Bearing down on workload for KS3 music teachers

For all 20 years of my teaching career I had plenty of KS3 hours on my timetable, a fairly unsurprising feature of music teaching, even for those who can bear meetings enough to move to SLT. The high volume of KS3 classes brings particular workload challenges to music teachers, and we've had these in mind at all points of building the Elemental platform. There are five KS3 areas where we've particularly focused on improving learning for students and reducing workload for teachers:

1. Explaining musical concepts mid-lesson
2. Assessment
3. Feedback
4. Homework
5. Cover

Explaining musical concepts mid-lesson

It is time consuming to find good examples of musical concepts, not every example of 6/8 is a good example of 6/8. We have the examples and have done the work to choose good ones.

You also need lots of examples to have any chance of generalising understanding to new instances of the concept. Every concept in Elemental is backed up by lots of examples in a range of styles.

The flow of the lesson is interrupted unless every track is open at the correct place and if you're using Spotify you can only have one track ready to go at the correct time mark. Our examples load instantly and immediately exemplify the chosen concept.

And to nail a concept you also need non-examples. Every Elemental quiz has non-examples chosen at the boundary of the concept: the trumpet is a good non-example for the trombone; the glockenspiel would be a bad one.

Assessment

If KS3 assessment is to have a complete bearing on KS4 then some of it needs to be listening or written. Summational, our assessment engine, builds, runs and marks assessments and you can use our content or your own.

The marking burden for a single KS3 assessment is huge. Summational marks the work for you, even if it's paper printouts, and the marking includes diagnostic feedback for teachers and students.

Creating an assessment that indicates potential KS4 attainment is time consuming. On Summational it takes a couple of minutes to make a 45-minute assessment containing 60 different clips. If a voiceover is needed, the platform will generate it for you.

Feedback

Feedback on conceptual understanding needs to be at the level of each concept to be useful. Our data shows understanding at the concept level for every element, chord, theory concept or aural skill.

It is hard to get data on precisely what each pupil does and doesn't understand. We record the answer to every question each pupil completes on the platform and present their success rate by overall element (e.g. metre) as well as by concept (e.g. 6/8).

Students need support to develop metacognition and act on it. Elemental quizzes end with feedback slides, including clips, to support student metacognition and help them choose the best next steps.

Homework

Music homework needs to involve listening to music, and the time spent on it should be focused on musical concepts not on finding time markings in tracks. Elemental homework draws from our huge bank of curated and commissioned clips, and it is almost entirely spent listening to clips that seamlessly load one after the other.

Sending pupils to YouTube for homework is like asking them to get their broccoli from inside a box of Haribo. All our music sits within our platform.

Creating and setting appropriate homework for every class each week is actually very time consuming as well as an attention drain on the teacher. Elemental's Scheduled Homework feature turns this into a once-a-term piece of admin.

Communicating homework to pupils and marking it is a considerable outlay of time; beyond a certain point it isn't worth it. Homework is, nevertheless, an opportunity to improve understanding. Elemental homework is self-marking, and Scheduled Homework posts directly to students in Teams or Google Classroom.

Finally, checking homework compliance, and sanctioning it, creates an irritating break in the flow of a lesson. Elemental sends teachers an email during the due lesson, colour-coded for compliance and pass rates. Checking compliance can be done in a glance.

Cover

It is obviously a time consuming pit of doom to make cover work that's new and useful. Summational assessments or Elemental lesson plans can be created in minutes and the content is already in the platform; you just choose the concepts.

It's hard to make sure cover work will last the whole lesson. Summational tells you the total length of the clips it will play.

Did the students do anything useful, and how can you find out? Summational marks computer and paper-based work, giving you feedback on student understanding.

You also need cover that respects the time of the colleague who has been lumped with it. Summational will generate an audio-only voiceover that lasts the length of the cover lesson. Your colleague can clear their inbox while playing the track.

And cover lessons are too often silent worksheets. Everything in the Elemental platform is based in sound.

As with everything in Elemental, these are all features I thought would improve my own teaching and workload. Many, many conversations with serving teachers later and here we are. We hope you find them all useful.

If you are new to Elemental and would like to trial the platform then you can sign up for a free trial on our homepage.