Mystery Activities to Develop Personal Learning and Thinking Skills and Functional Skills

(from p. 43, Teaching Secondary Music by Jayne Price and Jonathan Savage)

Year 8 students are at the start of a unit on programme music. The students have listened to, discussed and tried playing some extracts from Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. The teacher now wants them to create their own musical ideas for a composition about the sea.

At the start of the lesson the teacher displays a picture of a boat leaving a harbor in calm waters. He asks the students to discuss the musical effect they would want to create to represent the picture and then experiment with different musical ideas. After ten minutes he ‘conducts’ the groups by bringing them in an fading them out until the class has heard a section of ideas from each group. They then briefly discuss the atmosphere that has been created and similarities and differences in the way the task was approached.

At this point he brings up three newspaper headlines: ‘Severe store warning – sailors advised to stay at home’, ‘Beautiful summer’s day ahead. Record crowds expected’ and ’Boatman names as a hero after saving boy from cliff fall’. He gives the students ten minutes to choose a headline, modify their initial ideas to reflect the new information and compose some ideas for an ending. After ten minutes each group performs and the class is asked to guess which headline they chose and why. Each performing group is then asked to explain what they modified and why, as well as justifying their musical decisions.

This lesson is developing students’ ability to:

  • Process and evaluate information in order to take well-reasoned decisions (independent enquirer);
  • Make changes and improvements to their own work based on understanding the nature of the task (reflective learner);
  • Cope with unexpected changes (self-manager);
  • Work effectively within a group to come to collective decisions (team worker);
  • Come up with musical solutions to new situations (creative thinker);
  • Explaining and justifying their choices (English functional skills).