The teachers I’ve worked with
Over the past two weeks, between March 21 and 30, I was shadowing Martin Ainscough and Joe Starbuck who are the music teachers at Ladybridge High School. Martin is the Musical Futures champion teacher who I have been in touch with for this school. Martin’s gig is partly administrator and some teaching but not a full teaching load. He previously worked as the Director of Creative Learning at Fred Longworth (where I was the week before with Lucy Dalton) where he built a pretty renowned music program. After quite a few years there, he decided to move up and go more in the direction of administration, which is why he has this job now.
Joe Starbuck is the main music teacher and his full load is teaching music. Before teaching here, he was at a school in Manchester for a couple of years. I think this is his second job and he has been teaching for about four years total. I’m so grateful that both Joe and Martin allowed me into their classes to see how they are implementing Musical Futures as well as to see their overall music program.
An Animal Farm!
First of all, there is an animal farm on the campus of Ladybridge! It was the first thing I did on campus. I went with Joe’s form class (which is equivalent to a homeroom class in the US) to see and pet the animals. There is a farming club where the students can spend more time feeding the animals and tending to the farm. It’s a pretty unique feature – most schools don’t have this, though apparently most of them used to a long time ago. Anyway, here are some pics of the animals. They had chicks, mice, rabbits, hamsters, donkeys, a pig, a goat, and what I think is a Shetland pony!
Musical Futures beyond the music classroom
Martin and I had a lot of conversations about teaching philosophy in general. He’s a big proponent of project-based learning and student-driven learning, which is a big focus of the Musical Futures approach to teaching. One thing I love about what Martin has done as an administrator is that he has brought the Musical Futures ethos into his school culture, even doing hands-on professional development where teachers get into small groups and learn to play an instrument in a band. This way, he can use that as an example to show teachers how teaching in this particular kind of way can be a really useful tool to teach everything they need. I love hearing how Martin has a vision for leadership at the school through the lens of the philosophy of Musical Futures as part of that. He also led a huge initiative for the school where students went into the community of Bolton and worked with community organizations to figure out how to revitalize the city. They’re in the middle of this project now, which is very cool! The students are going to present it sometime in May, I believe.
The Ladybridge music program
At Ladybridge, the grade levels taught are years 7-11 (that’s about age 11-16). They have no sixth form (years 12 and 13, which not all students go to and is not a requirement to “graduate” from high school, though that is not what they call it here) at their school so all of the students go through year 11. Then if they choose to go to years 12 and 13, they go to the local college (again, not our colleges and universities, but this is what they call sixth form, I think) in the town of Bolton. It seems that every school does this differently, because some schools have years 12 and 13 within the high school itself but the rules for those students are different.
Anyway, at Ladybridge, since Joe and Martin have both only been there for a couple of years, they are building the program. When they got here, they said the main music classroom was trashed, and there were several supply teachers (substitute teachers) teaching music for several years before they got here, so there was really no music program to speak of. And there were no instruments or anything really to work with. So when Martin got the job, he planned to build up the music program just like he did at Fred Longworth. Because the program was not great when they got here, they currently have very few years 10 and 11 music students. I think year 11 has about 9 students and year 10 has about 15, however, their years seven through nine students are large, because they teach all of them. Here, like in most schools I’ve been to, the students choose electives at the end of year nine and start in year 10. So, as with pretty much every school I have been to, the years 10 and 11 students theoretically opt to be there, so they are smaller and have a much different feel than the years 7-9 classes because they have all students in those grades, whether they want to be in music or not.
They have two music classrooms at Ladybridge. One of them is a computer lab, which is similar to all of the other schools I’ve been to. And one of them is more of a music room that has traditional instruments like guitars, amps, drum sets, ukuleles, and such, with a couple of practice rooms off the side. All of the different grades go into all of the both of the rooms based on what units they’re working on.
Some of my favorite teaching things
Year 8 class
One of the favorite things that I saw at the school was when Joe was working with year eight students. They were working in small groups to create and perform their own song, including writing their own lyrics. He gave them options of chords to work with, and they chose the ones that they liked and then they basically learned those chords on an instrument and started figuring out how to create lyrics about something they wanted and working together to learn how to play their song.
I got to see this happen a lot and I worked with multiple groups. It was really fun to be able to go in their small group rooms and have them play what they had created at that point for me. Each group needed a lot of coaching but the good thing was that once I coached them, they were able to do what was asked or at least understood how to practice. Joe was walking around to each of the small groups and doing the same thing. Students were able to do the tasks, but they were quite unmotivated to do it unless we were right there with them. This is pretty typical of students in this age group everywhere I’ve gone, and it’s similar to how it feels in middle school music classrooms in the US where all students take music. Middle school is just a tough age to motivate, but I can see that what they are doing here and at other schools I’ve been to is, in my opinion, superior to a teacher-directed focus on learning to read notation in a more traditional music theory approach. Here, they are creating music on their own and with instruments that they choose in a genre that is quite familiar to most of them, and they have freedom to work with their friends in small groups. This is the way that lots of the teachers I have seen do things and I think it’s the right direction to go in. Of course, you have to take into consideration the maturity, ability, and attitude of the students in each class. But I have been so happy to see so much student-centered learning in the music classrooms in all of the schools I’ve visited. My thought too is that if they can’t handle freedom to work in small groups, that large group work where they are still making music that is relevant to them with lots of choice is a great way to go. Joe and I had some interesting conversations about this as well. I have really enjoyed having on-the-ground teaching conversations with all the teachers I’ve talked to. The truth is, we all are doing our best to teach music and motivate students. What I like about what Music Futures does is that it certainly puts student interest front and center.
Year 11 performance off campus
Another cool thing I watched is that Joe took his year 11 students to perform a concert off campus at this really cool venue called the Octagon. It’s a theater venue in Bolton. On a Wednesday afternoon during period five we left school early and went down to the venue to get everything set up so that they could do some sound checks and run through a few songs. And then Martin and I walked around town and chatted a bit until the gig started at six.
The students’ performances were great! Their parents mostly were they in the audience, but it was a really cool live show. I was really proud of them. It felt like a bigger deal than just performing on campus. I love that they did this off campus. Martin said is the start of hopefully building up a culture in the music program of doing really cool things to get more students involved.
This performance is also a requirement for their B-Tech exams that they have to submit for the performance aspect of it which is coming up soon. I think it’s really cool that not only did they get a great experience, but it goes toward their official exam that they have to turn in. Joe told me that they also have to write about the organization in preparation for planning the event, as well as their reflection on their performance as part of the official documentation to submit. I watched the student work on these written pieces in class the week after the performance, and they use Google Docs to organize everything and share it with their teacher. Then Joe has the lovely job of submitting everything.
Watching Martin teach
I enjoyed watching Martin teach as well. I only saw him do a few classes and they were in the computer room but I walked around and watched how he works with the kids. The main digital audio workstation that they use is Ableton Live and they have the Ableton launchpad hardware as well for each computer, which is super cool. You can do so many more things with the midi workstation so I watched how Martin showed the kids what to do, and I got to learn some of the features of the launchpad and the software as well. I can’t say I know how to do all of it but again, it’s really interesting to see how every school uses a different DAWs and they’re not the simple ones like GarageBand (though everyone seems to use these free ones too in some aspect). They are the top-of-the-line professional ones and the students learn how to use them. That is continuously interesting to me. I wish more American music teachers were more interested and willing to learn music technology because from what I have seen, this is the norm here and people just learn to do it. But I also think that we should expose pre-service music teachers to DAWs more throughout their time at university. The lack of use of technology throughout K-pre-tertiary music education in the US needs to change. It needs to not be an added-on type of thing, but an integrated major part of music education. Ok, rant over.
Large Ensembles
The other thing I discussed with Joe and Martin, though I didn’t see them in action, was ensembles. There are no ensembles in the curriculum here, as there are not in any schools I have been to, but they are doing a musical after school (I can’t remember which musical). This musical includes students from the chorus. I believe Martin said Joe typically does a chorus after school, and currently they’re being absorbed into the musical. I did learn that the same 30 or so students do everything at this school. They are the ones who are motivated, so they are the ones who are in the musical as well as in sports and everything else. So that is what’s happening. They will perform the musical in July, I think, at the end of the school year. The drama teacher was telling me that it’s the schedule for practice is difficult because the students are in everything so they can only practice like once every week or something…not as frequently as they would like. But again, when you only have a small handful of motivated students in the school population that do everything, you have to accommodate the schedule of all the activities they’re in. I wish I would’ve gotten to see the musical rehearsal but the schedule at this time of year is just crazy, so I’m happy to have seen what I saw. And I really appreciate having the conversations with these wonderful teachers that I am coming into contact with. I learned so much from all of them.
An aside about the town of Bolton
During the time in-between setting up and the actual performance, Martin took me around on a bit of a walking tour of Bolton to give me some history about it. Since I couldn’t take notes as we walked around, I did some googling for the background.
From Wikipedia: “A former mill town, Bolton has been a production centre for textiles since Flemish weavers settled in the area in the 14th century, introducing a wool and cotton-weaving tradition. The urbanisation and development of the town largely coincided with the introduction of textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution. Bolton was a 19th-century boomtown and, at its zenith in 1929, its 216 cotton mills and 26 bleaching and dyeing works made it one of the largest and most productive centres of cotton spinning in the world. The British cotton industry declined sharply after the First World War and, by the 1980s, cotton manufacture had virtually ceased in Bolton.”
The town of Bolton is currently a socioeconomically depressed place because now that the factories have dried up, nothing has come to replace it. There are some beautiful buildings downtown that are just closed up because there’s no business to keep them open. It’s sad really because there’s potential for this town to be very cute, and I’m sure it was once bustling.
Also, during the in-between time of the practice and the concert, I also got to just sit with Martin and have a chat and talk about music education philosophy, and just life. These kinds of conversations are great when you get to just know someone a bit better. I’m so glad I’ve made yet another great connection with Martin (and also Joe, though he was busy with students during this time).
I really enjoyed my two weeks at Ladybridge. I hope to stay in touch with Joe and Martin to see how they continue to grow their program over the next several years because I have no doubt that it will continue to get stronger. They are doing some fantastic work with the students!
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