Find Your Voice: approaches to increase student engagement and teacher confidence with singing in the classroom
In Musical Futures lessons students aren’t afraid to try out instruments, explore, make mistakes, and create from the start of the lesson. However, using their voices can be a different story – singing in secondary/high school is not always cool, can be associated with primary school music, and alongside adolescence and self-confidence issues, vocal work is often the domain of the more confident students – others fear the exposure it brings. And that's before you consider the teachers, many of whom lack confidence and experience with leading vocal work themselves!
Find Your Voice was developed in response to a UK report published in 2012 which highlighted 2 key areas for development in UK schools, singing and use of technology for music learning and teaching.
Find Your Voice builds on these two areas – vocal work and mobile technology – which has the following aims:
Find Your Voice was developed in response to a UK report published in 2012 which highlighted 2 key areas for development in UK schools, singing and use of technology for music learning and teaching.
Find Your Voice builds on these two areas – vocal work and mobile technology – which has the following aims:
- To help students and teachers to feel confident about using their voices to create and explore music
- To engage all students with singing in the classroom setting
- To break down barriers with using mobile technologies in the music classroom, by drawing on the interest and expertise of students, and showing the creative potential for using mobile phones / tablets
- To enable students to create music using methods (vocalising and mobile technology) that are immediately accessible to them and are fully inclusive
- To build teacher confidence with facilitating vocal work and using mobile technology, and for teachers to embed the ideas across their music departments
About the approach
EXPLORE: students explore the potential of their voices and the technology they carry with them through a variety of activities integrating performing, composing, listening and improvising
RECREATE: students recreate music they have explored vocally using mobile technology and learn to break down and rebuild songs of their choice using their voices
CREATE: students create their own music, bringing together everything they have learned about using their voices and mobile technology
SHARE: teachers test ideas, share and collaborate with our growing international network of music teachers
Links to Musical Futures core pedagogy
- Warm ups and ice breakers, plenty to choose from here!
- 4 chord mash-up project, best explored in a workshop to really dig into the potential of this task for teaching how music is constructed and developed.
RECREATE: students recreate music they have explored vocally using mobile technology and learn to break down and rebuild songs of their choice using their voices
- Using free apps that can be downloaded to devices, students recreate the 4-chord mash up using mobile technology. There's some problem solving to be done to make this work, but it's great fun!
- Teacher-led vocal session that breaks songs students know and recognise into parts for a whole-class singing session. You can find some songs and ideas on the UK YouTube channel, just have a look for "recreate a song vocally" and take your pick!
- Students pick their own songs, listen and have a go at recreating these vocally or by integrating mobile technology to support the process
CREATE: students create their own music, bringing together everything they have learned about using their voices and mobile technology
SHARE: teachers test ideas, share and collaborate with our growing international network of music teachers
Links to Musical Futures core pedagogy
- Focuses on aural learning
- Integrates listening, performing and improvising
- Starts with music that students are familiar with
- Encourages independent learning
Find Your Voice: The Pilot Year
The Find Your Voice approaches were piloted in 2 ways. Firstly a core group of pilot teachers from across the UK attended a training event and subsequently tried Find Your Voice in school. At the same time, all resources and guidance was made openly available to anyone, anywhere. Teachers were invited to join a open pilot which was co-ordinated via social media and over 200 teachers worldwide joined in.
Key outcomes from the open 'co- pilot', known as #MFPilot2013 was that through teachers sharing video from the classroom as it happened, the central team were able to respond with support as the work took place, rather than at the end of the process as more generally the outcome of a pilot.
The weekly Twitter chats that became the foundation of the co-pilot continued beyond the lifespan of the Find Your Voice pilot and widened to become what was later known as #mufuchat and covered topics of relevance to music teachers globally from assessment to building a culture of performing in school.
Key outcomes from the open 'co- pilot', known as #MFPilot2013 was that through teachers sharing video from the classroom as it happened, the central team were able to respond with support as the work took place, rather than at the end of the process as more generally the outcome of a pilot.
The weekly Twitter chats that became the foundation of the co-pilot continued beyond the lifespan of the Find Your Voice pilot and widened to become what was later known as #mufuchat and covered topics of relevance to music teachers globally from assessment to building a culture of performing in school.
An overview of the Find Your Voice pilot year
The development of Find Your Voice was supported by The Paul Hamlyn Foundation and The Sage Gateshead