Average progress in classroom music? Hmm!

There has been a lot of social media chatter in England recently about Progress 8 data scores, which have been published. This is rather complex to explain for an international audience, but, essentially, Progress 8 is secondary school accountability measure:

“Progress 8 aims to capture the progress that pupils in a school make from the end of primary school to the end of KS4. It is a type of value-added measure, which means that pupils’ results are compared to other pupils nationally with similar prior attainment.” https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1112046/Secondary_accountability_measures_2022_guide.pdf (p.13)

The essential feature of Progress 8 is that it is predicated on statistically average attainment, and, as the government document cited above states: 

“For all mainstream pupils nationally, the average Progress 8 score will be zero” (ibid, p.23) 

The point of this blog entry, though, is not to discuss Progress 8, but that these SocMe discussions set me off thinking about average attainment in classroom music lessons. This is much more problematic, at least in the context of English secondary schools, than it may seem at first glance. I am going to concentrate in this entry on secondary schools, although there may well be similar issues at primary, but that’s a different issue. What, I wonder, does average progress in classroom music in the lower secondary school (KS3, in the local parlance) both look like, and, more importantly, sound like? Now I know we have a model music curriculum, which is supposed to delineate such issues, but I am concerned with thinking about progression which is not deliverology, or of words-on-and-off-a-page syndrome, in other words it is not the writing down of a curriculum document, but the actual music that results from the children and young people who receive it in its enacted form.

We sometimes see published examples of ‘best practice’ in classroom music, but again, I am not concerned with a tiny minority of schools so well-funded and resourced, or with an abnormally high prior-attaining pupil cohort, but with normal, everyday schools. And here, I feel, that there are likely to be many examples. 

I repeat: What does average progress in classroom music sound like? We know that in the National Curriculum music learning is built on composing, listening, and performing, but these are interrelated, not atomistic. We know too that Ofsted have written that

“In making decisions about curriculum content, it is important to consider how the sequence of content develops pupils’ musical knowledge and competencies over time. This review proposes 3 pillars as the basis for progression in the musical activities of performing, composing and listening/appraising. [These pillars are] Technical, Constructive, Expressive” (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/research-review-series-music)

But again I ask, what does this sound like when average progress is being made? Qualitatively, how does music made at the start of Y7 differ audibly from the middle of year 8, and the end of year 9? These things really matter, as we know that progress is a vital ingredient in music making, yet the prime issue, that of quality of music being made, remains, for many, an elusive concept. Maybe this is elusive systemically too, perhaps? I have written before about Pirsig, in his seminal 1974 book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance making this highly pertinent observation:

“Quality — you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on?”  (Pirsig, 1974, p187)

And this, for me, is a big issue. What is audible quality in classroom music making? We know from the ABRSM and Trinity College graded music exams what a ladder of progression sounds like in instrumental music, but what about classroom music? How does a school that has been focusing on singing (say) sound progressively (actually I prefer ‘progressionally’, as ‘progressive’ has a problematic meaning in music education for some!) differ from one where the children and young people have been composing using ICT, one where there are rock bands, one where musical futures is the main modality, one where all the youngsters learn an orchestral instrument in class time, one where tuned percussion, or guitars, are the main modality, and so on. Again, I repeat, what does average progress in classroom music in each of these instances sound like?

One of the many issues for us in music education is that we start to get bound up in issues of ideology very quickly at this juncture, “well, if they will do rock music in class what can you expect?” sorts of things (insert any hobby-horse of your choosing for ‘rock music’!). We also get into the ‘could’ versus ‘should’ dilemma. For some, it could sound like this, for others it should sound like that. These issues are not easy to resolve. 

There are many issues that face us in music education in England at the moment, maybe this is yet another that we could/should be worrying about?

Advertisement

In which I worry about a quotation, and think about Mrs Curwen (again!)

I’m supposed to be writing a book chapter, but I got distracted by a quotation, sorry editors! The quotation in question is from Daniel Willingham, and it is this:

“Factual knowledge precedes skill”

Now I know I should provide a full reference, but I’ve moved away from my main computer, and I’m sitting in a comfy chair at my laptop at the moment, so if you want to look it up, please do! But my tangential thinking that stopped me writing a book chapter (where I would have had to reference it, sorry!) was “hold on, is that true in music education?”. And thus this blog…

So is it true in music education? Well, let me do some thinking out loud, as it were, in this blog, please.

When I taught KS3 music, I would often do something using keyboards (or guitars, same principle applies, only the chords are harder!), that we would learn, on the keyboard, chords, C, F, G, and Am (diff on guitar, obviously!); not all at once, but over time – we’d work up to all four of these chords. 

Now, these are clearly chords I IV V VI in C major, and the triads in root position (keyboards now) involve the same shape, although VI is obviously a minor chord, but the same ‘play a note, miss a note, play a note…’ hand shape works. I see this as a skill. We’d learn the names of the chords, C, F, G, and A minor, and we’d play all sorts of music with them, and the pupils would have a go at composing their own music with them. 

Now, where I am getting hung up is I don’t think ‘factual knowledge’ preceded that skill, unless the factual knowledge is ‘play a note, miss a note, play a note…’ etc to get the triad shapes. I certainly didn’t teach major scale theory, or the circle of 5ths, or notation other than guitar chord symbols to go with them, but all sorts of music was learned, and all sorts of music was composed. 

So is this bad? Should ‘theory’ have been taught first? Am I equating ‘factual knowledge’ with ‘theory’? I’ve chosen the chord example as I think it fits with what a lot of KS3 teaching involves still today. Had I chosen singing, I feel that even less factual knowledge would have preceded the skills, maybe?

Even having written this, I’m still thinking about it. As in so many things, I am reminded of Mrs Curwen’s piano teaching maxims of 1886, particularly “Teach the thing before the sign”.

Here’s another bit of a Mrs Curwen book, which is apposite here. (Those aren’t my underlinings by the way, I was sent this.) *

I do like “every musical fact should reach the mind though the ear”. Nice! And no, that doesn’t mean JUST TELL ‘EM, or whatever that shouty meme was a few years ago, it’s about music being musical.

However, as with so many things, I need to think some more about it. And I also need to get back to that book chapter…

Sorry!

(*Gender specificity in the original)

Article in BJME

Another piece by me co-authored with Alison Daubney in the British Journal of Music Education entitled “U-turns in the fog: the unfolding story of the impact of COVID-19 on music education in England and the UK”.

Available free for a while from the BJME at

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-music-education/article/uturns-in-the-fog-the-unfolding-story-of-the-impact-of-covid19-on-music-education-in-england-and-the-uk/0B7C6294FD6A42E5FC4338334323F0C8

Compulsory loving music

I am seeing a lot of posts at the moment about “getting children to love music”. Now, I have no objections whatsoever to this as a laudable aim. However, I don’t think it is that simple. Case in point: I had to do cross-country running every week when I was at school, I hated it then and have never volunteered to do it at any point since. I’m sure our X-country teacher probably had the aim of “making” us like it. I didn’t. What happens if our attempts to do this for music have the same effect? 

I have written about my dislike of Wagner’s music recently here. I can report that at O-level and A-level I had a music teacher who did love Wagner, and could crowbar in talking about Wagner’s music and playing us bits of Tristan at the drop of a hat. I’m sure that the music teacher thought he was doing the best for us, but I didn’t like it then, and I still don’t. Sorry to all the Wagnerians. On the other hand, to the best of my knowledge, said teacher never played a semi-quaver of Poulenc to us, and yet I am more than happy to listen to that. 

So what? Well, I was reminded of this when digging out an old powerpoint today, and I know I have written and talked about this before. A few years ago I went with some Uni colleagues to Vietnam, on a non-music related mission. Whilst there, we were taken out for a posh dinner in what we were assured was the restaurant to go to, where they served a good example of the local delicacy. Never being one to turn down a culinary experience, I was looking forward to this. When we arrived, the restaurant looked not unlike places I had been in Birmingham and elsewhere.

But … the local delicacy turned out to be unhatched ducklings cooked in their shells, something like this:

Our hosts loved this, and scrunched away happily. Yes, literally scrunched, you could hear the little bones being chewed. 

Now, despite my not being averse to a bowl of jellied eels, or all sorts of other things friends and family despair at, I couldn’t bring myself to eat this, much less ‘love’ it. 

I know what you are going to say, if I’d started young enough, yadda yadda yadda. But some of our hosts didn’t like (or love) this dish, and were thoroughly understanding of why I didn’t . So are they lacking? Am I?

Anyway, the point of all this culinary ambling is that making people ‘love’ music, any more than unhatched ducklings, or cross-country, may not be quite as simple as some people seem to think.

Sorry! 

Cultural capital – yet another link to elsewhere

Yet another piece of writing on another site, this one in Primary Music Magazine, to be found here.

In which I have a bit of a rant about people other than music teachers having a go at us!

Yet another blog elsewhere

Gosh, isn’t life hectic at the moment! Another blog by me, but published elsewhere is this one by the nice people at Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG). It can be found here.

Hope it creates some useful thinking?

Stay well, everyone.

Another blog elsewhere

My latest thought on schools in England going back post-covid are on the #CanDoMusic website here. Lots to be concerned about!

Writing (riting) music

As part of my work with Sound and Music and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG), we’ve been running as series of on-line events during lockdown on the pedagogies of composing, details of which are here. Doing these, one of the things that I have been thinking about a lot is the way in which people use the word ‘writing’ to mean composing. This has troubled me for a while, so in this blog I am bringing some of my troubling into the open, as it were.

I appreciate I may be being oversensitive, but in the wake of black lives matter, I think it behoves us all to think about what we may be doing that could be, albeit inadvertently, racist. Nate Holder’s blog  has some powerful materials on it that give pause for thought. With regard to ‘writing’ music, this usage has long troubled me, as I think what it is doing is making ‘writing music’ important. And what written music looks like is a staff with a clef, a key and time signature, and so on. Never mind that most of the world’s music doesn’t do this, music, to be worthwhile, has to be done in ‘writing’.

Now this use of ‘writing’ reminds me of an article by Ian Stronach, “This space is not yet blank”, which is about as hardcore a postmodern piece of academic writing as it’s possible to get, and certainly not for the fainthearted, or those with an allergy to PoMo articles! Anyway, bear with me…in his complex, but also very playful piece, Stronach says this:

Catching words with words is the name of the game, and we are on their trail hoping to catch them out, or in. So think the ritual of writing, riting’s passage, as a writual of riting as I will have gingerly picked my way, tensely, across this page, step-by-step, leaving word-prints here and there.

Eh? I hear you say! What? Has Fautley finally lost the plot, has lockdown got to him? No! What I take from Stronach that is relevant to my long term worries about writing=composing, is that ‘writual of riting’ wherein ‘we’ (and as I keep saying, whoever ‘we’ are?) use ‘writing’ without thinking (or thoughtlessly, if you like), to mean composing. Which immediately rules out vast swathes of musics as being not written, but ritual, and therefore not worthy of a western classical gaze. To use writing as composing is to conjure up images of a solitary genius, starving in a Paris garret in about 1880, and struggling alone. Or maybe of a modern tech-savvy composer, in their shed in the back garden, or whatever. The writing is riting and the ritual is writual. And ‘we’ who talk about writing when we mean composing are complicit in this. The use of ‘writing’ conveys where we place value.

Sure, when a 14-year-old singer-songwriter says “I’ve written a song” what they often mean is that they have written some words, lyrics, the writing is an aide-memoire. The music is often unwritten, or at least un-crotcheted, it may be a few chord symbols, or some tab, that’s fine. Is a song valid only as sheet music? Why don’t CDs, from hip-hop to Mendelssohn, come with a score as well as the text if it’s that important?

When our colleagues in the art department have a student who has produced a good painting, do we say “I don’t want to see the picture, show me the essay they’ve written about it”?

Why am I banging on about this? Because, for me, it’s a short step from writing = composing, to writing = knowledge of ‘theory of music’, and this takes us to western classical music’s nice cosy comfort zone. Beware of sitting comfortably!

Does this all matter, why do I worry about a word? Because words have baggage, and these days that’s an issue. If ‘we’ (warning as above) use words without thinking about the hidden meanings we can show what we think, and what we value. I value kids making music. I value the doing, the cooperative, the active. I want more children and young people to experience the frisson of live performance, the gratification of hearing something that you brought into being that no-one else has ever done before, is that such a bad thing? If we then say “nice song, but the 7^th doesn’t resolve properly, and the voice-leading is rubbish” are we encouraging? English and French may share the same alphabet, but the grammar is different, should we judge Baudelaire by the textual rules of Wordsworth? Stormzy by Mozart? Where is the writual?

So I am worrying about writing to mean composing, and it does make me uncomfortable. And I’ve just ‘written’ a blog about it. Maybe a writ needs enforcing to prevent me?

Sorry, I’ll go back to my beer now…..

Link to BJME post

Another ‘not a blog post’ posting! the very kind people at Cambridge University Press have made freely available for a few weeks only the editorial research article for the British Journal of Music Education by me and Dr Alison Daubney. It’s entitled ‘Music education in a time of pandemic’, and it’s available here:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-music-education/article/editorial-research-music-education-in-a-time-of-pandemic/40874E520FB7F34F1F8BEC178379F173

 

Grading and standards in troubled times

These are troubled times, what with us being confined to our homes, and the associated fears. But everything else goes on, and whilst it is not normality, a semblance thereof has to appertain. Against this backdrop, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which examination grading in the UK for GCSE and A-levels will be taking place this year, particularly with reference to music.

It is well known that I have long been critical of the status quo in England, and feel that many kids miss out on the higher grades because of issues with the process itself. I won’t rehearse those arguments again here, though. But reading through Ofqual’s statement today  alongside this piece in schools week I was struck by how actually what people are saying – and will say – could be interpreted the other way round. Let me explain.

Test validity is a complex and contested area, but one of the areas which is investigated is this: “How well test performance matches expectations based on evidence available from other relevant sources” (NFER, no date). What this means is that we could be saying instead of how well teacher assessments match the test outcome, that a judgement of testing is how well it matches other evidence, including teacher assessments. Important to note that this is not a swipe at exam boards, they work incredibly hard to try and ensure validity and reliability (another complex and contested construct!), but instead to try and restore faith in teacher judgements.

Now I know that  many people are telling us this is not the time to make cheap political points, but I will anyway! Ever since Michael Gove dismantled the education and examination systems in England, trust in teacher judgement has been steadily and deliberately drip-by-slow-and-steady-drip eroded. His infamous statement that “the country has had enough of experts” being but one example of this. What I feel (and this is only a personal opinion, so please take with a pinch of salt!) is that this has steadily transferred to the teaching profession, and many more recent entrants to the profession have known nothing else, and so are not used to thinking that their assessment judgements can possibly be even vaguely correct without some form of external validation. Consequently there is little to no trust built into the system as currently configured and, importantly, this is the results of a series of ideological decisions!

What this means is that this year we get to find out what will happen with an entirely differently configured way of grading attainment for our young people. I am reasonably sure, knowing how the system works, that much of this will translate into more work and much stress for our music teachers, though! But it will interesting to see what will happen, and what will come out of this system change that has been so violently thrust upon us. The system (and Gove again plays a part in this) has been ramping up accountability to the point at which it seems that, as many music teachers tell me, the only thing that matters is grades. SLT: “Oh the choir were on the radio were they? That’s all well and good, but I need your KS3 spreadsheets now, they are what really count in this school”. This translates as education = grades, but as we get further up the school the grades that really matter are those produced by others.

Anyway, I think that’s enough of a rant for the moment. It will be interesting to see what happens this year, and how composing, performing, and listening can be graded.

I wish our young people and their teachers well, and hope that we can all be allowed out again soon. Music is a sociable enterprise, after all.

Take care everyone.

Reference

NFER, no date: https://www.nfer.ac.uk/for-schools/free-resources-advice/assessment-hub/introduction-to-assessment/how-to-ensure-a-test-is-valid/