KS3 Music

a professional development programme

Challenges

There are many reasons why pupils may not engage fully with their learning. You can see an extensive list of challenges and solutions here, but this section is designed to help teachers with just one key issue: how to make the reason for undertaking tasks explicit to pupils, and helping them to see how their learning in one lesson relates to learning in other lessons.

There are different challenges according to when the lesson is taking place – it might be the first lesson of a new unit, or at the midpoint of a unit. Select each tab in turn to read about these different challenges, and then use Activity Resource 4 to see how one teacher taught the first lesson of a unit on Samba.

After exploring this section, you may want to

First lesson

The first lesson of a unit provides you with the following opportunities:

  • To engage pupils in the key features of the style, genre or tradition to be explored.
  • To find out what your pupils already know about the subject, and to help them recall work that they have done in previous years on similar topics.
  • To explore how the music being studied may be experienced via a range of contexts (as a piece of classical music; as a film score; as a ring tone), and to make explicit the specific context which will be explored

Typically the first lesson in a sequence will also:

  • describe the overall teaching objective of the unit (i.e. the ‘big picture’): ‘Over the next six weeks we will be learning about …’ or ‘Your task over the next four lessons is to produce …’;
  • tell pupils how they will know what they have achieved: ‘By the end of this unit you will be able to … (e.g. give a fluent performance of an arrangement of … )’.
 

Midpoint lesson

There are different issues associated with designing lessons halfway through a unit of work. The tasks may require specific skills or understanding which do not immediately appear to relate directly to the wider context of the unit. However, pupils need to understand:

  • how to develop the specific skills required;
  • how the work will relate back to the main learning in the unit once completed.

For instance, in a unit on understanding the conventions of blues music, pupils may have been learning individual parts of a blues arrangement. Now they will need to play with others in an ensemble, which requires different and very specific skills (following a lead, being able to watch and hear cues, etc.). Only when pupils can do this effectively will their performance properly reflect the conventions of the blues style they are studying. The start of this lesson will therefore need to identify that the lesson is about how to play in an ensemble, so that pupils can perform their blues arrangement effectively. This will help pupils to understand:

  • what it is they are going to learn, and how they will learn it;
  • how the new learning relates to the wider learning about the style, genre or tradition they are studying.