Most of the studio is about to lose a vote, and how they handle that decides the next three weeks. Town Hall repairs first and votes second - deliberately in that order. Then the first proper listen, and the Exhibition banner begins.
By 3:15 today the studio has a song it chose and cannot un-choose - and the people who lost the vote are visibly in.
The hard conversation happened before the fun one. If the vote went first, the repair didn't really happen.
Hands measure social pressure. Paper measures opinion. And the leader announced it, not the guide.
You gave no signal, by word or tone. The song belongs to them entirely.
Rules of Engagement (Wk 2) govern this Town Hall and get pointed at during repair - and any gap found today feeds the Week 5 rewrite. The silent-sketch-then-round-robin protocol from the Week 3 boats gets reused for the banner design, deliberately and out loud.
Standard rhythm. Greet by name. Thinking Puzzle up by the cubbies.
Standard rhythm.
Talking points, not a script. Hit these in your own words - the studio can tell the difference, and the ones that land are the ones you actually mean.
The opener (3 min):
"We vote on the song today. Before we do, I want to talk about the thing that happens ten seconds after a vote."
The core (12 min):
Say the arithmetic out loud, because it's the honest bit and nobody usually says it: "There are [n] songs nominated. That means most of you are about to lose. Not because your song was bad - because that's how counting works."
Then the actual skill:
Then hand it over: "Town Hall runs this. I'm not counting the votes and I'm not breaking a tie."
The close (5 min):
"Whatever wins, we're stuck with for three weeks and it goes on a screen in front of your families. Argue properly."
Do not indicate a preference. Not by tone, not by which argument you repeat back, not by which song you happen to hum at snack. The moment the studio suspects you had a favorite, every artistic decision for the next three weeks becomes yours to defend rather than theirs to own.
Standard rhythm.
Standard rhythm.
Standard rhythm.
Standard rhythm.
Learner-led. Rotating leader - not whoever led #2 or #3. Coached Monday or Tuesday.
Agenda - and the order is deliberate:
How to run the vote:
The Rules of Engagement from Week 2 govern this Town Hall and the studio wrote them. If the repair conversation gets heated, the leader should be pointing at the wall rather than at people - and if the rules turn out not to cover it, that's a genuine finding for the Week 5 rewrite.
Standard rhythm. Guide eats with the studio.
Wednesday's unplugged slot. Physical books, class-voted title.
The song exists as of 12:00. Fifty minutes to turn it from a track the studio likes into a structure the studio can work with - and to build the one physical prop the film actually needs. The Banner stays in the week rather than moving to backup because it isn't a side project: it has to be legible on camera, carried by several people at once, and survive being run down a corridor. That's production work.
1 - The first proper listen (12 min):
Aim for four or five sections. More than six and the map becomes unassignable.
2 - Build the Banner (25 min):
Not decoration. A prop with four requirements, given as constraints rather than suggestions:
Guide's only circulating question: "Can you read that from the other end of the hall?"
3 - Run what exists (10 min):
Yes, on day three, with a song chosen four hours ago and no map. That's the point.
4 - Close (3 min): tomorrow the whole song gets mapped and the whole route gets walked. Tell them the map has to be finished by Friday because the shoot is a week today.
Carry forward: section timings on the board, banner hung where it can be grabbed. Both live until the shoot.
The Portrait Wall and Chain Reaction are parked on the Week 4 overview as Backup Activities, written out in full. They are genuinely good and they're there when the studio needs a break from the same song - but they don't get to eat a Quest block that rehearsal needs.
Paint and banner storage add a step today. Whoever designed the layout owns the roll-up - give the job to the team, not to the tidiest learner.
The callout to look for today is someone whose song lost and who immediately got behind the winner. Name it precisely and connect it to the phrase from this morning.
One question: "What's one thing about the song you're glad about, even if you voted for a different one?"
Send-off by name.
Talking points for this week's email. Drop these into an AI assistant along with two or three live notes from your actual week - a name, a moment, something that surprised you - and it'll give you a draft in your own voice. The specifics are what make it land; the structure below is just the scaffolding.
The draft underneath is an example of the shape and the tone, not a template to send as-is. A parent who gets the same email as every other parent can tell.
Subject: We have a song, and most of them lost the vote
Hi families,
Town Hall did two jobs today, in a deliberate order. Repair first - the studio talked honestly about friction from the last two weeks' team work and sorted some of it out. Then the vote.
Before voting I was blunt with them about the arithmetic: with that many nominations, most people were about to lose, and not because their song was bad. What we talked about instead was how to lose a vote well - argue as hard as you can beforehand, then be entirely in on whatever wins. The phrase on our board is "disagree and commit," and the test of it comes in about ten days when this gets hard.
We voted by written ballot rather than hands, because hands measure who's brave and paper measures what people think. A learner ran the vote and announced the result. I deliberately gave no indication of my own preference and won't.
We also started the Exhibition banner. Every learner's mark will be on it.
- [your name]