At the moment I’m busy re-working some of my best high school units of work for the new NSW 7-10 Music syllabus (2024). While it isn’t due to be implemented for another year, the Department of Education as announced that teachers can start teaching it from this year if they wish, so here at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music we are making a quick shift to really focusing on the new syllabus in our preservice music teacher training, rather than teaching both the old and new syllabi as we did last year.
In this earlier blog post, I shared my planning sheets, updated for the new syllabus. I designed these with Ass Prof Michael Webb and Dr Brad Fuller over the last decade to encourage our students to teach music musically (thank you Keith Swanwick, but also everyone else who has written about that). The way the sheet is set out, with three equal spaces for thinking about performing, composing, and listening activities, encourages teachers to remember that these three experiences (now “Focus Areas”) should be equal and integrated (it’s easy to do that on the page by drawing lines between ideas!).
The other big implication of the planner is that it encourages teachers to think about musical experiences first, rather than beginning with things like concepts of music (now elements) or curriculum outcomes, which can lead to much less musical, more dry, dull, lessons (I remember my daughter starting Year 7 with a term on learning music terminology for The Concepts of Music – this is a girl who had just finished a season with Opera Australia performing in the children’s chorus for Turandot – and being genuinely shocked at how awful learning in music could be when it’s not done properly).
Of course, we teachers do still need to make sure that however awesome our music activities are, that we’re meeting the syllabus requirements, though! And that’s where the second sheet comes in – it allows us to “check off” the (now 57 – yuck!) content points that are required to be taught. Here is the new Stage 5 planner with those content points on the back:
I’m now working on those units of work, beginning with Stage 4, and I’m using the numbering of those content points to make it easier to notate how and where they’re being taught in my units. I’m going to publish those here in the coming two weeks as I teach them in our degree. I hope they’re really useful for NSW teachers, whether that’s in planning, or of course if you decide to teach them (modified by all means!).
Finally, you may notice that the second page now also includes a space to write about the repertoire you’re using, to account for the 5 new repertoire requirements. I’ve also updated the Stage 4 planner to include this:
