Student autonomy: the power of choice

It is always challenging to judge or anticipate how well a particular cohort of students will receive a unit of work. It sometimes seems that no matter how many hours of planning you put into the perfect sequence of lessons, there are mitigating factors and unexpected curveballs that derail your thought process and shake your confidence.

Curriculum structures and ideologies have become a recent focus of Ofsted inspections, and far more emphasis is now given to the sequence of knowledge and the reasoning behind the selection of materials that are being taught. It is increasingly difficult for music curriculum leaders due to the concise nature of the current national curriculum. This article focuses on ideas around building a cogent curriculum that is relevant to the students of your context. I have looked at some existing materials and models to help build a curriculum and then offered some of my key findings whilst researching student choice in lesson.