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.
Back in March I was invited to take part in a panel debate at The Music Education Expo alongside Jane Humberstone, Martin Fautley and Gary Spruce.
Watching the video of the session I was struck by how few solutions we as a panel were able to give.
The beginning of today’s music lesson was one of the best starts to a lesson I’ve ever had.
Anyone who has attended a Musical Futures CPD day will have explored the classroom workshopping project, moving from warm-ups to rhythmic improvisation which is then transferred to instruments to create a ‘groove’ from which a large-group composition can be created.
Looking back over my class blog Mrs Gower’s Classes, I realised that over the 4 years since I first started to use it, I managed to create a huge resource full of exemplar work, learning logs, a visual and aural summary of what happened in my classroom and much more! Below are a few tips for using a class blog in music-there are many others!
I wrote last week about a lesson I watched which I felt was better for having been free from the ‘stress to assess’.
So what exactly might a lesson that isn’t free from this look or sound like? And how might ‘stress to assess’ in a lesson manifest itself?
A while ago, I promised John Finney that I would write a description of a music lesson. Finally I have found some time to reflect on a lesson I saw as part of visits I undertook on behalf of Music Mark’s Peer to Peer programme. This post is a mixture of reflection on that lesson and the tweets that I sent as it was happening.
I 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.
Anna Gower 