Monday 13 July 2015

Six week schemes of work - do they work?

Last Friday saw the final conference of the Teach Through Music programme – marking the culmination of a year of superb CPD and teacher-led case studies taking place in London schools, with the aim of making Key Stage 3 music teaching more musical.
I felt privileged to be invited to speak at the conference on the subject of Key Stage 3 to 4 progression, and to discuss how the curriculum that I and my colleagues have designed at my current school enables students to make progress through years 7-9 and to be fully prepared for Key Stage 4 by the end of it. In previous blog posts, I’ve already spent a lot of words expounding how I think that Key Stage 3 curricula should prepare students for Key Stage 4 – and how it might be possible to overcome the idea of Key Stage 4 music being ‘elite’ rather than inclusive. So I won’t go on about this again here, suffice to say that I presented our ‘cook’s tour’ KS3 curriculum of largely six-week units of work and discussed how progression is possible in this sort of curriculum, and how I’ve spent time over the past year mapping the different ‘key skills’ that students are developing (such as creative composition, performing technique and improvisation) against the different topics studied, to ensure that each topic really does build upon the last.
Having said all of this, and made what I felt was a fairly well-reasoned argument, I was quite amused when the very next speaker – Robert Wells, talking about ‘Raising musical standards for all at KS3’ – suggested the exact opposite, that 6-week projects do not allow students to engage with music, or create meaningful music, being by default too teacher-led. An interesting point. Of course, in a carefully planned 6-week scheme of work, it is quite likely that many of the elements of the music-making involved will have been planned by the teacher, and of course resources will have been created and pieces of music to listen to chosen well in advance. However, I disagree that this necessarily means that all of the learning will be teacher-led. A six-week project on songwriting, where the teacher acts as a facilitator, enabling students with the skills that they need and giving individuals the support they require to write the song that they have created, is quite a different thing from a six-week project on Gamelan music, in which all students learn to play a pre-selected piece on xylophones and glockenspiels. Admittedly the Key Stage 3 curriculum that I currently teach includes both of these – but I’m very happy to admit that the first of these is more likely to enable students to act as musicians and creative artists in the classroom than the second.
Which, I suppose, brings me back to the age-old (but always interesting) debate as to the role of the teacher in the music classroom: as facilitator, or as teacher, or as musician – or a mixture of all of these and more. Quite what the ‘right’ mixture is, I’m not yet sure – but I think that this debate is far more central to the success of a Key Stage 3 curriculum than a debate over exactly how long a scheme of work should last.
In a further seminar at Friday’s conference, Jason Kubilius, talking about ‘Making the case for music in schools’, discussed the issue of ‘democracy’ in the classroom, citing the importance of students acting as democratic partners with their teachers. Teaching, he argued, is ‘not a matter of following recipes’, and might best happen when teachers are not ‘structurally limited’ by ‘fixed outcomes’. An admirable point and one that I very much agree with – but when it is used as an argument against organised schemes of work (which, to some extent, it was), I wonder whether it is an entirely realistic vision. Of course, music education is at its best when it can be shaped by the students. Indeed, the keynote speaker for Friday’s conference, Francois Matarasso, said himself that ‘nothing worth having about artistic experiences can be delivered – it can only be enabled’. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that, as teachers, we are required to work within a certain number of frameworks, limits and constraints, imposed by our schools and by the British education system as a whole – one of which being reporting and assessment timetables, which often tend to tie in with six-week schemes of work.
I’m not arguing that we should give up on the ideal of students having space and time to be creative musicians. Nor am I suggesting that music education should be constrained by the ideals of teachers and ignore the great potential of student-led work. But perhaps the best thing that teachers can do is to recognise the limits within which we work, and then consider the ideals of creative space and the democratic classroom within these.

As another contributer on Friday – Leonora Davies – pointed out, there is a definite ‘tension’ between music in general, and music in schools – and there is undoubtedly also a tension between what we music teachers would ideally like to do, and what we can realistically achieve. So let’s recognise that tension, and find a middle way that allows us to keep our musical integrity as well as our sanity. Which for me, comes in six-week long packages…