Occasion, time and place

Music learning can be planned for in many ways. Some of the more common structures for designing a scheme of work include the elements of music and specific musical styles. These structures allow teachers to focus on specific musical building blocks that can be mastered before moving onto the next block, and often have the bonus of being relatively easy to measure (‘Did this piece include a ritardando and an accelerando?’, ‘Does this reggae composition include a skank and an arpeggiated bassline?’). On occasion, however, this can lead to a focus on the easily assessible rather than the musical (‘Yes, this horrendous piece of music with no discernable melody and unintentionally horrific harmony includes a ritardando and an accelerando’, ‘Yes, this piece includes a skank and an arpeggiated bassline but sounds like a madrigal’).

One alternative method of organising your scheme of work is to focus on occasion, time and place. This can take the form of project-based learning, with pupils creating music for use in a real-world scenario, or it can make occasion/time/place the thing that is being learnt, with pupils creating music in response to having learnt about a piece that was composed for a specific occasion/time/place.