Targets for Sixth Form Teaching in Music 1.To improve the tracking of progress of Sixth Form Students. 2.To support students in the transition from GCSE to AS. 3.To improve the organisation of students and promote independence

To improve the tracking of progress of Sixth Form Students. Issues: Different elements of the course taught by different staff. Only three learning cycles per year. Student work kept in many places and takes many forms. Poor student organisation Solutions Centralised shared mark book that enables monitoring and intervention to take place. Different marking techniques for different work. Red, amber, green method for knowledge and skills-based short homework tasks. This is very visual and students can quickly see where the underachievement and knowledge gaps are. This was also shared at parents evening. All homework logged through Edmodo to provide detailed record keeping across all staff. These marks are transferred to Google Drive. More stringent missed deadline policy. C6 have been issued for homework and parents made aware of missed deadlines.

To support students in the transition from GCSE to AS. Issues Massive jump from GCSE to AS level Some students haven’t studied GCSE Music Music Tech is a ‘new’ subject Solutions Homework set up on Edmodo to facilitate DIRT. Reinforced at Parents Evening. Lesson time has been given to DIRT to ensure that it is happening and to get students used to looking at and acting on feedback. Marking becomes more of a discussion that needs a student response rather than an open and shut process. Drip feeding in ideas at AS Music Tech and not overloading the students. This helps build deeper understanding. Adopt a more ‘little and often’ approach to homework at first to build up to extended coursework projects. Using homework to check understanding and build a bank of revision notes so as homework is seen as important. Using some old GCSE materials as background to AS Music to build confidence in first weeks. This has worked well with AS Music where the analysis of symphonies is completely new.

To improve the organisation of students and promote independence Issues Different content taught by different staff. Lots of practical work. Content lends itself to ‘lecture’ style teaching. What happens after the lesson varies immensely from student to student. Although final coursework deadlines are stuck to, short term deadlines are missed. Solutions A2 Music Tech coursework checked more regularly with lessons set aside for reflection and setting targets for DIRT AS Music Tech coursework broken down into smaller chunks so as students are forced to make more progress quickly. This facilitates DIRT rather than simply given a ‘to do’ list. AS Music Tech work is kept electronically so there is always a back up copy. AS/A2 Music students given books for notes to help with organisation as this is less likely to be lost than having pieces of paper in folders. Going forward What happens from student to student still varies immensly. Some are being more organised and making use of DIRT. Others are less so. More consistency still needed. Students must take some responsibility for this.