Teaching Music

Baseline-Ours or Theirs?

~ annagower ~ Leave a comment

As the new school year is looming, there’s lots of talk about baseline testing for music. What ‘tests’ do people use, how do they convert test scores into levels/grades/whatever the heck they are using in the post-levels era?

It seems there’s a real market for the perfect baseline test, one that solves all the problems and provides the solutions.

In this post I reflected on the minefield that is often the start of the year 7 experience in music. But whose baseline is it anyway?

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What happens when you get to year 6? Chatting to a friend with a child just coming to the end of primary school they told me how suddenly everything changed. Gradually the topic work that brought together geography, history, art, science decreased and the volume of homework grew and grew. Sheet after sheet of mock questions came home, there were extension groups that meant missing younger years doing class assemblies, RE and topic left to PPA cover and the child grew disillusioned with school and increasingly stressed about the pressure they and their teacher were under. Tales of being shouted at by the deputy head and behaviour in class deteriorating worried the parents, yet there wasn’t a thing they could do. As a borderline level 6 student the pressure was on. When I asked the child about the last term before the SATs he can only remember literacy, writing and…

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Do you have to be a musician to teach music

~ annagower ~ Leave a comment

As Musical Futures launches their “Just Play” pilots designed to be led by generalist primary music teachers (no musical experience required!) in Australia and Scotland in the next 2 weeks, I’m revisiting a debate that always raises controversy and rightly so!

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Emile Holba

And do you have to be musical to teach music. Is there a difference?

I want to try and clarify my stance on this by looking at some of the things I have taught and seen others teach over the years and in particular how it has been taught.

Fresh from Uni I was armed with a music degree and having had plenty of opportunities to perform in a variety of musical contexts on several instruments I certainly thought of myself as a musician at the time. However, I don’t think, looking back, that I was particularly musical. As part of my PGCE we did some improvising and without notation, I froze. I certainly didn’t consider myself to be any kind of composer and singing without the comfort of the formality of a choir with a conductor and the music was my least favourite activity. I shied away from conducting…

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The power of student choice – Sophie’s story

~ annagower ~ Leave a comment

On my last day at Monks Walk we held a big event for 100 children from feeder primary schools. As part of this, they watched a concert in the afternoon and then sang with our choirs and orchestra to finish the day. It was the perfect end to 11 years and I will remember it as one of my favourite days there. But the absolute highlight was that some of my year 9 class performed work they had created in class as part of the concert.

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Can anyone help?

~ annagower ~ 1 Comment

I first blogged this on the Peer to Peer network and the comments at the bottom show it’s a hot topic for debate. The search for answers to some of these issues and in particular how using Musical Futures approaches can have an impact will underpin one of the first tasks in my new role as I visit Musical Futures teachers across the UK, spend some time in lessons, discover how they have integrated and adapted MF into their teaching and departments. I know I will learn a lot.

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Keywords

~ annagower ~ Leave a comment

I am looking round my classroom as I read this and yep, there are plenty of key words on the walls!

jfin107's avatarMusic Education Now

In 1976 Raymond Williams, the Welsh cultural theorist, published the book ‘Keywords, A vocabulary of culture and society’. (1) It was revised and expanded in 1983. It is shortly to be republished. Raymond Williams had gathered his keywords and researched their provenance over a period of thirty years following the Second World War. The word ‘culture’ unsurprisingly has one of the longest entries. Each entry is in effect a mini essay through which Williams shows how words change their meaning over time and across contexts. Others have asked: how is it that words can have meaning? After all, many words can only be defined in terms of other words. (2) Rarely can definitions provide the meaning of a word or term. In this view reducing words to labels is the final act of meaninglessness.

In England it was about 1995 that words started appearing on music room walls. When asked…

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Key Words, Key Words, Key Words

~ annagower ~ 1 Comment

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I wrote this blog back in Feb 2014 after  we welcomed candidates for interview for a Head of Music post at our school and as part of the interview they were asked to teach a lesson. During the formal interview in the afternoon, they had the opportunity to feed back on how they felt it went and three of them expressed surprise that our students “don’t know their key words”.

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What is good feedback in music?

~ annagower ~ Leave a comment

DSC_1701I wrote this blog following  a marking review in school that involved every department in the school  submitting work from selected students to be reviewed by panels of staff from different subjects who responded to a set of questions from SLT. Of course when I arrived for my panel session there was a box of exercise books and the questions were clearly geared around what you might expect to find inside these.

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