Streamlining contact time: Shifting classroom culture

The taught Music curriculum shouldn’t exist in isolation. It needs to work in partnership with the complex fabric of musical learning and enrichment that happens beyond the classroom.

Learning opportunities outside of the classroom play a vital role in creating well-rounded musicians, enabling students to develop their instrumental and vocal skills, meet and collaborate with like-minded people, and experience new and exciting repertoire first hand. What a difference it makes to students’ confidence and independence when they are trained and empowered to run rehearsals, performances and events.

Demonstrating learning

I want to make the level of autonomy and drive that I see in students’ collaborative work beyond the curriculum a part of classroom culture. I’d also like to get students thinking about classroom contact time as the starting point for musical conversations and collaboration – rather than separate from everything else they do as musicians.

I’m a great believer in making the majority of class lessons at KS4 and 5 about moving students’ musical understanding forward. They’re not for just ‘getting on with it’. In the music department at Huntington School, we spend an extraordinary amount of classroom time taking things apart to see how they work. We follow this up by setting tasks that enable students to demonstrate how much they have understood through application in sound.

Until now we’ve always set these tasks for students to complete individually. This year I’ve started setting collaborative homework tasks at both GCSE and A Level. No, this isn’t students’ coursework or formally marked assessment material, it’s the experimentation and discovery part of assimilating new learning.

In order to facilitate this collaborative approach, I’ve tried to remove as many obstacles to autonomy as possible. This is what I have learnt along the way:

• Make it really easy for students to get their hands on resources – whether that be the school network, Google Drive or your own website.
• Make materials accessible to students on their phones and tablets away from the classroom (but nothing smaller than 18pt). It’s much more attractive than a foot-thick ring binder of A4.
• Make your resources accessible to every single student in the cohort by scaffolding heavily to begin with and gradually phasing that out as routines are established and confidence grows.

Here are a few suggestions of how to increase student autonomy and develop a collaborative culture that enables us to make the most of contact time.

GCSE

Performing

• Create a bank of mp3 and pdf ensemble materials that you have arranged over the years.
• Model how to access and download materials more than once at the start of the course.
• Provide small bespoke GCSE ensembles with a VI Form coach. In two years’ time these students will become coaches themselves.
• Engineer mixed year group ensembles so less experienced students can learn from more experienced students.
• Drop in and coach to begin with, then gradually step back when the group starts to function autonomously. (Teach the skills of rehearsing and directing in your contact time.)
• Create welcoming spaces in the department for students to work in.

Composing

• Put all the composing material you have introduced, modelled and worked through with students in one location.

• Model how to access and use the materials.

• Use a portion of contact time to tackle common sticking points, but keep directing students to the saved resource, so they get used to finding solutions for themselves. Here’s a collection of our Year 10 starter workshops: huntschoolmusic.com/ks4.html

• Provide mp3 and pdf models of anonymised past student coursework, paperwork, scores, recordings with grades and comments for students to refer to when pulling their own work together.

• Provide playlists as inspirational starting points for each composition brief for students to draw on once you have modelled how to best use the resource in your lesson. Example playlist here. 

Listening and analysis

• Create or source elements-driven revision and self-marking test materials. Include embedded audio and video in your slides to provide precise locations of the thing you want them to hear.

• Set weekly follow-up homework tasks so that students get into the habit of listening critically and analytically away from the classroom.

• Reinforce ‘Area of Study’ topic learning with additional listening, watching and reading resources. 

• Draw students’ attention to valuable online resources for aural training. Work through examples in contact time to show students how to navigate it.

• Group students in teams of two or three and set a test/quiz date to incentivise students to use the resource to prepare. Turn it into a game.

• Furnish practice rooms with large manuscript whiteboards and pens next to a piano to encourage students to do aural training work with one another between taught lessons.

• Encourage students to work through tasks collaboratively

A Level

Performing

• Set lots of interim performance occasions across the year. Get dates into students’ diaries in September.
• Put the responsibility for making practice recordings in students’ hands.
• Put the responsibility of scheduling rehearsals with their group or accompanist in students’ hands.

Composing

• Explicitly teach how to research repertoire and set weekly research challenges based on past exam briefs.
• Use students’ findings as the basis for discussion in the following lesson. The wealth of repertoire they discover will broaden both their and your knowledge.
• Set collaborative techniques exercises to get students working through challenging harmonic sticking-points in pairs or threes. I have found that it has halved the number of excuses for non-submission of work.
• Set collaborative elements-driven composition tasks, that you ask to be realised acoustically in the next lesson, to get students away from screens and paper now and again.

Listening and analysis

• Explicitly teach how to research and gather materials so that you can set advanced preparation tasks for the following lesson. Do the curating for them in the early stages. This saves you having to start from square one, and it opens up the lesson to discussion and comparison of findings – it’s not just you delivering content week after week. 

• Model your thinking as you write an essay plan on the board, live in the lesson. Allow students to screenshot your notes and ask them to turn the notes into prose in pairs for homework.

• Ask Year 13 to write revision bullet lists of indicative content, and give that material to Year 12 to shape into prose responses in the early stages of them learning the craft of A Level essay writing.