Creative Curriculum Design: Our inspiration

A couple of weeks ago I documented the changes in our Create curriculum in this post:


http://teachingandlearningmusic.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/creative-timetabling-problems.html

In my next post I hope to show how and why we have moved from EBL (Enquiry based learning) to PBL (Project based learning) and share some of the more structural considerations that have had to be made.

I have written a lot throughout this blog about my visit to High Tech High in San Diego with @DKMead, but in particular you might want to look here:


http://teachingandlearningmusic.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/lfhth-learning-futures-visit-high-tech.html


http://lfvisithth.blogspot.co.uk/

If I could distil my learning about PBL from High Tech High, I would bring your attention to a number of drivers. Firstly, the integrations upon which High Tech High is founded:






1. Integration of students - One of the strengths of this model is that teachers are able to manage mixed ability groups so well is that they see less students more often.
2. Integration of head and hand - There is no distinction made between the academic and the vocational, Tom Vander Ark of the Gates Foundation described the school as a "great liberal arts school in disguise" and I know Larry Rosenstock (CEO HTH) is very happy with this description. The importance of the arts and technical skills is of massive consequence as a window onto the world and academia.
3. Integration of school and community - EVERYTHING is exhibited, publicly.
4. Integration of secondary and post secondary education - Here are some remarkable stats:


HTH Outcomes
• 100% HS Graduation
• 92% College Entry
• 73% 4-Year College
• 76% Retention after 4 years
• 35% 1st generation college
• 30% Major in  Maths/Science


California Averages
• 50% HS Graduation
• 60% Retention after 4 years
• 17% Major in  Maths/Science


The expectations are simple, you will go to college. The implications go beyond the means of my department but beyond these statistics, the quality of students' work I observed was exceptional and it was clear how the arts were integral to every project, even those delivered by non-arts specialists.

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Creative Curriculum Design - The problems

This year, alongside all of the usual trials and tribulations, I have been particularly pleased with the way that PBL (Project Based Learning) is beginning to be embedded in the department.


"Create" combines the disciplines of Music, Media and Drama and increasingly having been to High Tech High and having made a journey from tentative baby steps of pilots to robust tuning and refining we are beginning to realise the vision we had for Create when we sat at Muffin Mansion (read Longhirst Hall) almost five years ago.


Initially we were incredibly naive and expected to be able to allow the students to be almost entirely self determinate, big mistake! Over time we have learned that choice is OK, provided that it is framed thoughtfully and in a way that encourages independence through a gentle removal of scaffolding as students progress through the key stage.


Aside from ageing (in technological terms) PCs, the biggest barrier we have faced in the last couple of years has been in finding ways to implement PBL in a way that allows for professionally high quality outcomes.


The realisation has been that teachers need to spend more time with less students.


We have two 75 minute periods per week, with 6 classes of roughly 30 on session at once, split between 2 Media, 2 Music and 2 Drama teachers.

In it's original incarnation, Create was basically a carousel. Each class had a Create tutor who was their guide and would introduce enquiries (as they were then; rather than projects) and monitor home learning. Students rotated between the disciplines each lesson and each cycle was punctuated by a generic "Create tutor" lesson related to the enquiry and so learning was transient and often not of the quality we aim for.


A typical unit looked like this:

What would music look like?

View more presentations from Martin.

The enquiries were developed largely to ensure breath of content for the National Curriculum in Music, and other examples were:

What would Beethoven think of rock 'n' roll? Where students learned to perform music from both eras and made short dramatic pieces supposing that Beethoven had time travelled a la Bill & Ted (fine film!)

Can the camera tell the truth? Where students made comic books of still images to tell a story, with a soundtrack.

Looking back, our intentions were noble enough but in reality our enquiry questions were like lubing a steak and hoping to cram it down a National Curriculum shaped straw. We allowed ourselves to become hamstrung by notions of external pressure that were largely non-existent in reality.

The learning was also in two parts, lots of short enquiries or lessons, followed by some making of a product. (More like project orientated learning rather than project based learning)

Another issue was that at the time we felt the need to include all three disciplines in each enquiry which led to some square peg round hole shenanigans and usually one discipline became marginalised with a tacked on role.

Whilst there were some really great lessons, students did not really but in as the things we asked them to create were mostly abstracted from what creative artists produce in the real world. Students perceived little value in them and as a result the enquiries suffered.

The first changes I made the following year when I took over the department were to get rid of bespoke home learning for each enquiry which was unwieldy in terms of monitoring and workload in creating the tasks. Instead students were asked to keep a journal of their learning, reflecting upon what they had learned, how they had been Creative (ICEDIP, more on this below) and including examples of their learning. Students could choose how to keep their journal, for example as a scrap book, or in a song, the idea was to be creative in presenting your response.


I also brought in Geoff Petty's research on the ICEDIP model for creativity to help students understand that creativity is a not a rigid process and can be learned.


Finally, we moved from rotating every lesson to having blocks of four lessons with each teacher, which made much more sense. This has endured to some extent in the first two terms of Year 7, where students need some element of "tooling up" to prepare them for the enquiries ahead.


That was three years ago and Create has continued to evolve. In my next post I will discuss how we have moved to PBL rather than EBL, and how we are dealing with structuring the terms so that we see less students for longer.

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DTPF!

This is fast becoming something of a mantra for project based learning pedagogy at our school:


Do The Project First!


You may have read in earlier posts that in my school I am responsible for Create, which is a trans-disciplinary course in KS3 combining music, media and drama. It has long been the shared view in our team that the ultimate synergy of the three disciplines is film and we have now had two bites at the cherry with some success but many failings.


There are logistical issues which are a thorn in our side, mainly resultant from the capacity and scale for which we are required to plan and execute. At any one moment there are 180 students in Create shared between specialist teachers for each of the disciplines.


Two years ago, each half of year 8 (180 students) teamed up to become a film production company and we made our own version of Twilight. The process was fantastic, students were booking into our green screen studio to record scenes that they had rehearsed, to be met by their peers who had set up the studio for green screen video recording. The scenes were filmed and shared with a group of editors in the classroom who worked with the raw footage, taking out the green background using chromakey and editing in multi layered backgrounds which they had prepared in photoshop. At the same time composers were working with the themes from the twilight soundtrack to create music suitable to underscore the scenes.


There was a real buzz about the department and then when we came to show the complete film back in the hub (our performance space) it fell a little flat.  Even our students are still focussed on content and despite the amazing journey they had gone on, they could not get past the fact that the final film did not look great. Our knowledge of chromakey was in its infancy, so many of the backgrounds looked too artificial, camera wobbles meant that actors bobbed up and down against their background and due to time constraints and the aforementioned capacity issues we did not have time to redraft scenes. We had 6 actors in the role of Edward Cullen and Bella, which resulted in serious continuity issues. All of which combined to leave us feeling a little underwhelmed and determined to get it right the next year.

So last year we changed tack and in an effort to negate the final product having a polished look, we used 'Be Kind Rewind' as our stimulus. If you haven't seen the movie, the basic premise is that Jack Black accidentally wipes all of the VHS tapes in his friend's store and they remake the film on a shoestring budget, this is called sweding movies (taken from custom Swedish furniture). Our students seemed switched on by the stimulus and we had them working in groups rather than as a whole year group. We were much tighter in the pre-production stage with check-lists for each stage of their planing, each tick resulting in their wacky racer moving a little further along the road at the front of the class.

This engaged the students for a while but it became death by planning sheets and time that would have been more useful spent filming, making mistakes and correcting them, was spent doodling costume designs instead.  What we thought might turn out as well considered melodrama, actually led to the drama aspects of the project becoming somewhat of a joke, and acting skills were not really being enhanced to any measurable degree. Another factor that was not ideal was that we asked the groups to rotate around the roles of actors, editors and composers and so less time was spent in each. So rather than deep learning in specialist areas we skimmed the surface of the content in many cases, more lessons learned! The final products were highly mixed and often funny, but lacking the kind of quality that we were striving for and so this year it has been back to the drawing board.


It is said that hell is paved with good intentions, and last year we intended to make a "sweded" movie as part of our CPD time to use as a model but many reasons, none of them really good enough, we did not get round to doing it.


This year we have committed (thanks team!) a significant amount of our CPD time to "Doing the project first", the mantra taken from an inspirational visit to High Tech High in San Diego. 


The idea being that if you go through the steps that the students are going to go through you can see the choke points, work out logistically what are the problems and solutions, check that the intended learning is being delivered and at the end have an exemplar to use alongside real world models.


The running gag in our department is "Can we do the same next year?" as we are constantly looking at, revising and tweaking our enquiries and projects and this year it is no different. The film making project is in a new guise with a new driving question of "How do you tell a story using film?"


We have some excellent short scripts for stage adaptations of some Grimm Fairy tales written by Carol Ann Duffy and have chosen 'Hansel & Gretel' as a piece that more easily accessible and "Ashputtel" as a piece that presents a greater challenge. Students will be challenged to take the stage script and adapt it for the medium of film, thinking about what changes that will necessitate and how the audiences are different for each. This time students will specialise in media as script writers, storyboarders, directors and film editors. In drama they will become actors (and dancers if they choose to), and the musicians will be film composers underscoring the film. This specialism should hopefully deal with the issues of capacity and time to redraft, rather than last year's carousel.


The completed films will be shown at a community event in the Hub at Easter (with popcorn of course!). I would love to have our excellent local film house the Tyneside Cinema involved and we do have contacts, but at the moment I am hedging my bets and waiting to see what our "DTPF!" model turns out like. As I write this I think that maybe I am being a coward here, and if they were on board from the start that would add a layer of authenticity to the project. Hmmm, more thought needed here! Anyway DTPF!


We met as a team for the first time today to begin the project ourselves. We read the script for 'Hansel & Gretel' and decided to try and make our film as true to the atmosphere of the script as possible, the genre being a fantastical thriller, set in an alternate fairy tale 19th century. We are taking inspiration from the recent Grimm brothers movie (particularly musically), and Red Riding Hood visually.


We have the facility and increasing know how to use Adobe CS to edit the film, create backgrounds for green screen scenes and add after effects, and intend to use these facilities to transform environments in and around our school into those of the world in which the piece is set.


I have to say that I am extremely excited by the prospect of collaborating in such an authentic and creative way and I know that this is shared by the team. This afternoon as we began to read through the script my colleague Rob stated quite beautifully that "I know we have to be here anyway, but I couldn't imagine anything else I would rather be doing than this", and our student teacher Natalie beamed at the idea of storyboarding ideas with the comment "This is great, it's just like being back at university".

"I couldn't imagine anything else I'd rather be doing"

Having discussed the big picture for our movie we split into our specialist groups and began to think about our roles for pre-production, developing the storyboard and script, beginning characterisation and composing the leitmotif themes that would be the building blocks for the score. Here are some of my compositional sketches in their infancy from this afternoon.


It is true, and in this we are very lucky, that we are given directed time for CPD on Wednesday afternoons, but this to me is CPD as it should be. There is a palpable enthusiasm centred around a shared goal which we hope will reap dividends in the execution of the project. I feel that for the first time in a while I am really putting my skills as a musician as well as a teacher to use, and bringing a little bit more passion to what I do.


We intend to capture our journey in making our model film with videos, blogs and reflection, and hopefully some of that enthusiasm will translate from our final product to our students as they begin creating their films after Christmas (it is all about them after all!)

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Busking (street musician) Challenge

This project is part of our personal challenge week, where students in year 9 have a suspended timetable and sign up for projects that will see them working beyond their comfort zone.  We take chiefly non-musicians and spend three days learning to play fairly portable and immediate instruments such as kazoo, ukulele, melodica, guitar and glockenspiel. Students choose their set list based on music about which they are passionate. On the fourth day we have a practice run in Cramlington village, then on Friday they go with the school learning mentor to perform in Newcastle city centre’s busiest street. Students are able to choose what to do with any money that they make, and then are asked back into school on the Saturday to perform at the school’s community music festival.

Teacher Reflection

This project is far and away always my favourite week of the year. Seeing students progress in such a short space of time is a joy, and for most of them who have never performed as part of a band never mind in public the experience can be transformational.  This project allows students to take enormous risks but with a real sense of community and inter-dependence.  The fact that they are earning money in a completely public context makes the end product extremely high stakes. The Thursday “dry run” is vital to the process as a form of drafting and students use videos of the performance to critique each other to help make the Friday performance as high quality as is possible.  This is  a project that required little more than a few instruments as resources and a little musical nous. What is fascinating to me is how even those that don’t necessarily buy in from the start move with the critical mass of the rest of the group as the week progresses, and it is always these students that express most profound change at the end of the week.

Student Reflection

The challenge this year was extremely fun and I am so glad that I did it. My favourite part was getting into our groups and learning all of the songs that we wanted to and then getting on with it. I learned to play ukulele because of this which I would love to take further because it is amazing to play. I have received a massive confidence boost because of when we went to town to perform in front of everyone. If I could change one thing It would be only going to two places. It would be a lot better if we went to three or maybe even four places! Also if we could make a after school Busking group it would be a really good Idea!

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