What do children need from education now, and in the future? How is technology best used in teaching and learning? How can innovative approaches to education be reconciled with established, traditional ones? What does student-centred learning really mean? This five module course is not just for classroom or ensemble music educators. It’s suitable for anyone interested in creativity-infused education, in contemporary education issues, and in the integration and use of digital technology. It’s designed to challenge old paradigms, to inspire innovative and creative pedagogical philosophies, and to develop your ability to critically respond to the latest research. We’ll visit schools with vastly different approaches to learning and teaching, and meet inspiring teachers and principals. We’ll venture inside the classroom to closely observe how technology is integrated with music education – or how it’s decidedly not! We’ll talk to international leaders and experts about innovative and traditional approaches to music education, and I’ll provide insights from my own practice as well as from some of my students. I’ll be provoking you to think critically and creatively, to develop your own ideas and theories around students’ educational needs and the impact of digital technologies, now and into the future. Copy and paste this link into your browser to watch the trailer: http://tinyurl.com/music-education-21st-century
An Introduction to the BLs
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From the course by The University of Sydney
The Place of Music in 21st Century Education
34 ratings
From the lesson
The good news
What opportunities do new technologies afford music education?
Meet the Instructors
Dr. James HumberstoneLecturer in Music Education
Sydney Conservatorium of Music
[MUSIC]
PBL is short for project based learning.
There are many related pedagogies that share two of those words, and
I call them the BLs, because they all stand for something based learning.
These include project based learning, enquiry based learning,
problem based learning, or challenge based learning.
While these pedagogies and others, have their own philosophical and
practical differences, they share some key features.
Learning is student centered,
which means that students construct their own meaning through hands on activities,
and are active in designing their learning experiences.
Learning is often cross curricular, which is frequently
difficult to achieve in a typical school timetable where subjects are segregated.
And outcomes are real life, projects shared with the community or
even the world via the internet,
rather than school assignments that are forgotten once completed.
When we visited Hilltop Road Public School,
students were undertaking a PBL project with the big question, is the law fair.
After some discussion and
brainstorming, students formed groups following Sugata Mitra's, SOLE model
of learning which is based on his research that we learned about in module two.
In their smaller groups, they searched for
examples of law impacting on their lives and others' lives,
using resources inside the classroom as well as outside, through the internet.
And there's lovely combination of digital and analog.
Another feature of the BLs is that these projects happen over long periods of time,
allowing students to create work of a very high quality that they can be proud of.
The importance of multiple drafts and the extended processes for
review of draft is a subject discussing great detail in my favorite
ever education book, Ron Berger’s An Ethic of Excellence.
I asked Principal Natalie See why she placed so
much important on the process of drafting.
I think as teachers we're so time poor at times and we've got such a crowded
curriculum that we're always moving so quickly through what we're doing.
And sometimes skimming the surface and
not giving children time to do multiple drafts and improve what they're doing,
and look at it as "I can develop this and I can improve it".
Because we're looking for the next thing that we're doing.
So, multiple drafts has been a great mind shift for us.
So if they're working on projects for a much longer period of time,
you must have really had to change the way that you think about units of work and
the way that the curriculum is taught across the year..
Absolutely, sure.
We have to look at how we integrate key learning areas, and
how we look for common core things between our units so
that we can actually tie lots of our key learning areas in.
And we're finding that that's allowing us to teach
an provide opportunities in more meaningful ways.
So the learning is a lot deeper.
So we're not skimming the surface and
looking at lots of things over a longer period of time.
We're actually combining these things and teaching them in a deeper way.
And the learning's sticking with our kids because they actually see that they can
deeply understand something and spend time and have time to do multiple drafts and
explore things that we never considered that they'd be able to find out.
And that what you looked at today in terms of is the law fair,
that comes out of students co-creating a unit with some students in Adelaide,
where they went across and spent time going through the project base learning
process with students they hadn't even met before.
And co-creating that PBL unit because that's based on their passions and
their interests, and it ties in with the curriculum areas that we're doing.
So we told them the curriculum areas that they needed to be covering and
that's the project that came out.
Another school we visited that has invested a lot of time integrating project
based learning was the Northern Beaches Christian School.
Steve Collis explained why they use PBL.
So project based learning is a framework that we've really embraced over
the last few years, along with other techniques as well.
But project based learning really tries to wrestle with the question of
why does the learning matter.
The why of learning.
Is it just some disconnected cerebral abstract disconnected activity
happening in this weird space called the classroom or in fact can we make learning
actually happen the way it does in any other context.
You have a real problem to solve with real consequences for real people.
And so, we've really embraced that challenge in kindergarten right through
year 12, there's no reason why kindergarten kids cannot be engaging with
real world problems and have their solutions and their imagination and
the output of their hard work actually go out and benefit other people.
And so, there's a whole bunch of mechanisms that we look at to
help that happen.
You can have the outside world come in, so you invite parents in,
local community members, business leaders, council members, the mayor.
But also we can publish out to the world, and
using technology, that's really effective.
We can publish YouTube channels, or blog websites,
or in one instance we have our own version of Amazon.
Where the students publish their own books and
anyone in the world can purchase that online, it arrives in the post.
And so suddenly it's real, there's a real audience and we're actually
broadcasting and offering, and publishing out our solutions to the world.
In the music context here at NBCS, that very much plays out.
We've got this saying,
we don't learn about the music industry, we are in the music industry.
And there's nothing separate at all about the music study.
I think some people who maybe don't get a sophisticated understanding of
pedagogies like project-based learning or any kind of student-centered pedagogies,
they think that perhaps it's a little bit all wooly.
And you've said to me before that in fact,
there is no more scaffolded learning experience than something like that.
Would you care to just outline that?
Yeah. So this scaffolding is so critical and
the project based learning scaffolding is just one layer of it.
Project based learning will help the learning move towards a tangible output.
With a real solution, and then as part of project based learning,
those very first few moments of a unit of learning are really critical.
So the scaffolding there, you might get outside experts issues in.
So you need outside input that comes in to the students so they have a shape for
what the problem is, for what the need is out there.
And so that's got to be done deliberately, it doesn't just happen,
students don't know what they don't know.
But then, actually, all the way along the journey,
we have checkpoints, we have outside experts come and contribute.
We work as facilitators to help students frame their questions.
And then I guide them with research as well,
match them to the sources of help that they actually need.
All of this requires planning,
it requires often what I would call curated learning pathways.
That is to say students might go on different tangents.
Wherever they go they need support and we can actually resource that and
curate a series of high quality experiences that the students can embrace
depending on where they're going to take the question and the challenge.
While David Price, OBE, is hailed for bringing PBL to schools across the globe,
he agreed that the heart of BLs is a philosophy of student engagement.
In a sense, it's not about project based learning or
any one particular pedagogy, it's about a philosophy and
their philosophy is all about the integrations.
The integration of students across social class,
so they don't do any streaming or tracking.
The integration of head and hands, so for them, they're not separating out students,
they're good vocationally, they're good academically,
most of the real geniuses of this world have not seen any difference.
But I think the other thing that strikes you about places like High Tech High
is that it starts with the dialogue and the honesty, and
the relationship that they've got with their students.
So, yes the thing that visitors will often say is they're on first name terms with
their students. That's just for me, just emblematic of the fact that they're having
really honest dialog with the students and they trying to understand the students and
their parents and the community that they're there to serve.
So, what might all of this mean for music education?
In the final video this week, we'll find out.
[MUSIC]
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