Archives for Musical Futures

Ten Years On : Remembering Jane Attenborough

Ten years ago today, December 26th 2004, I was guiding my two sons through the streets of Venice. Along with their grandparents, we’d decided to spend Christmas in that beautiful city. Our visit coincided with the ‘aqua alta’ – the high tides that  require St Marks Square to temporarily put out raised planks of wood that form makeshift boardwalks to allow tourists to avoid getting wet. It had been cold and dank in Venice so, truth be told, we were ready to head back to the UK. The minor inconvenience of an entirely predictable high tide was put into sharp perspective, …

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Teachers Are Doing It For Themselves

An important report, ‘A Rich Seam’, written by Michael Fullan and Maria Langworthy, was published earlier this year. It signals the potential for a long-awaited decoupling of research and political pressure. It suggests that teachers as a profession are now starting to drive the direction of educational research based on what works in the classroom, rather than what plays well in the opinion polls. Meanwhile, in England, the government’s schools inspections agency (OFSTED) sought to re-assert its independence last week, when its Chief Inspector – accused by government advisers as trapped in 1960’s ‘progressive’ teaching methods – argued that insisting …

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Vegemite and Transformative Teaching

There’s been a lot of talk in the UK recently, sparked by Ben Goldacre’s campaign for applying the scientific method of evidence gathering to innovation in education. Ben’s argument is that teachers, schools, and indeed Secretaries of State for Education frequently implement a change in approach without looking at the objective evidence that it will work. While this argument has obvious appeal, and offers the promise of what all policy makers crave (certainty), as others have pointed out, students are not quite the same as patients. And there are growing concerns about the validity of randomised control trials in the social …

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