Background

A range of inspection and research evidence identifies common issues for creative teaching and learning in music. It also describes how successful teaching finds solutions that enable positive musical learning. The main characteristics are outlined below.

Common issues

• Pupils do not always understand what they are learning, why they are learning it and how they can best make progress. They are therefore unclear about the sorts of musical challenges they face, and the thinking appropriate to meet those challenges. As a result, they fall back on ideas and methods remembered from previous tasks rather than developing new ones.
• They find it harder to engage with some starting points than others, especially when composing. At the initial stages of composing, pupils also need more time to develop the music so that it has style and structure.
• They find themselves under pressure to perform pieces before they are completed, and do not have sufficient time to invent and try out their ideas for composing.
• Pupils are sometimes given tasks that constrain rather than liberate their imagination. Their creative attempts to meet the needs of a task are not always recognised, and they do not move forwards. They are not given the opportunity to find their own solution to problems.
• They often do not know how to evaluate their own or others’ creative work effectively.

Resolving the issues

Clear learning objectives make explicit what kind of musical challenge pupils are being presented with, and what types of thinking might be needed to meet the challenge. Setting objectives for both music and creativity helps pupils to understand how they might learn in order to address specific music challenges.

Pupils are engaged and challenged more effectively if a range of starting points is offered. Some pupils will respond more imaginatively to one type of stimulus than to another (e.g. a title or musical phrase when composing; samba or counting songs when performing). Different starting points can also offer different levels of challenge because one starting point may stimulate musical imagery more readily than another, (e.g. ‘Space journey’ rather than ‘Space’).

Providing sufficient time for pupils to explore, select, develop and refine ideas improves the development and consolidation of their musical understanding. Keeping preparation time for a performance separate helps them to focus on this creative process.

Pupils’ imagination is stimulated and liberated when they are given the opportunity to fulfil a task by drawing both on prior learning and on problem-solving skills. When a task offers limited materials, resources and processes, it results in limited creativity and limited outcomes.

Regular opportunities to evaluate work enable pupils to recognise what they have learned, and appreciate how they can use that learning in the future. The evaluation process will be more useful if they can develop a range of strategies for sharing ideas constructively and a set of values or criteria against which to judge work.