Challenge accepted: Bravery at GCSE and A Level

The pandemic has forced us all to reassess so many things in our teaching. Endless Zoom and Teams meetings – including extensive discussions erupting about Timmy's cat, who spontaneously appeared during your excellent diatribe about the Baroque period, and forgetting that your microphone is on while you curse the tech-savvy small people – have reaffirmed to us the value of in-person learning, the importance of learning environments, and the immense value of talking about and making music together.

But that alone doesn't tackle the rather daunting problem we now face: how to reignite young people's love for music, how to help them blossom again, and how to push them to become better than before. How do we do that when we're back operating at 500 miles per hour again while spinning nine plates, dealing with half of our ensembles being wiped out by isolations, navigating perpetually shifting plans, and have a now inevitably reduced amount of headroom for ‘busyness' before anxiety sets in? It's no wonder that many music teachers I talk to are feeling a little overwhelmed already this year. And so, if you are feeling daunted and swamped, know that you are not alone.

Yet, this is a great opportunity for us to recalibrate our teaching, and to develop students' skills and musicianship in a much deeper and more satisfying way. Since we had to rethink our teaching approaches when suddenly faced with online learning, I think we should also spend time reconsidering our teaching philosophies now we are back in person. We can capitalise on that new energy induced by the long absence of live music and music making, and inspire others in a more holistic way.

Dropping back

The biggest headaches are A Levels and GCSEs. Many of us relied on routines before plague struck; we gradually ticked our way through the list of requirements, ensuring that x number of set works are covered by week y, three mocks by end of month z, etc. We practised (and fast exhausted) listening tests, we did some score analysis, we assigned time for students to shout at music software while we gently steered them away from their Op.1 for bongos, six ocarinas, a balalaika and bowed washboard; we left the performance element until last, we flung out a surprise mock with glee (until we remembered we then had to mark it), we returned to the set work we started with… and so on.

But what would happen if we spent more time building general musicianship, knowledge, and skills first, and dared to leave the rubrics of the specifications until much later? Would our schools allow us to develop and sharpen students' skills for longer before chipping into the set works and anything more official? Can we revitalise the musical culture in our schools by spending more time being musicians with our students, continually dotting between analysis, improvisation, discussion, small composition tasks to embed ingredients in a musical way, deepening general knowledge, listening for the sake of it, and musicianship (I hate the word ‘theory’).

Can we alter our teaching philosophies so that students ‘drop back’ onto the specification in their second year, having spent time honing and sharpening their skills to a level beyond that required by the papers? Will students cover the specifications that much faster if we start much later when they are better? I think the answer to this last question is yes, but I will admit there are no easy answers to the other questions, and bravery is required to adopt any approaches that might yield some answers.

Yet, no matter how magical we make our teaching, we still have to prepare our students for their GCSE and A Level exams, they still need to do mocks, and we will never have enough time. All of us love teaching music, but I think all of us can make our teaching more musical, and all of us can achieve more by doing less.

‘Simultaneously empowered’

Take performance for example: we all get our students to perform regularly. Box ticked. But, can students perform their piece to their peers, who simultaneously write down musical features they can identify, and treat it as an unfamiliar listening exercise? Craig plays his Grade 4 clarinet piece to the class. Anna thinks the opening was staccato and that it was in a major key – was it? A brief look at the score reveals it's not written as staccato, so that's instantly a discussion. Is Craig misreading, or is it an interpretative choice? Chances are Craig has no idea, and is suddenly forced to make a decision as a musician. Playing the opening again both staccato and legato allows us to check whether everyone can spot the difference. Varsha thinks the middle section was played forte – the music says piano, so Craig can fix that as well. Everyone agrees it's gone into a minor key for the middle section, and a little questioning finally gets them to realise it's the relative minor. Craig plays the major and relative minor section again so that everyone can hear the difference and recognise the modulation. And so on.

The result is that Craig is being coached and simultaneously empowered when performing, because he knows he's helping the class, who are recognising features in an unfamiliar piece and building their listening skills. This method especially helps under-confident performers, since they know that both your attention and the focus of their classmates is on the music and the features within it, rather than on the person performing. Think of how much we could spot over a few weeks of everyone performing.

A Level students would dig deeper, and could write programme notes for performances, as that helps them to make interpretative decisions informed by context, and gives some related listening that might be useful in an exam when they research other pieces by the same composer. It also gets them analysing their scores in order to bring them to life for those listening. Engaging programme notes are often similar in style to essays that receive very high marks, since they will balance technical language and engaging explanations; and, most importantly, it teaches them how to write well.

Playing the long game

Spending longer on analysis of both familiar and unfamiliar music gradually deepens students' understanding of common ingredients in music, including musical devices and how they are most often used. Can we spend more time in ensemble and choir rehearsals asking quick questions about what is being performed, or what is in the score? Students can quickly get used to pairing musical vocabulary and the effect of that feature, and can get it wrong safely (and verbally), so that they hone their understanding before they approach coursework. Best of all, we can do this with all sorts of music, levelling the playing field and showing our students that all music genres and styles deserve equal academic attention.

If they need to compose to a brief, then researching that world of music first in great depth and critically listening to typical examples will inevitably give them a list of ingredients that they can use. They are simultaneously embarking on unfamiliar listening and analysis, so when they finally tackle it on the GCSE or A Level paper there is less fear. They also have a list of ingredients to incorporate into their composition. If they then research how composers use each feature, and stylistic traits of music of that time, they are then in a position to make a valid and focused start on their coursework.

All of these approaches can be rolled back through younger year groups, but they take time and are slow and painful at first; but students gain so much more over time and, best of all, it requires us to just steer things through questioning, rather than actively lecture and work our way through specification material. Set works can inform the musical worlds explored, rather than be the be-all and end all. As we deepen students' musicianship, we can demand more detail, more technical language, and more specificity. It becomes exciting.

The aim: to get to a point where we drop back in the final few terms onto the GCSE or A Level requirements; they become a consolidation, rather than a hoop to jump through. Our challenge: to be brave, and make our teaching more musical.