Music 7-11

Developing Primary Teaching Skills

Sarah Hennessy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134845989
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teachers have often felt unnecessarily apprehensive about teaching without music without being gifted musicians themselves.Music 7-11 dispels the myth that to teach music effectively a teacher has to "be musical" and provides teachers with the opportunity of developing both the basic subject knowledge and the confidence needed to deliver enjoyable and valuable music lessons. It does this by encouraging practical engagement with the subject through making and listening to music, reflecting on experiences and sharing views.

Unit 1

Music curriculum issues

This unit aims to raise a number of issues which have a profound influence on the planning and development of a school’s music curriculum. Some of these are concerned with values and guiding principles; others are more mundane, such as how to deal with noise. The values a school places on its music curriculum are, in some measure, expressed through the quality of the environment in which learning takes place, the range and quality of the resources and whether the timetable enables or obstructs musical activity.

Subsequent units explore some of these issues in more detail through practical examples. In the light of increased understanding it might then be necessary to return to this unit for some reconsideration.

WHY TEACH MUSIC?

‘Because the National Curriculum demands it’ would be the easy but rather bleak answer. Needless to say, legislation will not, in the short term, change the way people think and feel. Unless we appreciate the value of a subject for ourselves, it is always going to struggle for recognition and status in our individual classrooms.

The following two activities are designed to raise some awareness of attitudes and values.

ACTIVITY 1.1

Brainstorm the skills, knowledge and understanding which are developed through and by music-making and listening.

Music must first be valued for itself and then for how it might promote and develop skills that are shared by other spheres of learning and experience. At the same time, subjects do not exist in isolation from each other and what we discover through music about the world and our relationship to it develops our consciousness as a whole—not just the ‘musical’ bit (if there is such a thing). In Music, Mind and Education, Swanwick writes: ‘it is the special function of art, to strengthen, to extend, to illuminate, to transform, and, ultimately, to make life worth living, more “like life”’ (1988:50).

ACTIVITY 1.2

Recall and describe, to a partner in the group, a musical event or experience which was particularly exciting, dramatic, significant—a peak experience. What made it so? (The music itself, the people you were with, the occasion…?)

It is very rare to find anyone who does not enjoy listening and responding to music, and therefore everyone may be described as being musical in its broadest sense. The sticking point for most people (and this can include children) is in performance or ‘joining in’. For some people the inhibitors begin to develop in childhood and this may be largely the result of reactions and comments (even looks) made by teachers to their music-making efforts. The message that making music is only for those who show special aptitude can be transmitted at an early age, and stick; being unmusical is a biological state for which education cannot compensate. An emphasis on performance and its related skills is bound to reinforce this view—e.g. only those who can sing in tune or clap a rhythm accurately at a certain age (as young as seven years old, sometimes) are selected to sing in the choir or to learn to play an instrument. It is the only subject in the primary curriculum which can exercise such overt selection unchallenged by parents and educationalists.

Devising a curriculum which aims to nurture involvement in and appreciation of music in every child is bound to cause some rethinking about values as well as content.

Children’s music suffers from being heard as poorly executed adult music, rather than understood and appreciated in the way that children’s art-making or writing seem to be. This is not to deny the importance of teaching and learning musical technique, but to suggest that we have been too ready to neglect the development of such skills in the majority in the face of a quite small minority who show special aptitude. Children’s music-making must be valued for itself and to do this we need to involve ourselves in the practical, noisy, exhilarating business of making music with children and to learn to recognise, through listening, what they have learned and what might follow.

ACTIVITY 1.3

In two separate groups write down ten statements which express the views of the group with regard to the aims of music education in your school. Give due consideration to cross-curricular issues such as equal opportunities, special needs and cultural diversity. The final list of statements needs to be agreed by everyone. Then bring the groups together and negotiate a final set of ten statements from the two lists.

This process will help in the sharing of perceptions, values and differences. Policy statements and curriculum guidelines will only be effective if everyone has a hand in their creation. The discussion will also allow teachers to look at their current practice and identify in-service needs and wants. There is little point in drawing up a set of policy statements that can only be carried out by a full-time music specialist, though there may be some statements which need specialist teaching. Staffing, resourcing, accommodation and timetabling issues can then be clearly addressed. Short-, medium- and long-term aims may now be discussed.

With increased experience and understanding as a result of professional development, these statements will undoubtedly change, but they should provide an initial base for such development.

Music in the National Curriculum (DES 1992) provides some guidelines for planning and assessing music learning. The fundamental activities of composing, performing and listening are acknowledged in the names of the attainment targets and, for assessment purposes, weighted two-to-one in favour of AT1:

AT 1: Performing and composing

AT 2: Listening and appraising.

It is important to remember that this document is an attempt to simplify the assessment of what is a highly complex learning process. Such a document cannot adequately show the interactive and interdependent nature of these activities; what it can do is deconstruct some of the processes that lead to progression in music learning.

The practical experience offered in this book should help teachers understand these processes and as a result make their own planning, teaching and assessment more coherent. In-service in whatever guise is only successful if at the end of the programme teachers can continue with some measure of independence. When they have used these materials or ideas they should then be able to go on to find or devise others which reinforce, develop and enrich the learning.

ASSESSMENT

Whilst music education was mainly concerned with performing, assessment was commonly seen as measuring technique: singing or playing in tune, keeping in time, reading notation and aural skills. Musicality was considered to be too subjective and therefore not appropriate for assessment, as everyone’s response to a piece of music would be bound to be coloured by their own experience and taste. ‘Gut feelings’ or intuition have tended to be the way teachers have finally arrived at a view about the quality or effectiveness of musical outcomes, whether performed or composed.

With a new emphasis on composing, a different and more all-encompassing approach to assessment needs to be addressed. Musical behaviour is seen not only when children perform, it is also seen, for instance, when they explore the sounds they can produce on a suspended cymbal, improvise a musical conversation with a friend on a Gato drum, dance, describe their reaction to a piece of music they have listened to, and so on.

Assessment in music is achieved through:

• listening critically to how and what children perform and compose
• listening to and observing how children go about their music-making
• discussing with children their ideas and intentions
• listening to children’s assessments of their own and other music
• listening, observing and reading how children respond when listening to music through other media such as visual art, dance, drama, poetry, etc.

All of these may be integrated into the process of composing. It is here that control of sound is made evident; the ability to listen attentively is proved; musical influences, knowledge of form and style are exploited; and musical imagination can show itself.

In ‘Understanding Children’s Musical Understanding’, Glover (1990) suggests that we need to take ‘the widest possible view’. In a project involving student teachers and pupils at a junior school, Glover set out to investigate developmental patterns of children’s musicmaking. She arrived at some valuable conclusions about the conditions necessary to gain such insight. These are paraphrased here:

• A child must be ‘tracked’, over time, through a programme of work which should include individual as well as group work. ‘The teacher needs to live with the music.’
• Some of the tasks that children engage in should be uncommissioned, for ‘they reveal a great deal about their understanding of…what music is and can do’.
• Tasks should allow for interaction between related activities (e.g. exploration— composition—performing—performing to different audiences).
• Consideration should be given to the extent to which a composition shows what has been achieved intuitively and what has been consciously worked on.
• A range of approaches should be used to gather evidence: taking part in an improvisation, being shown how to play a composition, talking with a child about their music, and so on.

It is important to remember that this kind of understanding needs to develop over time and needs practice and support. Glover is, however, quite sure that class teachers can acquire the habit of trying to understand children’s work in music, and that once they do ‘the problems of how to chart development and “match” it in planning for progression begin to dissolve’.

I would hope that through working with the ideas in this book, teachers will begin to develop their own musical understanding in a quite conscious way, so that they might then recognise the evidence of it in their children. Our understanding is not only developed by our own efforts but by what we learn from the efforts of others; and by this I mean children as well as adults.

PERFORMING: SINGING AND PLAYING

Singing is a ubiquitous feature of primary school culture. It is unquestionably seen as ‘a good thing’, even in schools where the quality of singing is poor and enthusiasm is minimal amongst children and teachers. Playing instruments raises issues of equal opportunity, access, cost, management and noise—whether we are thinking of classroom percussion, steel pans, electronic keyboards, guitars or orchestral instruments.

Activity 1.4 invites you to carry out a survey or audit of what goes on in your school, and may provide an opportunity for discussion towards developing policy.

ACTIVITY 1.4

• In your school, when and how does singing happen?
• How often and which members of staff are involved in the singing?
• Are there opportunities for solo or small group singing?
• Who chooses the songs and how do you learn new ones?
• How are songs accompanied?
• Would you describe the repertoire as musically varied?
• Is there a conscious effort to choose songs from different times and cultures?
• Are songs chosen to develop vocal technique and therefore to suit vocal maturity?
• Does the school enjoy singing?
• If there is a school choir, are children auditioned or can anyone join?

This is not an exhaustive list but should help to focus on the nature, content and quality of singing in your school. Singing can be used for all kinds of learning in music; using the voice as another sound-maker when composing adds enormously to the range of sounds, particularly as percussion instruments cannot sustain sounds as the voice can. It is through the voice that we gain the most profound understanding of the relationship between listening and sounding.

Playing instruments

• How many children have regular opportunities to play instruments in school, including percussion?
• Do all classes have access to instruments for music lessons?
• How many classrooms include a music ‘corner’ or work-station for individual or small group work?
• What proportion of children have instrumental tuition in school or privately?
• How are children chosen for instrumental tuition?
• What instruments are on offer? Are they only the orchestral ones?
• What information is given to parents about their role in supporting this kind of learning?
• What is the drop-out rate?
• How are these children’s skills integrated into class music lessons?
• What provision is made for children who are learning instruments to play together?

These are some of the questions that need to be considered. The context in which instrumental teaching is provided has changed dramatically with the demise of centrally funded LEA services. Every school must now devise its own policy and manage it in the light of local circumstances. Much may be lost if schools do not give some attention to this aspect of the music curriculum, and where provision may have been poor in the past there is now the opportunity to improve it.

The traditional one-to-one teaching approach is only one of several ways to use the expertise of a visiting tutor. Group tuition, taking part in class music lessons, improvising and composing with children, and directing ensembles are ways in which specialists can become a more integral part of the curriculum.

It is probably the only subject in which a significant minority of children can have such different experience and skills to those of the majority; but it should be remembered that learning to play an instrument does not automatically include developing composing or even listening skills. Many instrumental teachers are now working to redress this imbalance and looking for ways to develop their specialist role in schools.

NOTATION

Teaching notation needs to have purpose and meaning. It should, in the first instance, arise out of a need that the music-maker identifies. It can have several different purposes:

• To help us remember—as an aide-mémoire—we may just write down an outline, important moments, or complicated passages.
• To communicate our music for others to play; in which case they need to understand our language.
• To give everyone a plan (score) of what happens. Each player can see how their part fits into the whole. This is useful for a conductor, if there is one.
• To help in the refining and rehearsing process. The composer can ‘tinker’ with the piece and refer to particular sections in rehearsal. Individual players or groups can take their part away to practice.
• To enable the music-makers to experiment and discover different interpretations of the same score. It is not usually p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Unit 1: Music curriculum issues
• Unit 2: Pulse and rhythm
• Unit 3: Pitch and melody
• Unit 4: Listening
• Unit 5: Form
• Unit 6: Texture
• Appendix 1 Relating activities to the National Curriculum (England)
• Appendix 2 Instruments
• Appendix 3 Music technology in the primary curriculum
• Glossary of terms used
• References
• Resources