[MUSIC] I'm now outside the music classroom with music teachers Brad Fuller, and Peter Orenstein. I've started outside the classroom because I want to talk to them first, before we go in there, about collaboration. The school gave us an opportunity when we both came on board, almost four years ago now, to combine our classes and by combining our classes in a large space, we are able to both be in the classroom at the same time. We said, what if we combined Year 9 and 10 and Year 11 and 12? What we've seen there is that Year 10s has become powerful mentors initially for the Year 9s and the year 12s become powerful mentors for the year 11s. So that everybody is always looking ahead in the journey and seeing what that's going to be like when I get there, but making little tweaks along the way. Yeah, we've been able to grow together. We've been challenging each other now, our thought patterns, our philosophies, that's really powerful as well. That you don't get comfortable in your teaching styles or pedagogy but you are actually being challenged daily. I think given the nature of being a musician, music teachers are probably some of the most comfortable with the idea of collaborating with other music teachers. But I think maybe, also, the idea of combining two Year 7 classes to a class of 56, most of us would think that is completely insane. Let's see how it's actually working. When you walk through and cross the threshold into our music classroom, we don't want you to just come into a music classroom. We want you to get the sense that actually something has changed and now you are not an audience member anymore. You're not somebody who might want to be a musician when you grow up, you are a musician. Now we're going to help you to find your musical passion and develop it, so that you can hone your craft and find your audience. Everything begins and ends, intro business, in the green room. Rather than call it a classroom, it's a green room. So they've walked into an inspirational space. You've got an incredible number of students here. How come it's not anarchy? What's the structure? For us, it starts with the gig. What do you need in a gig? You need a band. Every single student is in a band of seven. We work in seven groups of seven and sometimes, eight groups of seven. If you've got 50 odd students all at once and this philosophy that everyone's in a band and making music, then how can two people teach seven or eight bands of seven? How does that work? Our classroom is divided into zones and so the students in their bands, and by the way, bands aren't necessarily bands just because they make music together. It's about the social component of being in a band and working together as well. What we're trying to do in Year 7 is initiate people into that process. And then, they've got six years of working collaboratively and honing those skills about working together as well as honing their musicianship. Students move around the various zones in the room and at two of those zones, they'll find us. We're like checkpoints on the journey and that means that even though there's a large number of students in here, they get a one to seven contact with a teacher. In a typical model, we'll only judge a student at the end of a project. What we have here is formative feedback everyday with an expert. How do you ensure that students have got their own creative input in the field, that they've got creative freedom in the projects that you're setting up for them? We set a benchmark of productivity, of creativity, a guideline along the way However, it's not prescriptive in the sense that you must do this at this certain time. It's just a guide, and so, if you want to work slower, at the start of the project, you can. If you want to go ahead and work ahead of people, go for it. We have two colors that are really important to us. One is the blue button, and when you get to a station and you cannot remember what you've done, you hit the blue button, and everything you've learned up to that point is available. But really importantly, everything that's yet to come is available there. We have students that are racing ahead and students that are catching up at any given point. But the other color that's really important to us is the green line button. Students follow the green line and it shows them where they're up to in the rotation. We've touched on the technology that's been used in this classroom a bit but mostly, we've looked at philosophy so far. In the next video, we're going to look at what technology is actually in use here that allows students to be so productive, as they move around the structure of the classes. [MUSIC]
