Teaching Materials

Teaching a beginners' brass group

Group teaching is often thought of as the poor relation to individual music tuition. And that can certainly be the case if you try to teach groups in exactly the same way as you teach individuals. If...

Teaching Materials

Active listening

This resource translates the wisdom on active listening from its original therapeutic setting to a musical one, asking how processes in the first might be applied to the second. It then surveys...

Teaching Materials

AQA AoS1: The Requiem of the late-Romantic period

This resource will give a brief overview of the context of the late-Romantic Requiem, followed by detailed analysis of some extracts from three key works.

Teaching Materials

GCSE music: theory tips and tricks

This resource focuses on the key areas of music theory that are common across all exam boards. I'll also share some ideas and strategies that have worked in my own lessons, with the aim of providing...

Teaching Materials

Working with visiting music teachers

The place of peripatetic music staff (or visiting music teachers, as they're now more commonly known) is a notoriously grey area for schools and heads of music. Who is responsible for them? Are they...

Teaching Materials

OCR A level AoS5: Programme music

Teaching programme music should be the fun bit. It's where music is at its most descriptive and vivid, with an obvious narrative that offers an ideal launch point into the exploration of so many core...

Teaching Materials

Maintaining classroom instruments

Music departments tend to be full of ‘stuff’ – chances are, the more music there is happening in the school, the more equipment there is. Looking after all of this equipment is likely to fall to...

Teaching Materials

Creativity at Key Stage 3

With graded instrumental repertoire widely available, and three out of four GCSE exam boards linking standards to an equivalent grade, there can be a bias towards performing at KS3 as the means to...

Teaching Materials

OCR AoS1: Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23

The aim of this resource is to cover both the usual areas required for examination, as well as offering some more context that might provoke wider exploration beyond the prescribed work and enhance...

Teaching Materials

KS3 activities for the summer term

Below are some one-off lessons and ideas for those times where you find yourself in a room without instruments, with a bank of computers, or missing half the class, any of which can stop your current...

Teaching Materials

Approaches to classical music at KS3

My students might be resistant to classical music. How can I get them on side? I want to keep things practical, and don't want to turn my lessons into a music history lecture or old-fashioned music...

Teaching Materials

Revising for AS and A level music exams

This is the third of three resources designed to help students revise effectively and positively for this summer's written music exams. The first (Music Teacher, March 2019) was a general resource,...

Teaching Materials