Dr J's Emporium of Musical Education

While I would like to say that I am tech savvy and keep up with all that is new, in reality I am always a bit of a scaredy cat when it comes to embracing new stuff, and generally hold off purchasing 'the latest thing' for quite a while (usually until about 3 months before the next latest thing is launched!).  Thus it has been with Facebook, iPhone, Macs, the smart watch, and most recently, Twitter. I finally joined the Twittersphere last year as a colleague recommended it as a great source of CPD and advice for teachers.  After an initial false start (some scumbag had got my email address blocked after using it as a spam address), I set up my account and waited for all the followers to hang on my every word.  While I waited (and still am) on this multitude to materialise, I decided to research others who I could follow, and while doing this came across @TeacherToolkit .  Not only does this feed direct you to resources that you can download, but it also has the 1 m...

So it is the last week of the Autumn term and the school is slowly winding down towards the winter break.  Which means it is a great time to start thinking about what we are going to be doing in the Spring Term of 2018!  Already it is beginning to look like it is going to be very busy, and so any ideas that can help with lessening marking/ preparation workload are greatly appreciated. I must admit that most of these ideas I am looking at are taken from # teachertoolkit.co.uk , which is a website I would heartily recommend, along with the twitter account - I have learnt more from these in the last couple of months than I thought possible.  The site has had some great ideas about differentiation, plenaries and homework that I am already using - check out the takeaway homework menu  which we used as a starting point for developing differentiated homework options which the students love - but what I am finding most interesting is the free online resources that ...

Having lived in the Middle East for some time now, I find it somewhat of an embarrassment that my knowledge of Arabic has not got much further than the numbers 1-10, hello, goodbye, thank you, please and a few other one or two word answers.  This feeling was reinforced yesterday when I had to  cover a year 10 Arabic class.  To put it mildly I think I understood maybe one word in a hundred and that is being generous! This actually got me thinking about how we approach teaching EAL students in schools.  We expect them to at least try to participate, and encourage them to answer questions which in a lot of subjects - mine included - are abstract concepts and not recognisably linked to everyday life.  I remember from one CPD session that we were told that the moment an EAL student starts asking to go for the toilet, that is the first sign that they are developing understanding and language acquisition - I cannot even do that! From this experience, I am no...

So, San Francisco may now be coming an ever distant memory, but the ideas that were sown there are starting to show signs of growing. Over the last half term I have been trying out ideas and adapting old lessons, some more successfully than others, and I must admit that it has changed a lot of the ways I look at teaching music.  For a start, games are becoming more important, especially when teaching rhythm work.  Once they are over their initial reservations the students seem to enjoy these, especially if there is an element of competition. I have also noticed that I am more prone to start with singing - and are more confident in doing so - with instruments and movement then being used as accompaniments to this.  Indeed, having started the Year 3/4 choir off with four African songs, instead of the students just singing, we have stick games going on, xylophone accompaniments and now, at the suggestion of one of the kids, the dreaded ukuleles might be making an app...

The holidays are over and the students have returned to school.  The planning has been done and the classes are now coming through the doors for the first time in a long while.  For some it is even longer than just the end of the last academic year as some of our classes have not had a 'proper' music lesson in over a year.  This was due to cuts in the teaching staff and the prioritising of STEM subjects over the arts.  Although it is early days of the new school year this is already throwing up some challenges as I have noticed that a lot of the students have 'forgotten' how to sing, how to hold themselves, even how to count in time.   While this is disheartening, as we have lost our schools tradition of singing, it has opened up challenges and potential in now trying to reteach the students in the 'proper' ways of singing and performing.  I have already found that some of the ideas that I learnt in San Francisco are helping - the opportunity to perform...

Over the past two weeks I have gone from thinking I knew a bit about the Orff Schulwerk pedagogy, to realising I did not really have much understanding about it at all, to having an epiphany about how I might alter the way I teach to improve the quality of learning in my classroom. The San Francisco International Orff courses follow the American Orff Schulwerk Association (AOSA) three level certification programme.  The Level One looks at the basics of teaching the Orff pedagogy, including using the pentatonic scales, basic movement, games, singing and recorder.  Level Two takes this further with the inclusion of hexatonic scales and the church modes while Level Three goes full diatonic with a jazz and blues twist thrown in for good measure. This year I undertook the Level I course with Sofia Lopez-Ibor and Sarah Noll, and while I understand scales and modes pretty well (I do like writing music after all), it was the manner in which they were used which was a revelat...

Long term planning, medium term planning, short term planning, revision of planning, review of planning, replan the planning.  Lesson planning is never ending... Day Seven on the SF Orff Level One Course and we spent a morning session going over approaches to long, medium and short term planning.  When doing this we considered all the information that we have been looking at over the past week and a half and were shocked when we were told that the part of the pedagogy that everyone assumes is the "Orff way" actually only makes up about 10% of the curriculum at the San Francisco School!  We were then shown ways that we can plan a course and the different methods that can be effectively used in deciding what to cover within this.   So far, so normal, but it was the planning of the individual lessons where things started to get interesting. While developing long term and medium term planning for the topics, concepts and songs to be covered, the beauty of using ...