As teachers, stepping back from the ‘action’ can feel counterintuitive. We invest ourselves in the detail and feel this is our place. However, in working in this way we can forgo our understanding of the ’bigger picture’ – as the well-known idiom goes, we ‘can’t see the woods for the trees’. When we work with the detail we can easily compartmentalise learning, remove it from a meaningful context, and become overly focused on the management and delivery of analytical ‘chunks’ of information about music or isolated skills.

This is not to say working in this way isn’t necessary or important, but sometimes we just need to ‘step back’, and I suggest we need to do it more often.

I clearly recall a conversation now several years old between five Year 7 students that served to inform me of the importance of stepping back. These students were working on an arrangement that combined the African spiritual, Take Time in Life, and the traditional Balinese Ketjak chorus. Both pieces were explored in class as part of our ‘Music Around the World’ unit, and this group of students sought the challenge of combining these works as a new ‘whole’. They creatively and imaginatively fused and layered them together using their voices and tuned and untuned percussion instruments that mirrored the respective genres.

As I entered the room the five students were engaged in deep and focused conversation. Before I interrupted, I stopped and listened. Many things emerged – musical and non-musical. They were presenting their musical thoughts, negotiating and justifying their musical decisions. Higher-order thinking and cognitions were in action as the students worked in this way; they were posing and defending the musical strategies they felt the group should employ. Sound was preferenced over symbols; intuition ruled the moment, though this was taken up into analytical forms as they progressed. There was plenty of trial and error, plenty of healthy disagreement, plenty of mistakes and ‘wrong-turns’… and within this was rich musical learning. The students moved closely to the ways they felt ’real’ musicians might work in such a context. I think we often try to hide this messy process.

Two things stuck out for me: the authenticity of the way in which they worked with music, and that their musical thinking became visible.

So engrossed were the students that I intended to leave the room before they noticed, though I was sprung! They excitedly showed me the product of their thinking, negotiating, acting and reflecting. It featured some good ideas but also some conflicting ones… they went back to the drawing board to refine. The conversation started again; intentions were acted out musically. Their musical thinking was again visible. I let them be.

In stepping back I saw more – my influence was removed and this allowed for more genuine and authentic musical action (in this instance). The students explored more than I could have planned for. In their actions was a solid basis for developing fluency with the materials of music. The students’ learning followed a path of exploration, testing and re-testing, and experimentation with the language of music.

Now, I step in to listen to, inform, and guide musical decisions if and when necessary. I present the whole, we deconstruct the parts, and I let the students reconstruct them in ways that make them personally meaningful. In the parts we deal with the details; if the details are dealt with meaningfully, then a whole can be better reconstructed and understood. I was (and sometimes still am) afraid of doing this. It ultimately involves putting trust into students’ own processes and thinking styles, and it requires very careful planning to ensure that the ‘right things’ (and hopefully some other unintended but valuable musical ‘things’ too) are discovered.

The conditions that need to set for this to occur are challenging, however, but achievable. Perhaps the best approach I have found is through the provision of a ‘musical problem’ that the students need to ‘fix’. The students need to ‘buy in’ – the learning has to be valued and purposeful. My ideas and practices continue to consider and reflect upon this, and John Finney has offered much to my practice here (see https://jfin107.wordpress.com/2016/07/15/music-educations-existential-strand/ among other insightful and though-provoking reads on the same blog).[i]

Despite some counterintuitive feelings, when I stepped out of the picture I saw and heard more. I placed trust in my students, considered activities and provocations that would elicit the skills, content and processes that I intended the lesson to develop, and saw (in most) musical thinking become visible. In doing this, I perhaps learnt more than the students – at least on how to teach!

[i] I highly recommend John Finney’s blog Music Education Now – https://jfin107.wordpress.com. It contains many great entries and provokes in me new thinking.