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James Humberstone’s blog

My podcast, Music Zettel, is also hosted through this blog. You can listen to it here by filtering the Podcast category, or you can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play Music, or TuneIn.

  • On the new Music 1 syllabus

    Brad Fuller, Tom Fienberg and I wrote this initial analysis of the new NSW Music 1 syllabus when it was released just before the Christmas break. It was published on the blog of the Australian Assocation for Research in Education, EduMatters. As teachers return to thinking about school, teaching, and all those things, I thought… Read more

  • My “Musical Cryptography” unit of work, updated to meet new NSW Music 7-10 syllabus (2024 for 2026 onwards)

    ASME NSW are running a professional learning day tomorrow on our various new syllabi, and I realised that I haven’t shared one of the units of work that I updated for the 7-10 syllabus (Stage 4) last year – so that’s what this is. If you’ve followed my teaching and composition/production for long enough, you’ll… Read more

  • In defence of Explicit Teaching and Critical Thinking

    In defence of Explicit Teaching and Critical Thinking

    The last few days, I’ve re-posted a couple of articles I played a minor role in authoring for the Australian Association for Research in Education. These focus on AERO (the Australian Education Research Organisation), the way they push out “evidence” for teachers to follow in Australian education (and the fact that is contested), the lack… Read more

  • Evidence is important, but what is the problem?

    A re-post of the second article we wrote for the AARE blog recently.  This one a bit of a history lesson to get the current debate in perspective!   By Brad Fuller, James Humberstone and Rachael Dwyer   Following on from our previous piece, we explore the necessity for genuine evidence-based education practice to guide… Read more

  • AERO says educators can trust its evidence. Can they really?

    This article is re-published from the AARE blog. I’ll be re-posting the second part tomorrow, and a follow-up post soon.   By Rachael Dwyer, Brad Fuller and James Humberstone. Big credit to Rachael and Brad who did most of the work on this!   The first in a two-part series on AERO and evidence. Tomorrow:… Read more

  • My “Flip Sample” unit of work for middle/high school (e.g. year 7/8) students, updated to meet the new NSW Music 7-10 Syllabus

    (And a GPT Agent for aligning the new Content Points!) I wrote this unit of work in 2021 when YouTube creator-producer Andrew Huang released his fantastically simple (yet still pretty powerful) Flip Sampler. I’ve already shared that original Unit of Work and some supporting resources here. It’s worth noting that the app now also works… Read more

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