Recognising impact

This unit aims to help music teachers review and refine their practice in developing creative teaching and learning in music so that they can teach more creatively, provide varied musical challenges and enable pupils to use a wider variety of thinking skills.

The unit leads teachers to:

• use a variety of inventive teaching approaches to make musical learning more interesting, exciting and effective;
• establish a map of learning over the key stage which identifies a range of musical learning challenges;
• create progression in the range of creative challenges pupils are set;
• set musical challenges that focus on how to learn, as much as on what to do.

This will enable teachers to:

• draw upon a range of non-musical strategies and contexts to make clearer the musical conventions being studied;
• draw upon creative teaching strategies from across the curriculum;
• provide a variety of learning challenges created by working within different musical styles, genres and traditions, and by taking different roles in musical activities;
• make explicit to pupils the sorts of musical challenges they are facing, and the types of thinking they will need to employ;
• develop ‘abstract musical thinking’ by exploring the aesthetic possibilities of the musical materials themselves;
• plan learning that requires pupils to solve problems rather than simply complete activities;
• use existing research on developing pupils’ thinking skills to improve musical learning.

As a result, pupils can:

• respond imaginatively to a range of starting points;
• draw upon previous learning from within and beyond their music lessons;
• expect the unexpected and make the most of it;
• respond effectively to different sorts of musical challenges;
• employ appropriate musical thinking to meet those challenges, evaluating work effectively in terms of its originality and value;
• ask open-ended questions (e.g. ‘What if …?’);
• develop a sense of enquiry and a willingness to speculate and take risks;
• use a range of thinking and learning skills to achieve their outcome.