Being a Musician
Being a Musician Champion: an approach to Music
What is the point of Being a Musician?
Music is a universal language that embodies one of the highest forms of creativity. A highquality music education should engage and inspire pupils to develop a love of music and their talent as musicians, and so increase their self-confidence, creativity and sense of achievement. As pupils progress, they should develop a critical engagement with music, allowing them to compose, and to listen with discrimination to the best in the musical canon.
The aims of being a Musician are:
§ perform, listen to, review and evaluate music across a range of historical periods, genres, styles and traditions, including the works of the great composers and musicians
§ learn to sing and to use their voices, to create and compose music on their own and with others, have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, use technology appropriately and have the opportunity to progress to the next level of musical excellence
§ understand and explore how music is created, produced and communicated, including through the inter-related dimensions: pitch, duration, dynamics, tempo, timbre, texture, structure and appropriate musical notations.
Where does it come from?
Being a Musician is integrated into our curriculum through Curious-city. An enquiry-led, local learning approach to the National Curriculum 2014. This approach recognises that the cognitive maturity of learners affects what and how they learn. It also encourages teachers to think of how they encourage learners to Being a Musician instead of simply teaching them Music.
Within a Curious-city curriculum, there is no ‘skills or knowledge’ debate. It is seamless blend of both, and through every enquiry, learners are challenged to work independently to prove their understanding of Being a Musician.
What does Being a Musician entail?
- Provide encouragement and ideas to staff across the school
- Monitor content and enquiries and be mindful of coverage ‘v’ skill acquisition
- Collect and evaluate different voices with regard to Being a Musician
- Ensure enquiry planning and floor books are sufficient to effectively represent Being a Musician.
What is ‘covered’?
Essentially, a Curious-city curriculum uses the National Curriculum 2014 areas as a basic foundation of entitlement. However Curious-city is much more than that. It is localised, real-life and challenges learners to apply their learning in unique ways without the support of adults to prove what they have learnt. Local companies, charities, organisations, individuals and objects are used as foci to enhance and instill a sense of curiosity, pride and stewardship.
How is Being a Musician monitored and assessed?
Every term, through a family ‘sharing of learning’ event, Being Champions review floor books and displays of learning shared with families. This helps to not only ensure coverage and ‘matching up’ progress throughout a year group in line with the whole school curriculum map, but also gauge learner and family reactions to learning and provides an opportunity to collect different voices.
Every two terms, Being Champions meet as a team to discuss and share what they are seeing and hearing, and as working as a team, help to review the school’s curriculum and contribute to the development plan. One of the Being Champions is then designated to report to the Senior Leader Team.
As there is no requirement to formally report attainment of Music, Being a Musician is assessed through monitoring how a learner responds to enquiries and whether they show a particular enthusiasm and disposition towards it, or, if they constantly needed support in order to access it. This information is recorded onto the medium term plans which are kept and used for report writing towards the end of the year.