Month: October 2015

Professional development for teachers MATTERS

~ annagower ~ Leave a comment

In the summer I attended the Teach Through Music final conference and was part of a panel debate about professional development for teachers. There was plenty of discussion around the barriers to teachers coming out of school to attend events for example:

  • Schools don’t have the budget to pay for cover to allow teachers out
  • Schools won’t pay for teachers to attend training
  • Many schools are bringing teacher development ‘in-house’, whole school INSET, one-size-fits-all.
  • It takes so long to set cover, organise everything then catch up after that it increases workload and adds to stress so it’s easier to not go
  • Teachers aren’t aware of what is on offer to them and those that offer things don’t know how to reach teachers to let them know

Halfway through the session I noticed that with a couple of exceptions, discussion was being led mainly by representatives from music organisations. For some reason, the teachers in the room weren’t engaging with this discussion, it was happening around them. There were many questions directly to teachers in the room, yet very few responses from teachers were forthcoming.

I spent a long time afterwards trying to work out why.

-Is it because of a disconnect between organisations trying to provide support and development opportunities for teachers? Are we all aware of each other, what our aims are, what we do? There are so many organisations in our fragmented sector now, are we drowning each other out losing the teachers along the way? How can we work better together?

-Are teachers getting too much thrown at them, are they clear what each hub or organisation does, who they can talk to and why they might want or need to engage?

-Are we asking the wrong questions? Rather than asking why teachers can’t come out of school for professional development, should we be asking what do you want and need to develop as a music educator, a musician, a teacher, a professional? And possibly more worryingly, is training for assessing without levels, getting better grades at GCSE and A Level, How to teach Edexcel Unit 2 composition etc. actually what is needed to become more effective practitioners and ultimately ensure that all students get a better musical experience in the music classroom?

It feels like the actual practice of teaching and developing as a teacher, standing in front of a class and making music with them, has been so swamped by everything else teachers have to do that professional development has shifted a long way down the list of priorities for a busy music teacher in the UK.

Last year I even started to find teaching my lessons an inconvenience, because I had so many other things I needed to get done. At the end of every lesson I’d have at least 10-15 new emails all wanting me to do things immediately and after a full teaching day the thought of catching up with this caused a lot of additional stress. I had to work hard to make sure this didn’t distract me from what I was there to do-teach.

I find this situation really sad and I’m angry about it too. Teachers are entitled to training and support, to develop themselves professionally and to have some choice over what this might involve. To build on the initial training they received, to stay up to date with latest developments in the profession, to network and share ideas with other teachers (and by this I don’t mean downloading an Elements of Music scheme of work from a Face Book group).

I would like to see teachers feel able to demand that they get this entitlement. As with everything, in an ethos nationally where professional development for teachers doesn’t seem to be massively valued, heck you don’t even need any training these days to become a teacher, maybe teachers might need to work just a little harder to stand up and keep pestering until their needs are acknowledged.

Why not:

  • Use the appraisal system-identify training needs, articulate how this will fit into a longer term plan for the department
  • Identify how many students will benefit and how you will show the impact the training has had on them, you and the department.
  • Line training needs up with school aims-inclusion, attainment, engagement in music, use the right language in bids to attend training events.
  • Research what’s out there, as demand falls away there are fewer professional development opportunities around so chose the one that will have the most impact on the most students and make sure it’s sustainable.
  • Have some outcomes in mind, know what you want from a course and make sure you get it.
  • Share with others! If you find something and it’s great, shout about it. Let’s drown out those requests for help with what to teach at an interview lesson with some of the fantastic things that can happen when you have just a little time to focus on you, your teaching and your classes, meet like-minded people and remind yourself why you do what you do every day.

I’m leading quite a few workshops over the next year. It would be great to have these full and buzzy with teachers who are getting out there and claiming the professional development and support they deserve. I’ll see you there.

Confident Kitt

~ annagower ~ Leave a comment

My second school visit this week was to Wymondham to visit Musical Futures Teacher Kitt. I was looking forward to seeing how he’s been getting on in his first Head of Music role. Kitt spent his second placement at Monks Walk and he has always been committed to embedding Musical Futures approaches, pedagogy and ethos into his teaching, giving it a personal twist to suit his own teaching style and musical values.

In both schools I visited this week, I was impressed not just with the engagement of the classes we watched but also the consistency of expectations and musical competency the students showed. They all participated, performed, shared, played informally to each other, talked about the work and stayed on task. For the majority of the lesson they were engaged in musical activity whether this was warm ups, rehearsing in groups or listening to each other. There was no written work in either lesson, no painful Q and A about the elements of music, however there was clear musical progress made and no question at all that they were learning-I could feel it, see it, hear it. It was in the conversations between the students during group work, the nodding of heads in time to the pulse, recognisable musical outcomes, ensembles coming together.

This week I saw Musical Futures teachers with a very clear understanding of what they were teaching, how they wanted to facilitate learning and why this made sense in the context of their personal musical values, their departments and tailored to suit the demographic of their students. But I also saw how embedded Musical Futures is into every year group, it’s definitely not a “MF-style 6 week rock and pop project” in these schools!

In just 5 weeks at Wymondham, Kitt has gone into his new role with a clear vision. Desks have gone, new equipment prioritised, ordered and set up, other staff supported to bring in MF approaches with all year groups.

This is what we have been looking for

But I was most impressed by what happened at the end of the day. MF Australia director Ken and I delivered a practical session after school to 6 local primary school music co-ordinators, a music hub representative, a woodwind teacher from the school who stayed unpaid because she was interested and 2 6th form girls who thought they might like to be primary school teachers.

We worked through a couple of the Musical Futures: Just Play resources and at the end discussion started about how this group could make Just Play possible for their schools. What really seemed to resonate with the group was that because JP is scaffolded for generalist teachers it has the potential to be sustainable, for the primary children in feeder schools to then progress through to an established and secure Musical Futures experience that really does build on what they can already do and have learned. Imagine what impact a shared cross-phase approach or pedagogy as opposed to a transfer of information between year 6-7 could have.

Credit to Kitt for pulling this group together and generating such interest in only 5 weeks in the job and for engaging his classes impressively quickly in a new approach, so different from what they were doing before.

I love the idea of local clusters of schools coming together to design, create, drive and sustain an Musical Futures cross-phase approach that works for them. I’m hoping that I’ll be back in Norfolk soon to work with teachers who are doing it for themselves.

Fabulous Fiona

~ annagower ~ 1 Comment

With the release of yet another report that outlines the problems with music education in England, I still feel we aren’t hearing enough about how we could be addressing them. I’ve asked in a previous post about who might be able to help teachers to find some solutions, but as yet I don’t think we are much closer to solving this.

In the next few weeks I’m visiting Musical Futures schools across the UK and I’m interested in what teachers are doing at the chalk face in response to some of the challenges they are facing.

This week, my colleague Ken from Musical Futures Australia and I drove out to Norfolk so visit Fiona. 15 years into her job at Flegg High School, she has built a vibrant and musical department. However being unable to recruit a part time member of staff and increasing financial constraints means that she has found herself alone in the department.

Fiona is pretty honest about the challenges that frustrate many music teachers at this time. But she has found an answer. It’s her. She teaches every lesson (except where they are timetabled together when a cover supervisor helps as she goes between a GCSE and Btec class), she runs all the extra curricular groups including those which build on work done in lessons-the year 7 and 8 music clubs, choir, ensembles and more. A decline in the numbers of primary children learning traditional instruments hasn’t stopped her supporting a team of visiting instrumental teachers and concerts and performances continue as usual.

But as Ken pointed out, this just doesn’t seem fair.

So to all the Fabulous Fionas out there who recognise that unless they step up and do more than ever before, music will be at risk in their schools, thank you. The musical opportunities you bring to your students just couldn’t happen without you.