Close your eyes and imagine a secondary school music classroom. What do you picture? My mind's eye conjures a high-ceilinged room, cluttered with the familiar paraphernalia of music education. There's the Bentley upright piano in the corner, a class set of ukuleles dangling from hangers, and perhaps some djembes ranged on a shelf.
On the walls are posters touting the elements of music and the instruments of the orchestra. Bach and Beethoven might scowl down from a timeline of the Great Composers, or jostle among the fresher faces of contemporary performers. In sharper focus than any of this, though, my imagination draws the most ubiquitous furniture of the school music room: a set of electronic keyboards.
In some classrooms, keyboards get packed away and brought out when needed. But more often they are permanently established, facing outwards from the centre of the room, on desks or adjustable stands. As ABRSM's Making Music 2025 report reminds us, the electronic keyboard is the primary vehicle for musical learning in schools (p. 32). And it has been this way for decades: the keyboard's long reign is almost certainly the direct result of the many opportunities for creativity that this versatile instrument affords.
But like any powerful technology, keyboards limit as much as they enable. It's worth thinking what we inadvertently communicate about music itself when we direct students to these workstations for so much of their learning time. Do we want to say that music is something that happens individually, or in pairs, and essentially in private? Do we want to transmit the idea that musical learning is something you do while sitting still, leashed to the wall by a tangle of power packs and headphone cables? And do we really want to tell our students that music is a cerebral activity, foremost, rather than an embodied one?
As music educators, we know that our subject isn't lonely, private or sedentary. Music doesn't sit still; rather, it bounces, swings and jogs along. We know, too, that the most valuable musical experiences are usually shared. So sometimes we should abandon our keyboards, clear away the desks and create the space we need to tackle musical activities that put physical movement at the heart of students' listening, performing and composing. Here are some suggestions for ways in which movement can be successfully – and impactfully – brought into our everyday classroom practice.
Active listening
Many music lessons start with listening. But if we're not careful, students' engagement with what they hear can be very shallow. It's all too easy for students to zone out when the music starts playing, and to take a mental break rather than to engage meaningfully with the sounds around them. The principle of ‘show what you hear’, a mainstay of the pedagogies associated with music and movement, provides us with a powerful antidote to these passive ways of listening. For example, getting students to ‘step’ a rhythmic pattern – an activity with its roots in the mid-century tradition of Dalcroze eurhythmics – allows the teacher to see at a glance exactly who can hear a crotchet rest in an ostinato pattern, or who can distinguish between the ‘walking’ of crotchets and the ‘running’ of quavers. The students' comprehension of these auditory patterns is rendered visual, providing valuable and immediate assessment for learning.
There is practically no limit to the ways in which this principle can be applied. Props are often helpful, and, if you have enough available space, balloons make a good choice. Using these to embody a musical metre – for example, by having your students bat them into the air only on the first beat of the bar – helps to reinforce and to internalise a sense of rhythmic structure. Stepping and counting the unstressed pulses between the ‘balloon taps’ of the downbeats requires a little bit of practice, but perseverance is rewarded with an almost failsafe way to teach students how the rhythmic metre of a piece can be determined. Once your class has cracked it, this physical method can be used to analyse and understand even complicated or irregular metres.
An example of a more elaborate analytical listening task involves students in the creation of their own movement sequences, representing the gestures and motifs of a short piece or passage. This classic activity requires participants to hear musical details and represent them through their physical movements. It works well with music that features strong gestures and high levels of contrast. When the music contains two distinct lines – moving at times homophonically and at times in counterpoint – it is yet more effective as a pair activity, in which the pitches, rhythms and energy of an individual line can be represented by each student in the pair. Again, the students' ability to listen and to understand what they have heard is made usefully visible to the teacher.
Performing
Music and movement can support performing skills as much as those related to analytical listening. Linking concrete physical gestures with abstract musical ideas allows students to make connections and to grasp concepts that might otherwise elude them. This idea can be demonstrated through engaging warm-ups and games that tackle common difficulties encountered by inexperienced musicians. Students often find it challenging to maintain a steady pulse while singing a simple song unaccompanied, for example. Rehearsing this repertoire seated in a circle, passing or tapping some kind of object or token in time to the music – stones can be satisfying, but I usually use wooden pegs – requires every student to invest individually in, and take responsibility for, the pulse of the music.
Suddenly, the problem of rushing, or dragging, is eliminated. A more deliberate tempo can be achieved by lifting the objects higher in the air, and extra challenge can be introduced by reversing the direction of travel for a contrasting phrase or chorus. Students learn that the size, energy and speed of a movement are all determinants of a resulting musical tempo; they learn effective and accurate motor control; and they learn that, in a group setting, everyone has responsibility for maintaining effective ensemble and the chosen pulse.
Many of the best choral directors know that vocal performance can be greatly improved using these kinds of movement activities. When you're leading group singing, it can be helpful to introduce movements that support or scaffold rhythmic patterns, especially unusual or irregular ones. Setting up a clap-click-click-stamp-stamp pattern, for example, when singing songs in quintuple metre (Nick Drake's ‘River Man’, Taylor Swift's ‘Tolerate It’, Jethro Tull's ‘Living in the Past’ or the eponymous ‘Five Four’ from Gorillaz are some classic examples) really helps students not to fall off. Meanwhile, repertoire that alternates between different metrical patterns can be approached as a clapping game, fitting duple, triple and quadruple patterns against the stresses of, for example, a Bulgarian folk song. Once the patterns are secure, these scaffolds can be removed, leaving behind well-accented phrasing, crisp rhythms and excellent ensemble singing.
Composing
Music and movement activities are about more than simply realising the creative intentions of others. They can also be an excellent stimulus for improvisation and composition within a classroom setting. An activity that I return to very often involves three stages. In the first, pairs of students select at random from cards displaying words associated with movement: ‘jump’, ‘slide’, ‘stretch’, etc. In the second stage, which they must accomplish in a compressed time frame, each pair orders the cards and creates a movement sequence inspired by the prompts. In the third stage, each sequence is filmed, played in a loop and used as a starting point for a barred-instrument improvisation by another pair, whose job it is to match as closely as possible the gestures, dynamics and mood of the original movements. The whole process can be completed in a lesson or made into a longer project spanning half a term's work.
From simple beginnings, complex structures can emerge. One of my students achieved full marks in a GCSE free composition for a piece that started life as a movement activity in which 7-, 8- and 9-beat ostinati – pentatonic vocal melodies linked with physical gestures – were combined to create an elaborate pattern of phase-shifting that only resolved after 504 beats of mesmerising and captivating music. The complexity of the piece was enhanced through the addition of new elements and contrasts, but, at its heart, were the simple ostinato fragments shown below.
Conclusion
With curricular music experiencing significant cuts in secondary schools across the country, it is becoming ever more important to bring excitement into our classrooms and to make the most of the spaces we occupy in crowded timetables. Music and movement can form an alliance that offers a dynamic way to engage students kinaesthetically, to enhance their musical understanding, and to support their creative development through physical expression. So, why not give it a go?
