Activity Resource 5: The impact of planning for musical understanding

Listen to Audio 1b  917kb and Audio 1c  1mb which are recordings of two high-attaining Year 8 pupils, taught by the same teacher but through very different approaches to curriculum planning.

• The first pupil was taught to use major and minor keys to create a ternary-form piece based on a given ostinato (a skills-based approach).
• The second pupil was explicitly taught the contexts and conventions of South American Tangos (an approach designed to develop musical understanding).

The outcomes are very different: while there are strengths in each piece of work, focus on the skills, imagination and sense of musical quality being demonstrated in the two recordings. Is it possible to relate explicitly the nature of the planned learning to the type of musical outcomes?