Principles

Challenge defines the way that pupils improve and extend their learning. It requires understanding of progression, but goes beyond that to encompass a range of strategies that enables teachers to move pupils’ learning forward effectively. It is the active part of teaching and learning: after defining what pupils are intended to learn, it also, critically, identifies the methods and opportunities for them to develop and sequence that learning in the most effective way.

Setting appropriate challenge is therefore essential if pupils are to make good progress and to achieve at an appropriate level of expectation. Training materials for the foundation subjects, Module 9: Challenge (DCSF 0350/2002) notes that:

• challenge is a prerequisite for learning – to make progress in any curriculum area, learners need to work regularly in advance of their prior attainment;
• setting the right level of challenge is crucial – if the learning activity is too easy, pupils will become bored; if it is too hard, frustration will lead to demotivation;
• the challenge needs to be realistic – the learner needs to feel that he or she has a high probability of meeting the challenge;
• support should encourage independence in the learner – he or she should be helped to reflect on the process being used to complete the task;
• challenge in classrooms should be accompanied by low levels of anxiety – when learners experience high levels of stress, their capacity for learning declines, but mistakes need to be accepted as an important part of learning, as effective learners take risks.

Challenge is consequently more about the quality of the learning opportunity than the quantity or difficulty of the work being undertaken by pupils. In musical terms, therefore, it is not about ‘more sharps and flats’, but about how best to develop pupils’ musical understanding of a range of styles, genres and traditions.

Thinking challenges

While some aspects of progression will be specific to music, there is an underpinning hierarchy of intellectual skills and abilities across the whole curriculum that can help teachers to build challenge into all lessons. This is based upon Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives (Bloom and Krathwohl, 1956), which is a classification of levels of intellectual behaviour important in learning. The taxonomy classifies cognitive learning into six levels of complexity and abstraction as follows.

• Knowledge – pupils should describe; identify; recall.
• Comprehension – pupils should translate; review; report; restate.
• Application – pupils should interpret; predict; show how; solve; try in a new context.
• Analysis – pupils should explain; infer; analyse; question; test; criticise.
• Synthesis – pupils should design; create; arrange; organise; construct.
• Evaluation – pupils should assess; compare and contrast; appraise; argue; select.

On this scale, knowledge is the lowest-order thinking challenge and evaluation is the highest (see Unit 4: Modelling in music, 'Use of questions' tab within the Good practice section for further exploration of Bloom’s taxonomy). In most cases, pupils will need to be able to analyse, synthesise and evaluate if they are to attain National Curriculum (2008) level 5 and above.

• Level 5: … analyse and compare musical features … evaluate how venue, occasion and purpose affects the way music is created, performed and heard.
• Level 6: … analyse, compare and evaluate how music reflects the contexts in which it is created, performed and heard.

It is possible to map musical challenges against this taxonomy. At the lowest, ‘knowledge’ stage are the sorts of musical learning and skill-based activities that require simple recall and imitation: the identification of instruments’ names, the description of notation theory or the performance of a basic melodic line on a keyboard, taught by rote. Activities in the middle, ‘application’ stage ask pupils to speculate on what might happen if new ideas are tried in a composition, or show how a new arrangement of a piece might better reflect the intended style. At the highest, ‘synthesis’ or ‘evaluation’ stages are sophisticated activities that focus on musical quality and an understanding of how music works: evaluating two versions of musical performance, creating compositions that merge conventions of two different styles, or developing a performance of a vocal piece with a special timbre to convey a particular message.

Activity

By mapping out this progression in challenge for a sequence of lessons, it is possible to identify the level of challenge that a pupil needs next. The key here is to establish where each individual pupil’s learning is located at any given time, and to know how to move them to the next type of thinking; in this way they are constantly being required to work ‘in advance of their prior attainment’.

Use Task 1 (Relating musical activities to thinking challenges) to identify the range of thinking challenges you currently use in a sequence of lessons, and then to plan for and teach a wider range of activities which will challenge all pupils’ musical understanding.