Tag: teaching

  • Nurturing Every Student’s Creative Ambitions 

    Students arrive in our classrooms with extraordinary creative ambition. Across the arts, technology and design, young people bring a wealth of creative experience with them; real, sustained ambition that’s ours to nurture and grow. The question I find most exciting as a teacher isn’t how to spark that ambition, but how to give it the best…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Challenging conceptions

    On to the first chapter of Burnard’s book (2012). ‘For most of us, ‘musicla creativity’ refers to a particular type of practice, perhaps that of the Great Composers’, rather than to multiple possibilities’ (7) strikes me as odd as I have never considered that to be the case, and wonder where such a claim comes…

  • Why differentiate?

    I heard an excellent speaker at an INSET organised at my previous school. I remember vividly his response to a colleague’s question about differentiation: “F**k differentiation. Teach everyone the same.” Hmm. I ponder this a great deal. What it boils down to for me is differentiation is not about differentiating what you teach, but the…

  • Can we teach composition?

    After another batch of coursework is complete for GCSE and A-level music I like to look back and reflect on the year. I firmly believe in composition being an integral part of these examinations as it is the natural culmination of the study of musical rhetoric, in terms if its theoretical and stylistic constructs, and…