I published these a few weeks ago, and then had an update to my website, and the post was deleted – sorry about that! Here I’m providing the Unit of Work planner that I developed to help our pre-service music teachers at the Sydney Conservatorium plan creative and musical units of work for Stage 4 (Year 7 & 8) classes. Following feedback from my colleague Brad Fuller, these were updated a couple of years ago, and then with the release of the new NSW Music 7-10 syllabus, I’ve created a new one for mapping to the new (56!) content points.
The aim here is to get teachers to think about creative contexts for teaching – as I wrote on the first page, “500 years of bass lines” is better than “Music with ground bass” which is still better than something as plain as “the Baroque period”, because it encourages transcultural, pluralist, student-relevant, and creative thinking.
We then use the learning experiences (in the new syllabus, those have been renamed “Focus Areas”) to brainstorm musical activities around that context, and scribble arrows between them to show how they’re all linked (since, as the syllabus reminds us, learning in music occurs best when these experiences are integrated). The models I provide for the students include my Cryptography unit (show here), and my Flipping Samples unit.
The sheets encourage this creative work first, and only when the activities are planned, does the second half/page come into use, which is where we tick off outcomes (current syllabus) or content points (new syllabus). I’ve had a go at filling in the new one, so I’ll include that example too. But the main thing here is we don’t plan according to syllabus outcomes, we plan to teach engaging and enactive music. Then, we go back, and always find that we’ve met lots of outcomes along the way. While there are many more in the new syllabus, the process doesn’t change. Not only do we not plan to the syllabus, we actually end up teaching beyond the syllabus!
So if you’ve been worried about taking your old units and updating them for the new syllabus, feel free to use these planning sheets to help you along.
