It is always challenging to judge or anticipate how well a particular cohort of students will receive a unit of work. It sometimes seems that no matter how many hours of planning you put into the perfect sequence of lessons, there are mitigating factors and unexpected curveballs that derail your thought process and shake your confidence.
Curriculum structures and ideologies have become a recent focus of Ofsted inspections, and far more emphasis is now given to the sequence of knowledge and the reasoning behind the selection of materials that are being taught. It is increasingly difficult for music curriculum leaders due to the concise nature of the current national curriculum. This article focuses on ideas around building a cogent curriculum that is relevant to the students of your context. I have looked at some existing materials and models to help build a curriculum and then offered some of my key findings whilst researching student choice in lesson.
Musical Futures
When I first came into teaching, the Musical Futures (MF) model seemed the hip and trendy new approach to music. MF was funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and had considerable mention in the Ofsted review for music in 2012. MF provides a brief framework on musical learning that is driven by Lucy Green's research on popular music and how popular musicians learn.
The document has a pedagogic focus and explains how we can use a hybrid of formal and informal classroom activities to help with student engagement. Student-led activities are encouraged alongside regularly engaging with student voices to ‘co-construct’ the curriculum. Personal experience of this led to limited responses or unobtainable targets and I did seek further ways to engage student voices in the construction of curriculum.
The MF website has a number of useful resources including play-along videos and lesson workshops that focus on playing instruments. Assessment models are suggested that are likely to fall in line with current school requirements, with a hierarchical level system used to differentiate students' progress and needs. Although the framework may not be tangible for all schools, there are certainly useful resources to explore.
Independent Society of Musicians curriculum publication
Following Daubney and Fautley's research which highlighted the many inconsistencies of curriculum and music provision across the nation, a framework for curriculum development and structure was released in 2019 by the Independent Society of Musicians. This is a hugely useful tool for practitioners who are developing, enhancing and revising their curriculum offer for students.
A number of big questions are asked that allow the teacher to play to their musical strengths and values. These questions also allow the development of a bespoke curriculum based on the many interfering and limiting factors that teachers face on a daily basis. These can include demographic, attitudes to music and the arts, student interests and school limitations. An assessment model for music is given throughout the document that could be ideal at KS3 but there is clear understanding that some school requirements may restrict how many aspects of this framework can be developed and used. The key focus of its curriculum and assessment are singing, playing, improvisation, composing, critical engagement and the spiritual, social, moral and cultural aspects of music; these exceed the requirements of the subjective and concise national curriculum.
Student choice in listening tasks
Neuroscientist and psychologist Daniel Willingham's ‘model of memory’, which assumes that human memory can be divided into working memory and long-term memory, helps us understand the need to connect learning to everyday experience to help put knowledge into the long-term rather than it be forgotten over time. As the diagram and the model (see illustration, right) suggest, ensuring information makes it into the long-term memory means that this information can reside outside of a student's awareness until it is called upon again. At that point it can enter their working memory and become conscious, rather than for it to be lost after entering the working memory system.
My favourite moment over the past 12 months has been when I have been exploring the element of choice with students and within tasks that I have set in the classroom. To clarify, I am not suggesting for one second that students will get free reign over the musical pieces they listen to and learn all of the time, but I feel that the choice could accompany another task. Listening tasks are where I, as a practitioner, have struggled in the past to get meaningful answers from students. How do they become more relevant and educational to our students and not just another arduous task for them to complete?
My first port of call was to look back at responses from listening tasks that I had previously given to students and the responses (or lack of) that they gave. The responses varied from ‘I dunno’ to ‘N/A’. One student even asked why it mattered. So it was an interesting set of data. I then asked the same questions, which were about dynamics and texture, to the students but gave them a choice of song or tune that they wanted to listen to. The responses turned out to be far more musical and meaningful, and students seemed to remember the terminology the next week. Giving students choice allowed them to link musical learning to real-life experiences. That's nothing new or innovative, I know, as it's something that the MF model set out to do in its early days.
In the following few lessons, my starter activity was to answer a set of questions on their choice of song and share a few answers in a discussion. Then we would do a listening task as a class with songs that I had chosen. These songs gave a diverse repertoire of listening to our students. We then revisited the students' songs and applied the knowledge learnt from the group task.
This approach was not without its challenges, and expectations around suitable listening content for the classroom had to be established. This was an enjoyable class discussion and collectively we agreed on some ground rules for the choice that they would be making. This came mostly in the form of radio edits of songs.
Controlled student choice is relatively new to me as a practitioner as I have been exploring this for only around two years. In my limited experience I believe that it has had an increase in numbers at KS4. Further exploration will hopefully define if this was an anomaly or a fad that may wear off. This approach could potentially have more impact over time, as our demographics change, students musical experiences differ, and we change as teachers.
The Willingham model of memory. Courtesy guruheadteacher.com
Final thoughts
To many the element of choice in curriculum decision is nothing new. Naturally, as teachers want to find a way in with our students to build a positive and professional relationship. I truly believe this is easier in music because of how personal and vulnerable the art form can leave a listener feeling. I have lost count of the number of times that students have had to leave my classroom because I am playing a song that reminded them of a sad time in their life (often the loss of a pet). These feelings are genuine and need to be acknowledged.
With this in mind, I ask you to consider these questions: where could choice fit and suit your current curriculum design? When could choice be used to deepen musical understanding and engage students? And how could you successfully empower students to help enhance your current provision?
