The Full week 4 #MFLearn19 page can be found HERE

In my last blog I talked about how we first started using the term haphazard learning when we presented Lucy Green’s 5 principles of informal learning to teachers in the early years of the roll out of Musical Futures in the UK. So what changed and why in how we now present principle 4 at our workshops?

A few years ago, I had a catch up with Lucy and updated her on some of the work we have been doing at Musical Futures International to build on the original work, first across Australia supported by the Govt in Victoria, into international schools in Asia and Europe and now working with instrumental teachers in China and elsewhere.

As we talked, Lucy said that she regretted using the term haphazard learning. We talked about how it’s not exactly the aim of every teacher to produce a ‘haphazard’ lesson nor is it a term that we might aspire to have appear in lesson observation feedback or student self assessment. How was your lesson today? Yeah well it was a bit haphazard……

Lucy talked to me instead about ‘holistic’ learning with haphazard learning being one natural outcome of this approach in practice. I decided to go back to the literature and then think about this all might work in classroom practice.

Emily Wilson, #MFLearn19 week 5 presenter, found me some references that helped to clarify what holistic learning might mean in the context of informal learning.

So if we take these one at a time:

“approaching whole “real-world” pieces of music, involving finding their own way through the learning rather than using music that has been simplified and structured progressively” (Green & Narita, 2015, p. 305).

I interpret this as being that the teacher has done nothing to the source material or stimulus, all students are given the exact same start point in the case of in at the deep end, a free choice of a piece of music, and more importantly space and time to respond to this in their own way. They are then supported by the teacher in ways that are personalised to the needs of groups and individuals as these needs become apparent.

“the task involved what is known as ‘differentiation by outcome’. In other words, all pupils were set the same task, but it was adaptable to the differing abilities of individuals, not by virtue of being divided up into separate, progressive levels of difficulty, but according to what each individual produced as the outcome” (Green, 2008, p. 187).

This point also acknowledges that students may be able to adapt the materials to their own needs themselves without the need for the teacher to have already made some assumptions and done it for them. Such assumptions might include what the identified ‘progressive levels of difficulty’ in that context are, or which students are capable of doing what. Decisions have sometimes been made before the students even have a chance to begin.

“Differentiation by support and response is often an intuitive part of the teaching process; we tailor our support, including our verbal feedback, according to the individual needs of our students (assessment for learning)”. Learning to Teach Music in the Secondary School (2016, p. 179)

So here we have differentiation by teacher response, the other go-to differentiation strategy in music education.

I think music teachers do differentiation by teacher response really well. The nature of music and the way it is often taught in groups or through playing allows us to get to know our students musically. We have the opportunity to give personalised feedback and even if it’s not possible to evidence every last aspect of this, that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. As musicians we would never get better without that routine of create, play, feedback, rehearse, improve and then go again. So in informal learning, do we really need to be spending time differentiating materials before the students get to access them, or could we be more confident in what we already do well – to guide them and support them to develop their own strategies for differentiation.

I decided to have a look at the teacher forums to see the kinds of strategies for differentiation that were being suggested and whether I could find any examples of holistic learning in there.

What I found got me thinking about differentiation generally in music and how much the pressure to evidence the impact of feedback given with a view to improving attainment has somehow distracted teachers from that last point on the slide – Differentiation by teacher response. The examples on the next 2 slides suggest that much of the work has already been done by the teacher and the limits and assumptions of what students can achieve are already in place before they even start the task.

That’s not to say that differentiation by response isn’t happening as well. But what it does is remove that even playing field that Lucy’s idea of holistic learning offers the students. All have the same start point. Materials have not been adapted or differentiated by the teacher in advance.

Now nobody would argue that as the teacher you are responsible for what happens in your lessons, that’s the breadth and depth of content, the management of the space and relationships and the musical progress that the students make. It’s not OK to go and have a cup of tea while the students climb the walls in a practice room and it’s not about watching them struggle and fail.

But there is a balance to be found because as we start to narrow down the choices as our instincts as teachers kick in, we risk losing the opportunity for the students to show what they can do and have help to follow the pathways that they choose for themselves that is so intrinsic in informal learning.

It’s a really hard balance to find. Our instincts as teachers are really strong and there are huge pressures on teachers now to evidence everything, to make sure students make the required progress in visible and measurable ways, to fit into the mould of other subjects that are different to ours. It’s really really hard to step back sometimes and to hand that trust over to our students. The stakes are high.

So in the same way that the term holistic learning could be applied to differentiation, could we also apply this principle to some of the other aspects of Musical Futures that have already been discussed in this course. If it’s not about what we do, rather when and how we do it, in the case of differentiation thats differentiating after they have all started the task from the same start point, what then is the implication for choice of repertoire and choice of friendship groups.

We often hear of teachers offering a choice of pieces to play from a preselected list. Why not offer the preselected list as an option after they have started with a free choice. We hear about teachers getting involved for good reason in the choices about who to work with – why not save those interventions for after students have had a go at choosing their own groups. We know that teachers like to have chord sheets or guidance sheets with step by step suggestions for how to tackle the task available, why not offer those once students have started rather than before. As David Price, original project lead for Musical Futures puts it, “Just in time rather than just in case”.

And also perhaps we should consider whether we are preparing students well enough for informal learning. This diagram (tools, model, use) was designed to show how Musical Futures has expanded across the years to provide opportunities for students to develop some skills or tools (column 1) then undertake whole class activities that model how to use them (column 2) before they are sent off to have a go on their own. This can happen across a project that takes weeks or within one lesson, but it doesn’t rely on worksheets or notation or a quick listen to a piece of music as the star point, rather a shared experience that students are then able to consolidate and build on in groups before contributing again as a whole class if necessary.

Whilst many aspects of the new resource-led Musical Units such as Just Play could be described as more formal in approach, and in contrast to the 5 principles of informal learning, they do accommodate some of the similarities that Lucy acknowledges exist between formal and informal learning.

• Feel – we don’t let issues of technique get in the way of playing in the first instance

• We play music we like with our friends

• It’s OK for music to be fun

The following is a description that I like to use to describe how Musical Futures can sit alongside all kinds of different approaches and ideas as a means to engage students in classroom music before it can lead onto other and different things,

Music starts from a practical, hands on, music making session from which you can then build on the student motivation and enthusiasm for the subject and deliver really important understanding, skills, knowledge and hopefully a lifelong love of music.

Leading Informal learning as a teacher takes practice. It is never the same, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Its greatest strength – handing over the choices to students can also be its greatest challenge – how to support them once they have made those choices. But what it does do is to build trust. It makes us question ourselves as teachers and as musicians and challenges us to find solutions in collaboration with our students.

But it’s well worth giving it a go. You can learn so much about how you teach and how your students learn. Huge thanks to Steve Jackman and Musical Futures International for organising and running #MFLearn19 to give us this chance to be part of a global community of music educators reflecting on informal learning 15 years on from the original pilots.

The Full week 4 #MFLearn19 page can be found HERE

I am from the UK and it is often pointed out to me by Australian colleagues that this means I talk too fast, too quietly and using too many words. So making a video presentation for the Musical Futures International online course, #MFLearn19 was definitely outside my comfort zone.

I have decided to summarise what I talked about in a series of blog posts to contribute to the #MFLearn19 output that is coming in from teachers across the world as a result of this course that has been expertly created, curated and led by Steve Jackman.

It has been great through this course to revisit some of the core MF pedagogy through #MFLearn19 and also to learn more broadly around the 5 principles of informal learning how they translate into practice and link out into wider research.

It’s not just in the presenter videos where this has been happening. The weekly chats in the Musical Futures Chat Facebook group led by the fabulous Kellee Green, MFI Champion from Queensland Australia, but also through the Music Your Way network of teachers in Canada and from teachers posting on Twitter. These groups are digging deeper into the questions posed by the MF Learn presenters and it is great to get more insights into how MF is used and adapted, as it always has been by teachers 15 years since the original pilots of informal learning first took place. The beauty of it being free and open access is that anyone can take part and the more people that engage with the topics and talk about them, the more buzzy and exciting it will be

I am going to write my blog in 3 parts to try to sum up some of what I discussed in my video as presenter of #MFLearn19, week 4 on the topic of haphazard and holistic learning.

I want to start part 1 with a little Musical Futures history and context and where the term ‘haphazard learning’ first originated, before I get into the topic of holistic learning and differentiation in part 2 and then finish with some questions and a round up of what people have been saying in their blogs and discussions about the topic in part 3.

I know we have people taking this course who are new to Musical Futures and might not have been aware of its origins and the research from which it has grown. And for those of us that have been around for a few years now, it never hurts to revisit our roots now and then.

They put forward a proposal to test on a larger scale some pilot work that Lucy had already been doing some early testing with in some schools in London. The basis of the Herts pilot was to take the approaches that Lucy had identified and researched previously in her book ‘How Popular Musicians Learn’ and explore what would happen if these were applied in the formal music education setting of the school classroom. Lucy’s findings were published in this book, Music, Informal Learning and the School – a new classroom pedagogy and Lucy later went on to look at how a similar approach might work in an instrumental learning situation, with her findings later published in her book Hear, Listen, Play!: How to Free Your Students’ Aural, Improvisation, and Performance Skills.

Back at the start, we were asked to give one class of Y9 students per week to the pilot and given some simple instructions as teachers. We were to hand over the choices about what, how, when and with whom the students would learn and as teachers told to step back, observe, empathise with goals students set for themselves and find ways to support them to achieve these.

Lucy and the research officer and project manager for the pilot, Abigail D’Amore were regular visitors to those lessons, supporting the work, helping us all to reflect on what we had observed. They also built a positive rapport with what was in my case a really challenging year 9 class in a school who had previously had music on a half termly carousel, but for the purposes of this project were the only Y9 in the school who were allowed to have music for an hour a week for the whole year!

As the pilot unfolded, I realised that this approach couldn’t have been further from the way that I learned music myself. I already knew when got my first job in a one-person music department in a very challenging school that they didn’t really want to learn music the way I had been trained through my own music education and on my teaching placements to teach it.

I found I had no experience either musically or through my training as a teacher to know how best to engage these kids with music in school. The opportunity that the Musical Futures Informal Learning pilot gave me to reflect on what was happening week by week, then subsequently as I tried to roll out the approach with other classes eventually became a 10 year mission to relearn how to learn and teach music and one which continues today.

Based on her research into how popular musicians learn, Lucy shaped her findings into 5 characteristics of informal popular music learning practices into 5 principles which were then tested in the classroom. She summarises a longer description of Principle 4 as “engaging in personal often haphazard learning without structured guidance”

In year 2 of the original pathfinder, we entered a roll-out phase and in those early days we latched onto the phrase ‘haphazard learning’ and used it in our presentations to other teachers.

Based on what we had seen in the classroom we related this to our observations that learning was happening in peaks and troughs, as you would expect really, as opposed to the ideal of students steadily getting better and better at something in a straight ascending line. Something we are expected to aspire to in these days of targets and flight paths and predictions…

We all experienced the week 3 or 4  ‘dip’ with informal learning where suddenly it all seemed like a terrible idea as groups struggled, argued, went backwards in terms of progress. The classroom was chaos, everything was haphazard and it was tempting to stop the whole thing and just give up. But we learned that if we just gave it another week then suddenly groups started to get back on track and things changed for the better.

So when describing this dip, we asked teachers to think about strategies for how they might support students working in groups through the low points of this haphazard learning whilst still maintaining that general ownership of the learning that we had found so motivated and engaged them. We talked about supporting individuals, rather than applying one size fits all help, and how the suggestions for the role of the teacher that had been laid out in the pilots, to watch, step back, empathise, model could result in truly personalised learning experiences in a music classroom and supporting students through to an end point where the journey was more important than the outcome.

It was also easy to describe the noise and chaos of a typical Musical Futures lesson as haphazard, something that you might find in the informal world-look they are all learning at their own pace and finding their own way through! Or as my Musical Futures International colleague Ken Owen often says at workshops “have you ever played in a band?”

So if you attended an early Musical Futures training event or presentation, that’s why you might have seen ‘haphazard learning’ appearing on the slide as principal 4 of the 5 principles of informal learning.

To find out how the focus changed from haphazard to holistic learning in how we now present the 5 principles of informal learning, you will have to check out part 2 of this blog coming soon! Meanwhile, how might you describe Musical Futures lessons in your classroom? What does ‘Haphazard Learning’ look like and where do you look for the really valuable musical learning that takes place when students are given the freedom and choice to work this way in the classroom?