Tues Feb 7 – Fri Feb 10
Diss High School
This week I have been in Norwich, which is on the east side of England. It’s in the region called East Anglia. And I was in Norfolk County. I worked at a school called Diss High School which is in Diss. It’s a 16-minute train ride from the Norwich station to the Diss station. I walk to the station from my hotel, which takes me about seven minutes, and ride the train for 16 minutes to Diss, then Alison, the teacher I am shadowing, picks me up at the train station, and then we go to the school, which is about a five-minute drive. In the afternoons, I walk to the Diss train station which is about 20 minutes and the I take the train back to Norwich. It’s quite easy once you figure it out, though to do it every day and not have a car is not a sustainable way of going about it. But for 4 days, I got this!
The teachers
I really enjoyed being at Diss High School. Alison is such a positive person and brings such positive energy to the classroom. She works there four days a week and has a part-time yoga studio that she runs mostly online and out of her house. I was with her Tuesday through Friday. The first day she picked me up from my accommodation in Norwich, which was lovely. She doesn’t live in Norwich; she lives about 20 minutes east of there and drives into work every day, on the other side of Norwich. To me, it sounds like quite a long commute, but she likes where she lives, which is close to the seashore, and she likes working at Diss. She just finished her PhD at a university in Canada and has recently returned to the UK to continue working as a music teacher (this is not the school she was at before, however). There are two music teachers at the school. Alison is the department chair and her colleague Rebecca works full-time. It was great to get to know both of them throughout the week. I observed classes in both of their spaces.
Alison is not officially a Musical Futures teacher, but I am working with her because the MF teacher I was supposed to work with at a different high school this week wasn’t able to work it out, so she connected me with Alison. And that’s been great! Alison is a phenomenal teacher who essentially has a similar philosophical viewpoint that I do, which is also in alignment with the way that MF teachers teach. This involves, among lots of other things, decentering the classroom and letting students mess around on their own to figure things out, experiment, and practice. She does a great job of asking them questions and guiding them through things like how to make their compositions better and such. And she lets them work on their own a lot, which I love and think US teachers could incorporate much more for student learning.
Infrastructure and resources
The infrastructure and resources at Diss are underfunded across the board, not just in music, a similar story to Hayes, though Hayes has more musical equipment at their disposal than Diss does. This is a more rural school, and far away from London, so the population is different, as is the socioeconomic makeup of the community. Though they do have a full computer lab for one of the music classrooms, the computers are quite old and don’t have the software or hardware that is needed. They don’t have Logic Pro, Sibelius, or Midi keyboards, so they use free online sources such as MuseScore and Online Sequencer. So using music technology is quite a challenge. I do realize that the entire school's technology is not what it needs to be, and the music department is grateful to have the computers that they do have. I just wish the government would provide more funding to all schools for all academic programs across the board.
Though Diss doesn’t have a classroom set of ukuleles, they do have a class set of acoustic guitars that students use. They also have lots of rock band types of instruments such as drum sets, some bass and electric guitars, and some amps. And they have four practice rooms that students use to practice on their own and with friends at certain times throughout the day. Regardless of what they do and don’t have, the teachers are resourceful and creative and have found ways to give students a deep and comprehensive experience learning music. I talked with Alison and Rebecca about the obvious lack of resources and they are equally disappointed in the offerings here. They are working to find grants and internal ways to get funding for updated computers, software, and hardware, and a set of ukuleles. But the surprising thing is that when I asked what the school’s plan was for upgrading technology, they said there doesn’t seem to be one. I suppose it’s not completely unlike the lack of funding in the US public schools. But it’s always a sad and hard thing to hear. And it’s disappointing that it happens all over the world – education, and especially music education, is underfunded and quite frankly, disrespected by the powers that be.
The curriculum
Much like at Hayes, Diss has grades 7-13 and the curriculum for the students is pretty much the same in that everybody in grade 7-9 takes music and then grade 10 through 13 opt in for music as one of their major courses of study at the high school level. Here, however, they only have music as one of the as the option; they don’t have music technology, which was a second option at Hayes. I know that there are two students in grade 13 who are in the music option, I can’t remember how many are in grade 12, in grade 11 there are about 11 of them and in grade 10 there are about 10 or 11 students, I believe. So, small numbers just like at Hayes, compared to the overall population of the school (there are approximately 150 students per grade level, from what I remember Alison telling me). But again, students in the music elective take lots of different music courses, so they get a deep understanding of music at the high school level. Again, it’s to prepare them to take the GCSE, and their A-levels. Those national tests what the curriculum is directed toward. I learned that they take the GCSE at age 16 and they can stay until age 18 and take A-levels, which I think prepares them to study music at the university level. I’m still sorting all of this out…how it all fits together. But I can tell you that everything about their system is different from the US system – not all good and not all bad either.
Large Ensembles and plan time
At Diss, they don’t have any large ensembles because there’s just not enough teachers to divide the work. Alison and Rebecca need their lunch break to just have a break in the day, and they also use lunch for lunch detention. I talked to Alison more about whether or not she wished that they had large ensembles and she said it would be nice if they did but at this point there’s just not enough person-power to do that and teach all the courses that are required. Alison and Rebecca also have to do class cover sometimes during their free periods, which takes away from planning time. The schedule at both Hayes and Diss is quite grueling for the teachers, I have learned, and sounds very similar to what is happening in the US right now. They don’t have enough supply (substitute) teachers to teach the classes when teachers are out sick so they use teachers’ plan time.
Private studio teachers
In addition to the two music teachers that work at Diss, they have two people come in a few days a week to teach private lessons on different instruments. Joe teaches drum set and Delphine teaches piano and woodwinds. They are paid a percentage by the students’ families and a small percentage by the school itself, but I would describe them more like contract teachers. Many of them work at multiple schools and are only at one school a few hours a week. To me, the most similar thing that we have in the US is like they do it in Texas, where some of the big schools will pay a specialist on flute or something to come in and teach individual lessons to their students in the large ensembles. However, here, the large ensembles don’t exist. These lessons are simply to teach students how to play these instruments and they work through a specific curriculum that is geared toward taking a performance test at the end (I think). Again, this is part of the GCSE for those who elect music.
I did have the opportunity to watch the two studio teachers teach some while I was there this week, which was something I didn’t get to see at Hayes, though they have the same set-up. I got to watch Joe, the drum instructor, teach a few middle school-aged students on drum set. This was fascinating for me to see because I’ve never really seen anyone teach or take drum lessons on a drum kit. I really liked how he did it. He used syllables like avocado, mango, and plum for the syllables to teach kids basic drum solo types of things in addition to the basic backbeat. I wanted to take a lesson from him myself, but I didn’t get the chance! I also got to watch Delcine teach a typical flute lesson, which is right up my ally of course. Although it was more interesting to watch her teach a student who was taking piano lessons. He honestly was working more on creating a cover of a song and making it his own. So he was playing keyboard chords and singing the song. She was teaching him without traditional notation, which is the first time I’ve ever seen a piano teacher do this, which I also loved! They were mostly working on getting him to think about how to phrase the lyrics and put them with the chords. I asked him how he learned piano, and he said he just learned some on his own at home and asked his dad to help him too. So, it seems that Delcine was mostly helping him with vocal stuff I think. But that was really fascinating lesson.
Elementary music?
I talked to Alison about elementary music in her part of England and she laughed. She said it's technically a requirement of the national curriculum, but experiences vary so much between schools, largely dependent on staffing. She said the main feeder to Diss does the "bought in" program called Charanga, which does provide a logical structure for classroom teachers who are doing their best to teach music. It’s sort of expected that they should teach it but if they haven’t had experience doing it, how can they teach it? So a lot of Diss students do get some music education before grade 7, but many don’t get music class until they come to the high school level, so they start in grade 7. The ones who don’t choose music for high school only have it from grades 7 to 9, which is not much exposure to music at all.
Music from high school into university
When students have to choose whether they want to do music in high school at grade 9, that typically tracks them to have the option to do music at university. It doesn’t mean they have to, but they are more likely to choose music if they’ve chosen music in high school. What a young age to decide if you do or don’t want to study music at all for the rest of your school life and possible career! I think it’s crazy that it’s tracked so young. I asked Alison if students could change their curricular choices after they choose them at the beginning of grade 10 and she said they really can’t. She said it could be that around October of year 10, if they have really started figuring out it’s not working in a subject, that maybe they can switch to another one. But after that, they can’t change it throughout their time in high school. That is just so stringent to me.
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