Nick Cutts

I spent lots of time in schools towards the end of last acadmic year working with children and staff to explore creative approaches to learning.  Much of this work was around group creativity – getting groups working together well, sharing and refining ideas together, and cooperating towards a common goal.  Music is a great way of exploring this, and I had a lovely time with a number of schools trying out all sorts of approaches.  One lovely project that springs to mind had three seperate groups, all from the same class, ‘competing’ with each other to create episodes of music to accompany an aboriganl story.  The groups often wanted to work on the same episodes, and the negotiatins between the groups became complex and at times quite sneaky!  These skills then fed into the music-making, resulting in a fabulous multi-media performance of poetry, song, music and images retelling the narrative and emotions of the story…. fabulous!

Last week I had the pleasure of working with a small group of primary headteachers at the Sheffield headteacher’s conference at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds.  This was back to one of my favourite topics at the moment – Music and Maths.  Over a two hour session (which felt more like 10 minutes) we had a great time exploring mathematical principles through music and creative approaches.  We all learnt something new and took some new ideas to try in the classroom.  Lots of the ideas are ones that I have worked with teachers and children to develop – true partnership learning!

Those of you who know me will be aware of my interest in developing more creative learning links between music and maths.  I’m getting more opportunities to expland on this work at the moment and will be beginning a Creative Partnerships project at a primary school in Sheffield soon to explore this further.  We are going to explore this through a Mantle of the Expert approach, something I have spent considerable time exploring with the fantastic Dr Dorothy Heathcote.  Mantle of the Expert (see www.mantleoftheexpert.com) is an approach to learning and teaching through dramatic inquiry, placing the children and young people within an enterprise in which the teacher can adopt the voice of a colleague.  This is a great approach which gives the children and young people a sense of ownership of their own learning, and makes learning both real and relevant.  Should be an interesting project!