The Hayes School in Bromley
Weeks of Jan 9-28
For the first three weeks of my sabbatical, I’ve been at a school called the Hayes School in Bromley. I'll talk about different topics to break things down. They include:
The Teacher I'm Shadowing
The Music Courses
The Teaching Staff
Large Ensembles and How They Learn Band/Orchestral Instruments
The Teaching Methods
How the Students Interact with Music
The Teacher I'm shadowing at Hayes School
The teacher I’m observing, Ms. Jane Werry, is an excellent seasoned and versatile music educator. I have seen her teach all manner of music classes from rhythmic counting using London metro stops to high-level composition using Logic Pro. She employs a lot of Musical Futures pedagogical techniques and/or content in all of her courses. It has been a joy to watch her teach, see how she plans, and have philosophical and pedagogical conversations with her throughout my time with her. I also think she (and all of the teachers to come) is so gracious to invite me into her classroom space.
The Music Courses
Hayes School is grades 7-13, which is essentially like our grade 6-12. The middle school students (6-9) are all required to take music class so it feels a lot like music classes in the US middle schools. The difference is that in the middle school, they don’t just call it “vocal music” as a catchall, which I think is a problem that we do in the US. It’s actual general music, and the teachers teach it like a general music class. For example, this past week they were learning to play three chords song Stay with Me by Sam Smith. After Jane did a bit of showing them what to do, they all got a keyboard out and were actively working on keyboards to learn the chords. It looked a bit like organized chaos because she totally decentered the classroom and had them each get a keyboard out and work in pairs. It was really cool – my kind of teaching. Because they get to mess around and figure things out on their own in their own time. This is a unit that’s going to take them several class periods. Maybe even up through Easter, which is the end of their term. I think the culminating on topic assignment is that they will create their own 3 chord songs or something like that. It will be something where they work on their own and create something. I love that. I think musical skills like learning chord function and progression on chorded instruments are really useful.
The high school students elect different tracks to take, which can include things like sciences, languages, or other things, and among them are traditional music or music tech. Students get to choose between two and four different tracks; some students choose both the music tech and the traditional music track. If students choose music, they don’t just take one music class, they take several different music classes because it’s a focused concentration in their curriculum. The traditional music students have been working on analyzing an aria from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. They literally were using scores and Roman numeral notation! I was blown away to watch that, since in the US, students don’t typically do that until maybe second semester music theory (or maybe first? I’m not fully sure, but I know it’s not until college that they are typically introduced to Roman Numeral analysis). They also had a deep discussion about the particular characters in the aria. The music techs students I have seen are in grades 12 and 13. Grade 12 has been working on recreating different songs (Tainted Love and then the theme to Stranger Things), so that they can become more familiar with Logic Pro. 13th grade is working on creating their original song in Logic Pro. This involves lots of different criteria, and I think it involves actually recording some things using real instruments, plugged into an audio interface. It is really high-tech stuff again I’m amazed to watch it. So a lot of what they do is sit at their computers and work on their own throughout the class period while Jane walks around and checks on their work, asks them questions and helps them when they need help. All of this is in preparation for the GCSE exams they have to take upon graduation (it’s the UK curriculum).
The Teaching Staff
The school has three part-time music teachers, and two teachers aids who do a lot of actual teaching as well. They are currently missing one full-time music teacher so Jane and I think the other two are picking up the slack for the loss of that teacher. They have all lost some free periods to make it happen. But they are all well-versed and flexible in what they teach. It’s not like anyone of them has this identity as a choir director or band teacher. They are music teachers that teach it all. To me, this is one of the biggest aha moments to watch, when large ensembles are not the center of the curriculum. They all don’t have that identity, which I think makes them more flexible and able to teach whatever is needed. When I talked to Jane and Emma (one of the other part-time music teachers), It’s clear that they all realize that they will need to teach a lot of different things, and that includes popular music and music technology as a fundamental part of the curriculum. So it’s refreshing to see what can happen, and how teachers can be, when large ensembles and competitive performances are not at the heart of a curricular program.
The two teaching aides don’t have teaching degrees. One just graduated from uni with a degree in geography and one just graduated from Hayes last year (he is 19) and is teaching a lot! They both do a great job and are quite dedicated to it. I’m impressed by both of them, honestly, though I was surprised to see this. However, the reality is that, like in the US, the UK is hard up for teachers because of the way they are paid and treated. It’s really just a sad thing this is happening everywhere and makes me so angry. When will things change?
Large Ensembles and Band/Orchestra Instruments
In addition to teaching general music classes for grades 7-9, and intensive music elective courses for 10-13, at Hayes School, they also have ensembles. However, they are not part of the actual curriculum. They all exist during the 40-minute lunch break, and they don’t meet very often: each ensemble meets once a week for approximately 30 minutes when you count set up time and actually eating lunch. They have choir on Mondays, band on Wednesdays, musical theater on Thursdays, and orchestra and ukulele club on Fridays. There is no time for warming up or getting too deep into the music. They have time to rehearse one or two songs and that is about it.
I asked Jane how students learn to play, for example, band instruments. She said they don’t have beginning band class in most schools. What happens is they have private teachers from a music organization in town (I think of it like teachers who teach at the local music shop) who come to the school every so often and teach students who want to learn those instruments. I met the brass teacher on Friday last week. He told me he’s here I think on Fridays, but I’m not 100% sure. But he teaches some students brass instruments. I also saw that there’s a percussion guy who comes in and teaches drum set. So, the students can take lessons as part of their curriculum, but it’s like a pull-out lesson. So, they might miss part of their English class one week to have their lesson, so that next week they might miss a different class, so they don’t get too far behind in anyone’s class. That’s how it works for students to take private lessons on instruments. And that’s how some students learn the typical band instruments. Others simply take private lessons outside of the school setting. It’s a completely different set up than in the US. And it’s so clear that large ensembles are not the focal point of the music curriculum.
Teaching Methods
In the high school music tech courses, the teacher is pretty much a guide or facilitator, where students are mostly working on creating their own compositions or arrangements. In the traditional music courses, it’s a lot of deep listening, analyzing, and discussing small sections of a piece of music. Again, it was amazing to me to see the high school students discussing chord progressions in the Mozart arias. I LOVE the deep listening as well – I think this is something that could be included much more in all music courses in the US. It leads to interesting discussions and helps students begin to use musical vocabulary in a way that they otherwise would not. In all HS courses, students are expected to understand music at a high level and show their understanding.
At the middle school level students do a lot of listening to music and talking about musical elements within it; they are expected to write it down and have discussions in class. This really helps them solidify the different musical elements that you could listen for and talk about in an interesting way. The musical “doing” of playing or singing is a bit of organized chaos, where the teacher again facilitates a space for them to work on their own, and she comes around and checks on them. Just imagine every student (there are about 30 in every class) and two on a keyboard, practicing three chord songs on their own. It sounds a little loud and looks a little chaotic, but when you walk around and check on the students, you can see they are thinking, working, experimenting, and getting somewhere (even if they are playing something off task, to me, that is a way of musical exploration). It’s a lot of independent practicing and learning and figuring it out, messing around on an instrument, rather than the teacher leading everyone through at the same time. This whole scene is my philosophy of teaching. I love watching this kind of teaching being normalized in a music classroom! I know several teachers in the US do this kind of teaching as well. I hope to see more of it because…well, it just works.
The Students
The students are just like American students, it seems, especially the middle schoolers. They are very talkative and it seems that several of them don’t want to be there (typical, I guess). Many of the year 9 students know they are not going to choose music as their course of study in HS so they do not take it seriously – that age range is a tough grade to teach both in the UK and in the US, I think. It feels very similar to a middle school music classroom in the US. But regardless, the teachers work to find relevant and interesting music to have them work on, and many of them are interested and I can tell they enjoy it.
High school music feels completely different because the students choose to take it, and they understand that they need to learn deeply about the topic. They actually have to take graduation exams (GCSE exams) for whatever subjects they choose to take in high school. So, the students who choose music are highly motivated for the most part, and know that they have to be able to do all of these different tasks and show that they understand musical content in a pretty comprehensive way. It’s content that we just don’t require students to do at the high school level in the US.
My take at this point on the high school music structure: I love that they have such a comprehensive curriculum. However, the flip-side of this is that there aren’t very many music students who choose to do music at the high school level. It’s more of a deep dive into an academic subject, and it’s more involved than performing in a band or choir. I have lots of conflicting thoughts about this, because, though there are fewer students in high school doing music, they are getting a more comprehensive musical education. However, in the US, though music students aren’t getting a very comprehensive music education at the high school level (IMHO), lots of them are involved in large ensembles because they are having an enjoyable positive experience performing on an instrument. I know that in the US there are some high schools who have gotten really into things like music technology, and guitar and some schools do AP music theory. Those things are great, but large ensembles and competition culture still dominate our curriculum. What could US music students learn if the music curriculum was more well-balanced with more relevant music offerings? I don’t suggest ending large ensembles, because they are an important part of our music curriculum in the US, but I do suggest not having them so much at the center of the curriculum…I think a more balanced approach would be better. But more on that later…
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