilised taste

    Our third 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’. Music education was conceived as an education in citizenship and in many respects as an education to be regulated in the…

  • What kind of subject is music?

    Our second 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’. What kind of subject is music? How do you view music as a subject of study? Consider the for and against…

  • (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…

  • Coaching Redefined

    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…

  • Appreciating the deeply unsatisfactory

    ‘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…

  • My professional body

    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…