My name is Michelle Flint and I’m head of department

music and performing arts at Cambridge Middle School.

My entire music programme comes under the

encompasses really Orff Schulwerk which

is a teaching pedagogy that was developed by Carl Orff and

Gunild Keetman in Bavaria in 1924 - a long, long time ago.

This pedagogy, this approach teaches children to sing,

dance, use movement, body language, body percussion

to actually create and explore in a really imaginative way.

Last year I approached the University of Waikato

and found that they were offering

Masters papers in Orff Schulwerk -

at that point I’d never heard about Orff Schulwerk before

so I went along to the first workshop in January last year

and had a really amazing time and then did Orff two in July,

and while I was there it opened my eyes

to the connections between speech, song, dance,

movement, body language, and instrumentation.

While I was there at the workshops I was able to

create and explore in a really fun and imaginative way.

It’s a really inclusive programme,

it’s a child centred approach,

and I thought great, this is what we need for our school.

So my teaching programme now has changed completely

in that it’s more hands on.

The students know now

their journey, the learning journey they’re on,

they know the purpose for the music making,

which is really really important

before we didn’t have any way, any direction

that we were going on, now my children do have a journey.

I take them on a learning journey.

We discuss what it is that we want to get out of our music

because it’s really important for students to know

the direction that they want their music to be,

a reason for their creativity,

a reason for their music making.

A really exciting part of my teaching now

with the Orff approach is using poems

or rhymes as a starting point for teaching and learning.

So the children develop ostinato patterns,

which are repeating patterns from words within the poem,

which we can create and build up to make layers.

Lots of ostinati layers that goes along

with a melody that we create.

We then take this repeating pattern, after using our voice,

we then take it onto body percussion

and then onto untuned instruments

and then onto actual instruments so the students are

actually understanding about composition -

understanding the form of composition

and at the same time they’re getting a rhythmic

and an aural awareness.

As Carl Orff himself said, Orff Schulwerk is for the school

and it’s meant to be integrated into

the whole school curriculum.

And if us as Orff teachers can actually integrate

with other teachers, and collaborate with other teachers,

then their programme can become part of our programme.

So when children are actually using these rhymes to create,

we can use rhymes that they’ve made themselves -

it might be a poem that they’re working on

in their own classroom.

They can bring these poems with them and that can be

the starting point for our teaching and learning.

Currently I’m working with a group of five students

who are our lowest maths achievers.

They are year eight students but are really

struggling with their maths.

So since the Orff approach again is for the school

I figured it would be really nice to use the

connection between maths and music

to see if we can help there with development.

We’ve only started this and

we’re only actually 15 sessions into the maths work,

but those five students come to me every week

and we’re using this model word idea to help them

understand about whole notes and half notes

and quarter notes and eighth notes, and then we’re

actually taking that into maths and musical maths.

So they’re able to split, subdivide,

and understand these fractions of notes.

The students are clapping them,

they’re using untuned percussion and

they’re going into percussion,

so one of them might play a whole note while some of them

play a half note and a quarter note and an eighth note.

We then take that onto the whiteboard

and we start adding and subtracting whole notes,

half notes, quarter notes, adding notes together.

So it’s really helping them with their

understanding of division etc.

So again it can be used not only for poems,

but we can use music for maths

since it obviously stimulates other learning areas as well.

So really then, the Orff approach,

it does empower students of all ages

particularly adolescents, mainly because it’s hands on.

It’s literally from the minute that students

walk through the door, it’s practical, practical, practical.

And not having to sit down and take notes,

they’re not having to listen to theory,

they’re actually physically and actively involved

in their music making

from the minute they walk through the door

to the minute they leave which is really, really important.