Castleford Academy, Feb 27-March 10
The teachers
This has been a pretty great experience to be at Castleford Academy for the past two weeks. It’s been great at every school I’ve been to! I cannot say enough about how wonderful the teachers have been to invite me in and let me be part of their world for several days. And Castleford has been no different. The two teachers I worked with primarily were Rosie Weatherley and Liz Moran. Rosie is the music department chair, and Liz is the performing arts department chair, so they both have added responsibilities which means a bit more pay. But these two teachers are the first people I’ve worked with who work five days a week full-time, and let me say, they are extremely busy. I can understand why lots of people choose to work part time. And I think it’s great that there is that option because people don’t have to worry about having health insurance, since it’s not tied to their jobs. BRILLIANT. Though there are problems with it, but still. This just affords people SO MUCH MORE FLEXIBILITY.
Liz is the blond and Rosie is the brunette.
The program
The Castleford music program is years 7 through 11, very much like Hayes and Diss except that Hayes and Diss also had years 12 and 13. L&R told me that there is year 12 and 13 here, but just not many students take it, from what I understand. I don’t think there are any music GCSE students in years 12 and 13. The more I’m understanding about the school system here, it seems that the equivalent of “graduation” in the US can be achieved in year 11 at age 16 and that is what a lot of students do. Years 12 and 13 are considered college, though not the same college as in the US. Their universities are like our universities, but the colleges are for those students between years 16 and 18. I don’t understand who actually attends the years 12 and 13 college level (if I’m even describing it correctly). Is it people who plan to attend university in particular? Or is it also some folks who don’t plan to attend university? And if so, why do they attend? I’m quite confused about that still.
Performing ensemble – super inclusive
Similar to other schools I’ve been to, they don’t have large ensembles in the curriculum, so you don’t see band instruments anywhere, except hanging from the ceilings as decoration. After school, on Thursdays, Rosie does a band class. She does two of them. One is where everybody can come, no matter what your ability level is. And another is where select students come. But it’s more like a rock band style, not wind band. The one I was able to observe was the “everybody come” band and there were students of all levels. They got to choose their instruments as well. So we had maybe 10 or so guitar players (Rosie paired up more advanced students with new students to teach them the basics); one or two bass guitarists; maybe 10 keyboard players (they worked on their own); and a smattering of wind players (I think there were about 7 or 8 of them which included flutes, clarinets, violins, and maybe others but those are the instruments I remember). There were no drummers because the song they are learning doesn’t require it. It seemed there were a couple of students who wanted to play drums, but Rosie told them to choose a different instrument for this song, so they did – I think they chose guitar. Oh, and there were maybe three girls who chose to be singers for the song. The group is learning the song Hey There Delilah and today was the first day. Rosie had a chord sheet that they were all working from that she passed out. It was pretty easy for the guitarists, bassists, and keyboards to pick it up pretty quickly. However, for the wind players – one of the part-time teachers was helping them and what he did was he wrote out their parts using staff notation. From what I saw, he wrote out some accompaniment parts that the keyboards might also play. This was the most interesting thing I saw, and I wondered why he was using traditional notation for the wind players. Couldn’t they learn to play by ear? It’s not my place to jump in because he has a method to it, but it was a major philosophical conundrum for me to see how these students were learning to play this song. I wanted them to use their ears more and not rely on staff notation. I think they could do it, and I think it could be useful for them. But again, I’m just here for a short time and I don’t know the whole context. So I took it all in and enjoyed walking around and listening to and helping different students. What an interesting day!
GCSE in Year 9
Anyway, another difference at Castleford is that here, students choose their GCSE courses in year nine, whereas in other schools it’s year 10. It’s like the year nine students choose GCSE courses but also take some of the required middle school courses. For example, I observed a class that Liz taught where there were some year nines, who didn’t choose music as their GCSE, but there were all kinds of year nine students in there. This is an experimental part of their curriculum this year, I think. I don’t fully understand it, much like I don’t fully understand anything here, but I’m learning a bit more about the whole thing as I go from school to school. I will say the whole setup is quite different than in the US, and I’m honestly not in a place to judge it one way or another. I’m truly fascinated about how very different public education is in a country that is so similar to ours.
Their classes
Liz and Rosie do a lot with computers in their classes. They have two pretty nice size classrooms with some pretty up-to-date computers and keyboards throughout. It’s really nice actually. They also have lots of guitars and drum sets, much like all the other schools I’ve been to. The years seven and eight have done some really cool projects where they are exploring different things. I watched several year 7 lessons where they were using some DJing software called Serrato DJ Lite to learn how to beat match and crossfade. They worked in pairs during the class period and some shared their creations at the end of class. I also watched several year 8 lessons where the focus was film music. Students had to learn a motive from the song Let It Go and create it into a horror film version using that motive as a start. Again, they worked in pairs on it in class and some shared their creations at the end of class. These are units that they are working on all semester until the Easter break. It’s also kind of an introduction to working with lots of different digital audio workstations, as well as keyboard sounds. It’s a lot of exploration and introduction of new concepts that they will add on to over the time in their music classes. I think it’s pretty cool.
I’m going to work backwards from year 11 to year 9. Year 11 music GCSE students’ curriculum is based on the GCSE exam, which means that they have to turn in two compositions by sometime in May. And they are working on these compositions during most of the year in Year 11, from what I understand. On Fridays after school Rosie has what’s called year 11 boosters. This is essentially an additional class time for year 11 students have chosen music GCSE because they cut one of the hours out for year 11 students to be in music class to complete their assignments. But the assignment requirements are the same – so same work load and less time to do it in. Translation: more work for teachers. UGH!!
In years 9 and 10, they do projects and units that familiarize them with the requirements of what they have to pass and work on things like that. And in year 11, they are working on their actual assignments. Anyway, Rosie had to find an additional hour to get students in the classroom each week to make sure they are able to finish their projects in enough time to submit them. It’s crazy to me that they just expect them to have class outside of the school day even though it’s curricular. I think that’s wrong on so many levels, and also not that different from what we are experiencing in the US at the moment. Rosie doesn’t get paid extra for this. She just has to do it. I don’t think I had thought about this until now, or really understood it, but most of the students are not able to work on their projects at home because they’re all based on a computer. So they have to work on their projects in the school classroom that has the computer programs on it that they need. Primarily they use a digital audio workstation called Cubase. That is a lot of what the year 10 and 11 curriculum is from what I understand.
Thoughts on Music GCSE
And another thing I just now understood: if students fail their GCSE exams, the teachers have to answer for that. It’s really hard on the teachers because when I talked to R&L about this, they said basically they don’t let them fail. There’s so much pressure on them to work with each individual student to help make sure their compositions are at the level that they will pass. And this is particularly tricky when you have quite a few students who choose Music GCSE who don’t really care about it. They are not invested and they don’t care. Their attitude is, “I’m not ever going to use this so I’m not going to try very hard.” So it ends up becoming a lot of work on the individual music teachers to motivate and mentor students a lot along the way. I should also say, they have at least three or four other teachers who are part time but who come in and help students work on their GCSE compositions. It’s a huge undertaking by the teachers, and much more individualized than for teachers who teach, for example, foreign language GCSEs, because the nature of the work is so individualized. I mean, students are creating individual compositions.
A lot of what the students in several grades do (I think I saw this in years 7-10) also is piano tutorials on YouTube. This was one of the many tools used for different types of lessons with different parameters. But it is a good way of getting students playing relatively successfully relatively quickly. Some of my students have used this before as well. So they will look up a song like Adele‘s Set Fire to the Rain and play it using a piano tutorial where there’s left hand chords and right hand melody. It looks similar to the Rock Band Wii game where you are tracking what they are doing on a screen and playing along. But that is a way for students to learn how to play a song.
How does Musical Futures play in to Rosie and Liz’s classrooms?
The more we talked, and the more I learn about Musical Futures, the more I believe that Musical Futures does two major things really well.
1) They have lots of great resources on Musical Futures Online that teachers can use. I have seen several different teachers use the specific resources in their classes, and I am working with them a lot on my own to familiarize myself with them.
2) They have a philosophical foundation that, whether teachers use the resources or not, has the potential to transform the way music teachers approach planning and teaching and their own roles within the classroom. I have seen this in every Musical Futures classroom I have been in, and Liz and Rosie totally embody this philosophy.
I asked Liz and Rosie how they utilize MF and they said it has helped them reshape and recontextualize how they plan their classes. So instead of doing different units that may seem disconnected every 6 weeks (a half term), it has helped them find connections between and through all of the musical skills and knowledge they want students to know and be able to do. That sounds pretty revolutionary. So, though we discussed that I didn’t see them using specific MF Online resources, they told me how they conceptualize of their teaching and how MF has been a game-changer for them as they have learned more and more about the philosophical underpinnings of the program. This is why they are a Musical Futures Champion School!
Some of my thoughts on music education philosophy based on what they do
At Castleford, they do not focus on primarily on staff notation at all in this program, which I am a big fan of. So much of it is on getting students to actively create relevant music and be successful at it, which I appreciate. A lot of the work students do is independent, but some of it is with partners on keyboards or computers, particularly in the younger grades. But upper level, it is a lot of individual work. However, the upper level students do get to choose whether they want to do individual or group work. I did see some students working for the GCSE the songs were they working together as a group. For example, there was one year 10 class with a group of 4: two singers and two pianists. They were working on a song where one pianist was playing the bass notes and one was playing the melody line using a YouTube piano tutorial, and the two singers were singing the words from a lead sheet. I listened to them after they had worked together and they were relying heavily on the piano roll on the computer screen rather than listening and grooving as a unit. But it wasn’t terrible…just one of those things where they were about ready for the next step to work it out and not use the piano roll. So I told them that’s what they need to do – to listen to each other and start relying less on the piano roll because they’re using that as a crutch and it’s not making things sound very musical. I can’t tell If students actually take my suggestions because I’m not really their teacher. So I don’t know how they actually work things out to get it better. I would love to see some of their final project to see how these performances end up. So much of this is just student led and student driven with the teacher offering suggestions along the way. I love that way of being in the classroom and that way of teaching and learning. It’s right up my alley!
Snow day!
Friday, March 11, the last day I was supposed to be at Castleford, we had a snow day! It had snowed on and off for the past two days, and Friday morning it was so pretty on the streets. It was a welcome break for the teachers, though I was sad I didn't get to see Rosie and Liz one last time. But such is life, I guess.
This has been a great time at this school, and I’ve gotten along really well with Liz and Rosie. They even told me that they were so glad we got on so well. And I agree! We even went out for drinks one evening after school and it was lovely to just chill with them and get to know them outside of school. Super fun ladies! I think if I lived here, we would hang out more! But alas, on to the next place!
Comments