Strategies to Facilitate Student Composing

Abstract

In this ethnographic study of classroom music programs, 43 secondary schools in England and Australia were visited and 380 music lessons involving more than 50 classroom music teachers were observed. Though the focus was on junior secondary classrooms, the findings have relevance across a wider age range. In this article, aspects of this project are presented, the first being the identification of the three underlying teaching perspectives, music as knowledge, music as accomplishment and music as an empowering agent and the affirmation that the teaching of music is most effective when it is approached from a music as an empowering agent perspective. The three syllabus structures used by teachers who projected this focus are briefly outlined, and 16 strategies to facilitate student composing identified during the reflective period that followed the observation of 131 lessons are presented.