Interactive whiteboards and all that jazz: the contribution of musical metaphors to the analysis of classroom activity with interactive technologies

Abstract

The teacher’s role has often been described as one of ‘orchestration’, and this musical analogy is a powerful one in characterising the manipulation of features in the classroom setting in order to generate activity or ‘performance’ which leads to learning. However, a classical view of orchestration would fail to recognise the extent to which effective teaching and learning make use of serendipity and improvisation – characteristics more often associated with jazz. This paper uses the characteristics of various musical genres to characterise teaching approaches observed in the authors’ work in two research projects investigating the use of ICT in mathematics classrooms. In particular the authors demonstrate how jazz and other musical analogies can be useful when describing some of the more effective classrooms in which serendipitous events were exploited and performances were improvised by pupils as well as teachers. They discuss the ways in which teachers were able to use ICT to establish conditions under which more jazz‐like performances were likely to occur, offering opportunities for more creative, improvised teaching and learning. They also examine lessons that can be learned by examining differences between musical and pedagogical settings.

Keywords:

• whole‐class interactive technologies
• orchestration
• improvisation

Acknowledgements

The projects which contributed to this paper were funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (Research Grant RES‐139‐25‐0167) and Becta: they were respectively ‘The Use of ICT to Improve Learning and Attainment through Interactive Teaching’ and ‘The Impact of Prior Technological Experiences on Children’s Ability to Use Play as a Medium for Developing Capability with New ICT Tools’. The authors wish to thank the other members of the research teams (John Parkinson, Nigel Norman, Lynne Meiring, Alex Morgan, Gerran Thomas, Helen Denny, Bethan Jones, Cheryl Anthony, Anne Loughran, Helen Lewis), all the teachers who contributed to the projects, and the anonymous reviewers who commented on an earlier version of the paper.