• Imagining a plan for cultural education

    With the announcement following the publication of the White paper in England that work would begin on a National Plan for Cultural Education many will have applauded the announcement, and many will see this as part of a long history of policy and approaches that sought to champion cultural education. Music education has received considerable…

  • (Re)learning how to teach music in the secondary school

    (Re)learning how to teach music in the secondary school

    Thanks to Twitter and a group of fellow music educators I have started a collaborative blogging effort to work through a selection of the tasks in the edited volume ‘Learning to Teach Music in the Secondary School‘. The venture was inspired by a tweet I saw from Christine Counsell. The cog sci is a useful…

  • Pedagogy: exploring crocodiles

    I spend ages preparing sessions for early career music teachers; you don’t get much time to work with them and there’s pressure to make every minute count. Thankfully there is lots of good thinking in books such as this one that save some time in selecting the ideas, the provocations and the exemplification of practice…

  • People, Place, Purpose

    I enjoyed returning to Royal Opera House Leaders for Impact programme on Friday to join a panel about leading cultural education. Marvellously this programme is now into its sixth year; I was part of Generation 4, joining the programme as I started a new role in Bexley. The timing was ideal; I welcomed the collegiality…

  • Creative Survival, Creative potential

    Reading more about creative potential recently and capturing some quotes that were interesting; more to read! It is now common knowledge that creative efforts represent the key to innovation, advancement, and even survival. Creative potentials and efforts are vital for health, innovation, and so many forms of progress… Potential may sound like a risky topic,…

  • Valuing Creativity

    I kept coming across the inclusion of ‘value’ in the definitions of creativity; a creative output would typically be described as ‘original’ and ‘of value’. As a composer I wondered what value could mean; to whom? A quick Google Scholar search led to the discovery of Weisberg’s 2015 paper that shares my query about the…

  • A creative personality

    Teachers’ perceptions of creativity are complex, but too often they are not complex enough. When asked what child creativity is, a great majority of teachers would probably define it with reference to at least one aspect of creative thinking. Most frequently, it would probably be originality (“non-schematic thinking,” “creates new solutions”) or fluency (“has lots…

  • The craft of creativity

    Creativity is largely considered today synonymous with success. It is the success enjoyed by creative people who are accomplished in both their personal and professional life; the success of innovative institutions capable of thriving in the complex and dynamic work environments of today; the success of countries that cultivate a healthy creative industries sector and…

  • Off limits excellence

    I’ve kept diving into Google Scholar to look at excellence, arts, culture; some recent finds see excellence on a par with perfection (Moreh, 1998) and genius (Ginsburgh and Weyers, 2014). Some explore cultural excellence but they’re referring to ancient civilisations (Bain, 2016) and their cultural artefacts, assuming the skill to create such work is technically…

  • Stories of excellence

    ‘In general, insofar as art enters the domain of the art world, the institutional world of dealers, galleries, schools, granting agencies, collectors and so forth, it is subject to judgments of excellence, of which the relevance cannot be denied. According to many of those concerned, that is not what art is about; but it is…

  • Reclaiming excellence

    ‘The time has come to reclaim the word ‘excellence’ from its historic, elitist undertones and to recognise that the very best art and culture is for everyone’ writes James Purnell in the 2008 report ‘Supporting Excellence in the Arts’. Brian McMaster, the author of the report, writes that ‘the desire and ability to innovate and…

  • Qualities of excellence; excellent qualities.

    Provoked by the end of my last blog about quality and excellence I went back to the Arts Council England ‘Great art and culture for everyone’. Greatness distinctively pops up in the National Curriculum for Music where it’s expected pupils be taught to ‘appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music…