Planning effective and musical lessons

Teaching music is not like teaching other subjects. This is worth pointing out, because it means that planning music lessons is not like planning lessons in other subjects either. Music contains a rare mixture of the physical and the intellectual. Lessons need to develop fine motor skills together with confidence in performing and a whole range of concepts relating to an art form that is both highly emotional and also invisible. It is most certainly not a subject that involves instructions along the lines of ‘sit down, open your books and do page 54’.

In this resource, a range of practical strategies for the following will be presented:

• Creating learning objectives
• Teaching musical concepts musically
• Lesson structure
• Responding to students’ needs from one lesson to the next
• The place of key words in music
• Ensuring students of all abilities make progress
• Using recordings of students’ work as feedback and for evidence