Objectives and outcomes

This training unit is designed to help you set appropriate musical challenges for your pupils, so that you can promote higher-order thinking skills, recognise increasing challenge in musical understanding and reviewing and evaluating skills, and accommodate pupils’ prior learning, particularly in relation to their quality of instrumental and vocal expertise.

The unit will focus in particular on:

• the generic principles of challenge in the classroom and how these can be applied to music;
• improving the challenge for quality, breadth and depth of musical understanding;
• the link between vocabulary, reviewing and evaluating skills and higher-order thinking;
• how to accommodate experienced instrumentalists and vocalists within a KS3 music classroom.

As a way of identifying your current practice, use Activity Resource 1 to explore the principles of challenge. The resource demonstrates how challenge is linked to the issue of quality in musical learning, and to the development of thinking skills. It also asks you to reflect on your current practice, and to consider how a series of lessons can develop challenge by increasingly emphasising musical understanding instead of simply exploring more advanced practical skills.

After exploring this introduction, you may want to

• develop your exploration of these key principles by reading more;
• continue with this unit by exploring good practice in modelling.