A High School Visit and Observation

Today was a huge learning experience for me.  Melanie, Per and myself took a train ride to Nyanda State High School in Brisbane in order to observe music teacher Nathan Ryan.  I found many differences in the layout of their high school when compared to Pentucket Regional High School.  Firstly, they had many different buildings, each one with its own discipline.  Pentucket has one big building and I attribute this to the fact that our winters are cold and thus it is cheaper to heat one building than multiple buildings and it cuts down the amount of time the students need to be outside in the cold.  

Another big difference was the like a university situation, teachers have offices that cluster them together with computers and desks.  Teachers rotate throughout the classroom space and therefore their "home" for correcting and planning is in the offices assigned to their discipline.  Though I think this makes a great situation for teachers as far as breaking down barriers for communication and planning collaborative work, I feel as though there is a loss of ownership within the classroom space.  Many of our teachers back home with decorate their rooms with posters, papers, project examples, etc.  

I was very impressed by the fact that nearly every single room had a Smart Board in it.  Additionally, the grounds for sports were fantastic.  They had a cricket area, soccer field (they call it football), track area, and even a boardwalk that went over a creek.  The boardwalk reminded me of the brook that lays between the middle and high schools at Pentucket.  

The music rooms were very impressive.  Nathan has a computer lab just for music, a general music room, a percussion storage room, a sheet music library room, and a huge multi-purpose practice room.  From his explanation to me, it seems as though concert band and chorus is not as big in Australia as music technology is.  Nathan's upper level high school courses in music focus on learning the craft of creating a song and producing it.  We listened to some of his student examples and they were of very high caliber.  

Nathan talked about wanting to start a drumline that specifically integrates dance celebration of the Pacific Island students that make up a large portion of his school's population.  

One period we got to observe Nathan teach a music class to what would be ninth graders in our system back in the states.  He used the Smart Board to give examples of timbre, pitch, tempo, and dynamics.  From there he split the class into four groups and assigned a composition project to create a piece of music based on the timbre, pitch, tempo and dynamics of either a mouse or an elephant.  Each one of us observing was assigned to a group.  My group had four very energetic students in it and chose to make a composition about an elephant.  We went into the room next door and started playing around with the drum set, hand drum, piano, guitar, and Orff xylophone.  After a few minutes of listening to what each instrument sounded like, we brought it back together in the center of the room and discussed how we wanted the composition to work out.  I only asked questions so not to cut off from their imaginations.  The students came up with a theme of an elephant walking closer and closer to the music room and then walking away.  It started out with the guitar player playing a low G, then the piano playing whole note G two octaves below middle C, followed by the drum-set and hand drums playing half note hits.  As the elephant got closer, the density grew along with the volume.  The opposite happened as the elephant went away and each musician cut out of the composition one by one.  It was excellent to see Nathan having the entire class talk about the composition after it was performed.  This lesson reminded me of lessons we would do team teaching at the Bartlett Community Partnership School in Lowell during my undergraduate experience.  

Overall, this was an excellent experience for Melanie, Per, and myself to understand the culture of education within a high school in Brisbane, Australia.  It was very nice of Nathan to invite us into his classroom and high school.