Week of Feb 20-24
This week I visited Norbridge Primary Academy, which is I think the only elementary-aged school I’m going to visit. For those who are interested in where this is, here is a map.
Matthew Bellingham is the teacher and he is just lovely. He works part time, just like the other two teachers I have observed. He works there two days a week. An interesting thing about him is he doesn’t have any degrees in music or education but he is a pretty great music teacher. His undergraduate degree is in business. Matt has been at the school for about 10 years, I believe. He works alongside his other music colleague, Jim, who also doesn’t have any official teacher or music certification. Jim is an older gentleman who’s been teaching there in different capacities for a long time. Jim teaches in two capacities: private lessons on guitar and ukulele, as well as some classroom music teaching. Matt only does classroom teaching. So, what this means is Matt works only for the school and Jim works partly for the school and partly is contracted out via a music company for the private lessons portion of the teaching he does. Jim is there either four or five days a week, I wasn’t quite sure, but he’s there more than Matt. It’s an interesting set up that they have. And also, they have NO MUSIC CLASSROOM. They travel from class to class to do their teaching.
Matt was originally a classroom teacher before being a music teacher, which includes teaching a bit of music along with all the other subjects (all primary school teachers are supposed to do this, but you can imagine that most don’t since most don’t know how to teach music). I talked to Matt about how he got into music teaching specifically, and he shared with me a story of how he helped some students get ready for a pretty major performance that was coming up. It was just thrown in his lap. So he helped the students get ready for this performance, which he was not obligated to do. The head master (school principal) observed that he did quite an amazing job of it, and the performance went well. After that, the head master asked him if he wanted to teach music full-time because it was such a success, so, after that, he decided he wanted to teach only music. And that’s how that came to be.
I asked Matt how he learned about music and what he plays. He mostly learned by watching YouTube and teaching himself. He’s the pastor at a local church, and works with the church band as well. He plays guitar, bass guitar, keyboard. I think his main instrument is guitar, but I am not fully sure. But it’s just very interesting to work with someone who has no official musical education. By the way, he also doesn’t really read traditional five-line notation. But like I said, he is a great music teacher to these kids! He clearly loves kids and gets how they learn and how to form relationships with them, which is something I think some people don’t get. He teaches things that are relevant to them, which they respond well to. We talked a lot about why he teaches what he teaches, and he said, knowing the students in this community, and knowing this community, he said, I just teach them what I think is most relevant and interesting to them. I asked him if he thought something like a wind band or a choir would be useful here. And he said, knowing his students, he doesn’t think that would be the most useful thing to teach. It’s clear he’s a culturally responsive teacher, though he did not use that term. It’s just something that is on my mind these days because I’m seeing a lot of it here.
I watched Matt teach multiple classes. I went in on Wednesday and it wasn’t officially a day where he had to teach but he went in because he’s going to enter some of his older students in a competition where they have to write a French pop song. So, he’s collaborating with the French teacher, and choosing several upper-class students in Years 5-6 to participate in this project. I watched them start the project on Wednesday and they have until May to get the song written and performed and a video made. It was really cool to see how they’re getting this off the ground. The students he chose are students who show a high degree of aptitude for music or French or both. There were about 12 to 15 kids who are part of this project. So that’s what we did on Wednesday. He said some of them are low SES kids, but they also have to show high aptitude. So not all students are getting this extra experience.
Thursday, I watched Jim and Matt teach several lessons together in the morning with Year 4. They did chair drumming from the Musical Futures Online website. It was really fun to watch how that happened and see how they’re using the MFO resources. They did it to Abba’s Dancing Queen and he slowed it down a lot to help students be able to get the multiple parts of the chair drumming, which is primarily a learning tool for learning to play drum set.
Then they transitioned to teaching a Year 6 class on remixing a pop song. This was a complete change of pace. Students each got a computer which he brought in on a classroom cart and we worked on getting them to create a login and download the song that he used for them. Again it was a MFO resource, which was the full MP3 of this current top-40s pop song called Friday, as well as some MIDI files, which are the different parts within the song. All of this was downloaded from MFO. Students basically messed around in a digital audio workstation (DAW) called Bandlab to change around the MIDI files to make them sound different based on what they like. So, instead of it, being a guitar, they might choose to make it a flute or something. This project with Year 6 will take probably most of the second half of this semester.
In the afternoon Matt had two pull-out lessons with grades four through six. This was mostly a small group, rock band-type of thing where, essentially they chose a pop song, and they chose their instruments, and they are going to together work to perform a cover of a pop tune. He actually used a Little Kids Rock because I told him about it yesterday and he really liked the resource. The students did get to choose their song, as a group, and it was fast. There are two different groups at two different times, so two different songs chosen. One song they chose was Let It Be and the other song…I don’t remember. They don’t have a drum set so they are using a Cajon instead. These lessons are totally my jam and I really loved watching how this got off the ground and seeing how he lets them work on their own, as well as how he guides them! I of course I stepped in and helped as well because this is my favorite thing to do! But I really like his style of teaching where he does a lot of talk to your neighbor and share out, and giving some instructions and letting them as around on their own. The students respond really well to this, too.
I also watched Jim teach a group lesson of ukuleles to some Year 2 students. It was a pretty traditional lesson except he’s teaching them picking on a ukulele, and not just chords which is cool. And he is using chord charts.
Friday, we started by teaching two different Year 5 classes on Brazilian drums. Jim taught the first lesson and then he had to go so then Matt taught the second lesson. I jumped in more with Matt’s lesson because I saw what they were doing. Being a music specialist, after I sensed that Matt is open to me co-teaching with him and is open to letting me take the lead at times, I tried to model a few more teaching strategies that I thought would be really helpful, like getting more students involved in doing more things more of the time. It was fun to collaborate with Matt and coteach with him. And it was fun to have a conversation about it afterwards. He said he really liked some of the things that I was doing and he was going to incorporate them, like having all students air play the parts, even though only some students are playing the actual instrument. Also, using student leaders within the sections to help get more students being successful (and the teacher not having to be saddled to playing one part).
So that was two classes in the morning, and then we did another Year 6 class of the remix project. Year 6 is difficult because they are the oldest students in the school so they just have that attitude. This project takes a long time to set up, but he seemed to do it more seamlessly today than yesterday, even though, as he pointed out, we didn’t get any further in the lesson, lol. But it was less frustrating because students listened and followed directions better for how to set up the project.
In the afternoon on Friday, we went to two different Year 2 classes, where Matt taught some basic rhythm reading of quarter in eighth notes. He used a Super Mario video on YouTube to get them reviewing tas and titis even though that’s not what they call them here. And then they got out instruments and they learned how to play a bit together as a class – he focused on tas and titis and basically created a layered piece with three different groups playing three different instruments: djembes, shakers, and xylophones. Year 2 was a little more dicey because they are just smaller and I am not used to that age group! But again, it was really great to see how Matt worked with them and was very patient with them. And ultimately, he helped them work together to try to read the rhythms and play together as a class. I jumped in more during the second Year 2 lesson, and we talked about some strategies to get them to play better together, like doing more complementary rhythms, which he employed in a second lesson, which worked pretty well I think.
Anyway, that concludes my three days at Norbridge. It’s a lovely school with a very inviting ambience to it. The teachers are wonderful and the students are generally well behaved and welcoming.
Conversations with Matt
When I had a conversation with Matt about music programs in other elementary schools, he said what the other teachers had said: it's not standard across schools. Classroom teachers are expected to teach music all the way up through Year 6. He said in his experience, some schools have some form of bought-in service from a music hub (like they are contracted through a music service. It would be sort of like if the music stores in the US contracted out private studio teachers that work in their stores to teach music in their schools...sort of). So some years students may have this type of music, and other years maybe not. And he said it's supplemented by class teachers. So as you might imagine, it probably doesn’t happen very often if at all, because how can someone teach something they don’t know anything about? He said he is not sure the ratios of how much schools rely on classroom teachers versus contract teachers to come in and teach music at the primary level. But ultimately, it is not consistent across schools and children get a different experience depending on where they go to school.
This is not a slight to classroom teachers. To me, this is a huge problem with the system and music education not a valued commodity here, at least in the primary grades, which is such a shame. It’s such a great thing for kids this age to experience! I asked Matt why he is able to be a music teacher at Norbridge and he said that the headmaster values music and the arts, so he puts part of his budget to paying for music teachers. He said most other primary school headmasters might say things like, “There’s no money in the budget…We have no money.” But it’s the very typical idea of, you pay for what you value. So, it’s amazing that Norbridge has two part-time music teachers and that, between them, every student gets some music class every week. And might I say they’re doing a pretty darn great job at it! The students are involved and engaged. They seem to love coming to music class from what I can tell. So I feel very grateful for having been able to shadow Matt and Jim for a couple of days.
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