Creative Curriculum Design: Where are we now?

My last post talked about our inspiration from High Tech High


What have we done with this?
In this post I mentioned issues in our Create curriculum with:

• Naivety in expectations of students; ability to be self-determinate
• Authenticity of enquiries and a lack of clear idea over intentions and content
• Shoe horning disciplines (music, media, drama) together
• The constant herding of students from one place to another, with limitations on opportunities for students to get to know their teacher limited as a result

The running joke in the Create department for a while now has been: "Can we do the same thing next year?" and the curriculum has been in a constant state of flux as we have tried to work out what works.

We are now in a position where the curriculum is fairly settled and we have made the move from enquiry to project based learning. There is still an element of discovery learning in every module, but these exist within the confines of a clearly defined product and so we can prepare more easily for any unintended but fortuitous (or perhaps advantageous is a better word)  outcomes that may arise. The document below outlines the curriculum, with a focus on music and progression across the two year course, and how this feeds into Year 9.

I have looked at it from both a landmarks point of view, in terms of the key concepts that we intend to deliver in each year, and also from the perspective of how each unit develops  depth, complexity and range of students' musical responses through a variety of styles, genres and traditions.

Curriculum Overview from Martin

Structurally we have made some changes to the way students move through each year, and I think that we retain an element of student choice, especially in Year 8, whilst allowing us as a team of 6 teachers to see less kids and more often.

Students have 150 minutes of Create each week. In Year 7 they begin in the first term with a more recognisable carousel around the three disciplines, learning key concepts that will be needed for the course i.e. stop motion animation, video/image editing, ensemble & instrumental skills, musical devices, stagecraft, working with scripts etc.

The first project which takes place in term 2 is "CLV Hits". This involves the production of a music video, where students rehearse and record the audio for their track, animate in sync with the audio and choreograph dance routines. These three elements are then edited back together to make the final product. At this stage we are quite tight about the parameters of the product as this is the students' first experience of a project. The tracks are predetermined, so that it does not matter in which order the students visit each discipline. Typically students will spend a block of around 10 hours with teacher working on each element for the video.

In term 3 in Year 7 student have their first opportunity to chose their project from:

• Frozen Moments - Making soundscapes and a slow motion (a la Matrix) "moving painting" that captures the most climactic moment from the students' favourite books.

(The project plan can be downloaded here, the full plan is also shared at the bottom of this page)

• Radio Play - This project is still being designed but students will study seminal works and create their own radio play.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Students will put together a stripped back production of the play and compose leitmotif to form the musical backing.

Then in Year 8, students can choose their route through the year. Their are two projects that last a whole year (making a film, and making a fitness DVD). This is necessary to give the students time to create work of the quality that meets our expectations. With projects the rule of thumb is do it yourself, then multiply the length of time it took you to do it by ten! There are also two routes whereby students complete a project in each term.

Year 8 create projects from Martin

As a result students see only one teacher each term or in some cases half term in Year 8. We still use the products to give students an insight into works of art outside of their cultural frame of reference, for example Japanese art music plays an important role in the Frozen Moments project. The products that they are making are authentic and clearly defined, though with increasing scope to be creative and present a range of outcomes as they progress through the two years. I am though a firm believer that there is much creativity that is born of constraint so we are not nearly as naive as we were at the outset of the course, where we imagined students might roam free, becoming a film director as the whim took them, then suddenly swap to scoring their film when the wind changed,

The disciplines tend to exist in pairs, so that one does not become the poor cousin in the project, and where synthesis of all three is sensible, these are year long projects.

The one area that still needs most work is in public exhibition. Some projects have involved links to professional composers via Skype or artists coming into school to critique work in progress but this is not yet embedded.

The model is not perfect but it is so much more manageable and effective then our first rambling efforts. In music, Ofsted highlight the importance of regular and sustained music making, and in a year long project, students have an intense burst of music for a term, then less practical music making for the rest of the year. Clearly this is not ideal, and as  head of music, I feel uneasy about this to an extent. That said, from the a whole school perspective and head of Create, if I were to ask myself do our kids get a good deal, I would say "Yes they do."

Fozen moments project plan from Martin

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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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On the power of critique

This interview was conducted with Charlie a week after a whole class critique session on his composition for the Frozen Moments project. I bumped into Charlie on the corridor and grabbed the opportunity to get some sound bites from him, knowing that he had valued the experience. Charlie had not been prep'd (you can hear me prompt him sometimes) and is around the national average if you believe in CAT scores and seeing students as numbers. 


See if you can guess which year group he is in...





None of the qualities that surface from this conversation are the result of any amazing teaching on my behalf. More the protocol we used and the innate nature of Critique to lead to  a focus on high quality content.


What strikes me listening back to this is just how powerful his testimony is for a number of reasons:


"I could see..." This hints at a clarity of direction.

"Harsh on content" comes straight to the fore, it is clear that Charlie values having his work robustly challenged.


"So the person doesn't feel like them failing" So failure is important but it must be made safe.


"I'm improving and I haven't even started the work" NOW the aforementioned clarity is crystallised. This is about the best thing I have ever heard a student say. Incredibly perceptive and inspirational for me to hear.


"Then I get the most out of the class... all of the brain power" Wow, here is a statement that says community more perfectly than I ever could.


"We thought we'll probably get away with that" Quality, quality, quality.


Here is the feedback Charlie got from the class, the technical words in bold are the students'. I did rephrase some in terms of sentence structure though.

Feedback from the class:

Good use of silence at the end, try fading out the wind sample.

Try extending the magic sample as it cuts out quite early. Also this could be faded out and made louder.

We love the wind sample being in the piece throughout; the wind sample should also fade in gradually to help build tension.

Think about your choice of timbre on the ostinato, it sounds a little squelchy and should sound more mysterious.

The accelerando works well with that choice of notes in the ostinato and the staccato way that those notes are played. The crescendo should peak at forte earlier and start to fade back to piano to prepare for the silence.

We love the pedal and the way the timbre changes gradually over time. Try adding another A in a different octave later on to help it change more.

Get rid of the word "view" from  on the laugh

Oh, Year 7 by the way.

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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! Surfacing 'Tacit Knowledge'

There are varying and sometimes conflicting, or at least ambiguous definitions for 'tacit knowledge' so for the purpose of this entry I am going to use it to refer to not just to learning/knowledge which is difficult to to transmit, but rather learning which can be described as 'know-how' rather than 'know-what', 'know-why' or 'know-who'.

There is a an extra layer of subtly to this type of learning in that it goes beyond simple 'know-how' i.e. 'how to make beans on toast', 'Tacit knowledge' is non-formal in nature and it is learning that is more easily 'caught' rather than 'taught'.

For example riding a bike is something that is difficult to express and pass on to someone else. One would find it difficult to describe the sum of the learning and knowledge involved in successfully riding a bike.  Instead it is best learned by watching others, then experimenting through trial and error.

This is a type of learning I have become very familiar with through my involvement in Musical Futures, where music teachers will often play lots and explain little, giving students a practical musical experience upon which they can later hang terminology and formal knowledge.

So I return to the DTPF! mantra (Do the project first, see my earlier post). Our students have just been briefed on their film making challenge, and in preparation for this we have collaborated as a faculty and created a model for the students.

In doing so we went through the same process as the one upon which our students are now embarking. There were many reasons for doing this, firstly the students would have a model with which they could compare their work and use to critique. It also demonstrates a commitment from ourselves as a body and that the product is achievable. Also by follwing same process as the students, it gave us an opportunity to look at the mechanics and logistics of how that would work, especially important when 180 students will be working on the project at the same time. We have also as a staff body picked up some important technical knowledge on how to use some of the facilities at our schools and their implicit limitations (for example the size of our green room, or how to use our cameras most effectively).

We have been able to do document and share this process with the students so that they can see how we got from the stage script, to a screenplay and storyboard and then to a film. In doing so the most revelatory aspect has been surfacing some of the 'tacit learning' that we would hope our students catch, but perhaps had not anticipated or considered.

What I think we have done with this DTPF! is to foreground some of the 'tacit learning' that our students will pick up along the way and in doing so, we are now able to factor these into our planning and success criteria. In this instance the 'tacit learning' is the body of 'know-how' required to make a film, specifically fleshed out within our context and our facilities. Much of the process might seem disparate when taken as a discreet quantum or packet of knowledge but become crucial only when you consider the whole and the connections therein.

For example:

'Know-how' to take steps to avoid continuity issues.

This is something that must be planned and accounted for at almost every stage in the process of film-making and so it is difficult to describe other than by showing students how. We are now able to do this by using our model, i.e. storyboards which plan for continuity between shots (body position for example), filming of our filming which shows us discussing continuity and the positioning of bodies between filming shots, and editing clips together which maximise continuity by capturing the best in and out points for body positioning.

Or a more routine example:

'Know-how ' to catalogue your filming both orally on film and by filing.

When you mention it, it might seem obvious, but as I have mentioned in a previous post, we have tried filming in previous years with limited success. This 'know-how' had been foregrounded in the mistakes we made. Whilst this packet of knowledge alone may have implicit value in terms of being organised, it is only when you connect it to the later stage of editing footage back together it becomes crucial to the point of making your job nigh on impossible unless it is done. In the past students might and in fact did learn this through trial, error and much frustration. Whilst I am firm believer in allowing students to make mistakes and learn from them, in my experience when students perceive that their genuine and significant efforts have been rendered futile by mistakes that could have been avoided, this can be very demotivating, and understandably so. I guess my point in this instance is that the tacit learning here is not just in the 'know-how' of cataloguing your filming but in the holistic value of doing so when taken in the context of the project as a whole.

As a slightly related aside, one of the biggest issues I still have in teaching an enquiry based curriculum is the unintended learning outcomes that are a natural result of students partly or fully determining their own learning. How do you plan for, validate, measure and reward this unintended but equally important learning? Answers on a postcard please!

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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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Big Mistaks (or how to make children cry)

Here are the slides from my presentation at TMNE11.

TMNE11

View more presentations from Martin

There is a well used old teaching adage that goes something like this: “Give the kids an early taste of success.”

There are times though when I think it entirely appropriate for us to give students an experience of, and to celebrate failure. The very first thing I do with students in Create (a trans-disciplinary subject combining Music, Media and Drama) is to set my students up to fail.


We outline a fairly simple task, to create animals from a finite amount of newspaper and tape, the winning group being those that are the most creative. Now it’s worth pointing out here that part of the focus of Create is not just to create better musicians, actors and creators of meaning through media. It is also a fundamental part of the course that students become sensitive to and more adept at going through creative processes, taking with them transferable problem solving and thinking skills that will serve them in any discipline regardless of what pathway they choose later in their school career.



So the scene in my Year 7 classroom is very industrious with new eager students crafting beautiful turtles, giraffes and such; I even had a panther this year. When students present their work at the front of the class to be told they have failed, they are rightly furious and begin to ask “Why?”


Then there is the odd savvy group that have asked me a clarifying question such as “Can we make up an animal?” normally only one in each class if any. These groups are met with a clandestine and whispered response from me “Yes. And if you do. You’ll win.” The finger over the lips at the end of that sentence in now well rehearsed but it always has the same effect and it never fails to amuse me just how conspicuous 11 year olds can look when trying to hide something and yet no-one else in the class seems to notice.


So these groups come up to the front with their cross between a dragon and a goat with a lions tail, and they are lauded as champions for that short 20 minute task.


So the questions continue about “How come we failed and they didn’t?” and normally the conversation will organically arrive in the direction that I am hoping. Pretty soon the kids will wizen up to the fact that by creative, I meant imaginary. “Ah but you didn’t tell us that” they say and I reply “I know”.


Without putting you into the classroom with me it’s difficult to explain just how angry and let down the students can become. Here they seemingly have a lesson which is “fun” and they get to “make stuff” but the teacher is clearly a jerk! So we then talk about what a good teacher would have done, and I challenge them, or at least proposition them to challenge me. “Would a good student not have checked what the criteria were before they started?” We then use some statements on cards to debrief and unpack what steps the students took in their creative process during the challenge, and crucially what steps they should have taken and would do next time. The kids are very honest with themselves and it’s a bit like a magic trick, but if there is a team that has passed and therefore won the challenge their “What we did” is always remarkably similar to everyone else’s “What we would do next time”.


So I say “OK, OK you’re right, I was a terrible teacher, let’s try again” and set a new challenge, to make a map of the creative process on paper using our thoughts and findings from the debrief of the newspaper challenge. Again the kids are poised, eager to please. “You have twenty minutes again” I continue “and the winning map will be the most creative”. Brilliantly there is a moment like the needle scraping to a halt over vinyl. “Hold on hold” my students implore “What do you mean by Creative?”


And there is the learning, its not any facts so I am sorry Mr Gove (though I can assure you that that does come later) and hence the comb-over question. In fact it is a terrible question, are we judging the hair styles or the composition of the photographs and actually what do we mean by best?

The quality of thought that goes into and the resultant quality of the outcome i.e the maps is startling. The students are able to articulate through their maps what they would do next time, but the beautiful thing to watch as an observing adult is that they are actively acting upon their own feedback and the map is not just something that they creating but something they are following whilst they create it. By amplifying their mistakes through a carefully thought and frankly quite Machiavellian plot, the students are able to see that mistakes are a valuable and indeed necessary part of any creative or learning process on the proviso that they lead to change, whether that be change of the students’ practice, habits, attitudes or opinions.


Finally I must come to the child who was crying, I won’t use his real name. With one particular class I was remonstrating at the end of the less that the children “must challenge their teachers if their criteria are no good” and that they “must celebrate mistakes provided that they are turning points for learning” and a lad at the back stopped me and said “Sir, David is crying”.


This being my first ever lesson with the class I was very concerned that I had missed some kind of bullying incident and so quickly took the boy to one side. When I asked him what was wrong he said “It goes against everything I have ever been taught”.


For me, with that class, an early taste of success!

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A (hopefully) more than simply vocal student voice.

Last night I met my focus group for the first time. This has been something I have not done particularly well in the past, though hopefully that will change. We plan to some quite ambitious things this year in Create, our trans-disciplinary, enquiry-based curriculum (Music, Media & Drama) for years 7 and 8. Perhaps it is better to give you a brief history of time, or at least the last three years.


Create has been running now since the inception of our Junior Learning Village, when years 7 and 8 joined us for the first time in 2008. We were lucky to be given time out of school to plan these modules at what has now become known as “Muffin Mansion” aka Longhirst Hall in Northumberland just north of our school. Faced with a carte blanche, we as a team were incredibly excited about the potential of breaking down disciplinary boundaries, moving to a new building and having the chance to work with and develop youngsters from an earlier age. Ultimately though there were a number of factors that led to the first year in Create being somewhat of a headache. Many of our staff had not worked with years 7 and 8 and so a lot of our planning was naive in respect of our expectations of such children’s capabilities. In the excitement of moving to an enquiry based curriculum, we possibly spent too much time planning content and not enough time planning pedagogy, i.e. how to teach students to enquire, what are the key stages, what web 2.0 tools would be useful. Finally another major factor was that due to staff departures, in effect the curriculum was planned by one team and delivered by another.


As a result the first year in Create, whilst peppered with vignettes of pockets of success, was on the whole a disappointment. Students were given too much freedom, too early, in enquiries that were too abstract and lacked real world authenticity. Our first unit, “What would music look like?” was a prime example. Using the work of Oskar Fischinger as inspiration, we imagined students making animations set to student composed music with contemporary dance moved choreographed in our state of the art ‘hub’ performance space. Faced with the same blank piece of paper we had experienced a year earlier in planning, many of our students emotionally opted out at the scale and complexity of that with which they were faced.


Fast forward one year and the vista of Create was a markedly different place. Our Year 8 students last year went on an incredible and at times frustrating journey in remaking the movie Twilight. The process was quite remarkable with students quickly overtaking teachers in their skilled editing of video, using chroma key to manipulate backgrounds using our green screen studio and applying after affects. Logistically there were many problems which required navigation and many mistakes from which to learn, but when you walk into a room to find a student inserting a television screen onto the background of a scene, and on the screen is playing the original Twilight movie, you know something special is afoot. The one thing that kept coming back to bite us (sorry, terrible pun) though was the quality of the final product. Logistically, it was a massive achievement to film an entire movie, with jobs and roles for 200+ students, but when you sit students down in the hub for a premiere to watch their film, and they find it hard to follow the movie as their as six different actors playing Edward Cullen, scenes missing as they have been lost in the system and every time the camera wobbles it becomes impossible to suspend disbelief as the moon jumps around the sky in the background, you can’t help but sense the collective disappointment. Of course we continually heaped praise on our students for actually accomplishing such a feat, but in a target driven society, even in our school where process is held in such regard, or kids can’t help but focus on the final product and allow that the dominate their judgement of success.


We are about to run the same unit again this year in Create after Christmas, this time with a twist. To negate the unavoidable issue that we are simply not, nor have the facilities of Pinewood studios we have taken inspiration from the movie Be Kind Rewind. If you are not familiar with the movie, the basic premise is that whilst looking after the local video store, the two protagonists inadvertently erase of the all the cassettes in the store, requiring them to remake all of the movies on a shoe string budget.


Our students will do the same, and thus the aesthetic quality (or lack of) in the final product should not take the shine off their evaluation of the experience, in fact the hammier the better in terms of spoofing the movies. We are still faced with the same logistical headaches as last year though, made more difficult by students making a number of films across the 200 students rather than one combined effort.


So we come back to last night, and my meeting with the focus group. The idea seems quite simple and I don’t know why we haven’t done it before. I have taken a group of 22 keen, but genuinely mixed ability students, (I have graphs, graphs can prove anything, I have a graph to prove that last statement as well), and they are to do the enquiry a half-term in advance of the rest of the year. Between now and Christmas we are going to spend one night a week making these movies, doing the enquiry, working out which tools work best, whether students should sign up to become specialists or have a chance to do everything i.e. cameraperson, actor and composer. Of course there was much bribery in the form of sweets and juice, but I get the sense that these students are genuinely excited by the unit and are proud to be involved not just as guinea pigs but as authentic cogs in the decision making process on how the enquiry will run. An added benefit besides being able to try things out and garner feedback is that when the unit rolls out to the whole year group, I have two students in every classroom who have experienced the process and become extra teachers, coaches and mentors in the classroom. As we draw closer to the end of the process I hope to start training the students in how to coach others, but I am very hopeful that this approach to student voice will be successful. I intend to something similar with a Year 7 focus group cohort in advance of their storytelling enquiry which begins after Easter.


Last night’s meetings was one of those moments when you walk out of school delighted to be a teacher, which is always there at the back of your mind, but often hidden by pressures of the daily grind. Enthusiasm is contagious though, and long may it continue.

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Using E-Portfolios in KS3 Music

Just a very brief addition.  This is an example of the way we use smartassess realsmart in our Create curriculum (A multi disciplinary course in year 7 & 8, combining Music, Media and Drama).

This video shows how students upload pieces of evidence to their eportfolio in relation to specific targets taken from the national curriculum level descriptors. Teacher can then leave feedback and enter into an online dialogue with the student about next steps.

This is a highly motivational apporach as learning becomes very visual, students are involved in identiying which targets they have met, and through the eportfolio can look ahead to what they need to do to achieve the next level.

Next steps for myself are to add exemplar materials and guidance to every level, so that students can see the kind of work that would be suitable for each level.

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Scientific Learning in Create – An experimental approach to active learning

There has been a paradigm shift in music education in recent years, away from being able to cite possible composers for a piece of orchestral music, or to know your Rock Steady from your Reggae. Instead the music curriculum is now more geared towards the elements or building blocks of music, and developing an understanding of how music is put together through holistic activities that combine performing, composing and listening.


Indeed the new AQA GCSE has moved completely from areas of study based on styles and traditions such as ‘Music for Film’ to the more fundamental ‘Rhythm & Metre’ or ‘Structure & Form’.

This elemental knowledge of music is vital at Key Stage 3, where the national curriculum is entirely skills based. The challenge we faced in writing our embryonic “Create” curriculum (a combined course of media, music & drama for years 7 & 8) was how to introduce these musical elements in an engaging way, and also in a way that would allow scope for the other disciplines of Create (media and drama) to not only check understanding but to further it.


The nature of Create demands a holistic approach, as do the main strands of Key Stage 3 Music, where we aim to encourage students to see the links between listening and appraising, composing and performing. In fact if you were to visit some tribes in Africa, they would not be able to make any distinction, for example between composing and listening.


After some thought we came up with the enquiry: ‘What would music look like?’ the idea being that students would have to make music tangible through the use of images. Students would be challenged to create a video that could help hearing impaired children to understand the musical elements. Students would create a piece of music and accompanying moving images, with clear links between the images and the use of musical elements such as tempo or pitch.


Happy with this idea, we still had the dilemma of how to present the basic knowledge of the musical elements which would underpin the enquiry. Most students in Year 7 have a firm understanding of the more innate elements such as pitch or tempo, but few could explain what timbre is.


It was then that I decided to investigate a long-held wish. For years I had been frustrated that you could easily demonstrate dynamics (volume) with the simple turn of a dial, why could this not be true for the other elements? Through a lot of trial of error, and yet more careful calculation with our web designer Chris Allen, I set about making an online mixing desk that did exactly that, with a slider for each of the musical elements, the effects of which could be heard in real-time.


My thinking was that if students could experiment with, and experience how the musical elements work by making the changes themselves much like a scientific experiment, this fundamental knowledge would be much more likely to stick. Not only that, the activity itself would be completely student focused, encouraging active learning and allowing the teacher to have proper learning conversations with students, many of whom they were meeting for the first time.


I chose the current (ish… I am certainly not a “down with the kids” music teacher) hit by The Ting Tings, “That’s not my name” as the simple, hook-based nature of the song allowed me to use loops and samples and keep workload down in making audio clips for the resource.


In practice the activity was a resounding success. Before they got hands-on time with the musical elements mixing desk, students filled in a matrix of keywords asking them to write down what they knew about the musical elements. Students were offered a choice of level, with more complex terms on the higher level (colour coded using the traffic light system; I do this for all differentiation).

(The three matrices can be found here: Green , Amber & Red)When they got to use the mixing desk, the students were entirely engaged and were able to see the progress of their learning from the start of the lesson. Without fail all students in my class were able to add significant details about the musical elements to their matrices at the end of the lesson, and were able to make concept maps to show connections between the terms. This was really motivational for the students as they were able to see their learning on the page in front of them.


In fact this lesson was delivered as a Create tutorial by all members of the Create team; drama and media specialists alike. The student centric experimental approach meant that even colleagues who were not music specialists were able to deliver the lesson from the point of view: “I don’t know the answers, but by the end of the lesson you will be able to tell me”.


You can see how the mixing desk out yourself by going to:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7FpRcGot4k

Here is an example of a matrix filled in by a student.  You can see some of the misconceptions in the first try column, and in the second column the highlighted or modified (with strikethroughs and blue coloured) text are areas that I identified as needing further clarification.

The picture below shows a concept map created by a student using Rmap (an application of smartassess' realsmart software).  This student had used the green level matrix.

During CPD sessions this year we were asked to give examples of active learning tasks as part of a market-style sharing of ideas. During this session I began thinking of ways this scientific, hands-on experimental approach could be used in other lessons.


Perhaps a short story in English, with buttons at the bottom of the screen to turn on and off devices such as similes or structuring using paragraphs? Whereby pressing the button will magically make the text come alive with similes appearing in the text accompanied by images to demonstrate. Or in Art a simple drawing could be brought to life by turning on shading or colour.


I’m now left hoping that The Ting Tings are still in vogue in September as I certainly intend to use the resource again. Though I’m not holding my breath, doubtless some new genre with a preposterous moniker like ‘Krunk n grind’ will be the latest thing. I’m also left with the knowledge that I am slowly, unavoidably becoming my father.

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