KS3 Music

Setting challenges that build on prior experiences of practical music making

In providing additional challenge for those pupils with significant prior experience of music making, most teachers will focus on providing pupils with activities involving more challenging skills: taking harder parts, being the leader of an ensemble, using standard notation rather than graphic scores. While this is important, it is unlikely to stretch these musical pupils fully, since this kind of challenge is more about the quantity of the learning than the quality of the learning – the essential balance of their learning is therefore still towards the lower end of the cognitive challenge.

What these pupils do need is the opportunity to develop their musical understanding, with more sophisticated skills being used and developed alongside this process. Throughout this unit, great emphasis has been placed on he relationship between effective challenge and cognitive or thinking skills. Music is no different in this respect to other subjects: the greatest challenges are not those that simply demand more advanced skills, but those that demand more sophisticated thinking about and understanding of music.

Appendix 1  138kb shows a diagrammatic definition of the able musician. It places thinking skills at the heart of music pupils’ capability, suggesting that the best way of challenging these pupils is by extending their musical understanding – the sorts of learning covered in the Good practice section, and in particular the sections on quality and breadth of understanding.

Providing appropriate challenge for pupils with significant prior experience of music making therefore requires something more than the provision of harder parts to play – though this will still be valid and important. Rather, it requires the setting of challenges that will enable these pupils to think about their understanding of the music being studied, applying the cognitive skills of analysis, synthesis and evaluation to their practical work.

This might be most easily achieved in two ways.

1. Setting specific thinking challenges to move them beyond simple replication of styles and genres, to an exploration of how the techniques could be used more imaginatively. A good example of this is shown in Unit 3: Creative teaching and learning in music: the reggae beat activities in Activity Resource 4 show how pupils who already have the instrumental skills to complete the first version very quickly can be given thinking challenges that help them to explore not only the essence of reggae but also sophisticated issues about how music is structured and organised.
    
   It is also important to recognise that in this type of challenge pupils will still need to develop advanced knowledge of theory and practical skills – for instance, knowing how to change minor chords into major and vice versa. Indeed, pupils will need to have this ‘feed’ of more challenging skills in order to sustain their musical understanding.

2. Setting challenges that require pupils to work beyond an existing style, asking them to develop new musical ideas by combining musical traditions or by developing their own versions of existing styles. For instance, a group of able pupils studying gamelan may very quickly be able to demonstrate their understanding of the basic compositional procedures, and play a gamelan piece accurately in a group. To move their thinking forward, you might challenge them to:

   • create gamelan-influenced music for a specific purpose – for a film or holiday TV programme, perhaps;
   • cross-fertilise the way of working with another, known style: consider whether pupils could use the same melodic techniques to create a new style of rhythmic samba, or apply the ideas to a piece of rock music;
   • produce a gamelan-influenced piece that reflects their personal response to a local or national event.

As well as focusing on the learning for pupils with instrumental expertise, it is important to recognise that these pupils need access to a wide range of opportunities for music making. The Musical Futures project has explored this issue in depth with both schools and music services: if you wish to explore the potential of their positive findings for your own school, go to www.musicalfutures.org.uk to learn more.

Task 13: Developing instrumentalists’ and vocalists’ musical understanding (30 minutes)

Consider a series of lessons involving performing or composing that you are about to teach with a class. Identify pupils in the class who already have advanced instrumental or vocal skills, in any sort of style or genre. Identify how you can develop the learning challenge in the task by: stretching these pupils’ musical understanding through the setting of new thinking challenges, making sure that pupils will be working in advance of their prior attainment in terms of comprehension, application or analysis thinking skills; building into this challenge the requirement to develop advanced musical skills and knowledge that will enable the new thinking to be realised. When pupils complete the practical work, reflect on the musical outcomes: Were pupils able to produce music that demonstrated more advanced musical understanding than you might otherwise have expected?   Did pupils use their existing musical skills efficiently, and/or develop new ones?   Were pupils engaged with this way of working?