The Noise IS the Learning

The Noise IS the Learning

If your music classroom sounds like five bands rehearsing at once, halfway through term, good. That's the sound of students teaching themselves to play.

Someone puts their head round the door. A deputy head. A visitor on a tour. The teacher next door with a Year 9 maths test. They hear a drum kit, three guitars, a keyboard where someone has just found the synth bass, and a singer shouting over all of it. They look worried.

They shouldn't be. That noise is five groups solving five different problems at the same time.

Nobody is waiting for a turn. Everybody is working.

Where the noise comes from

Professor Lucy Green asked a simple question: how do popular musicians learn? The answer shaped the informal learning pedagogy at the heart of Musical Futures. Students pick music they love. They copy it by ear from recordings. They work it out with friends, in whatever order the song demands. Hardly any of that happens in silence.

When researchers at the UCL Institute of Education asked 671 students in seven schools what learning this way felt like, here's what they said.

Hallam, Creech and McQueen, UCL Institute of Education. 671 students, seven schools.

The same students were honest about the hard bits too. Some groups fell out. Nearly a third wanted more help from the teacher when they got stuck. That matters, because it tells us what guidance and support students need, both through the noise in the classroom and beyond it.

Noise needs a coach

Ofsted's 2023 music report found plenty of secondary pupils playing a variety of instruments, but often picking up only “shallow” skills along the way. Its answer was that teachers should offer feedback that improves “technique and expressive quality” while pupils are making music.

So keep the volume up, but change what you do within it.

Move between groups like a coach. Help each band find its one fix and its one keeper, then let them get on with it.

Teachers are already doing it

At St Joseph's Catholic College in Aberdeen, NSW, most students arrive with no formal music training. Claire Dent and her colleagues get them playing first and fill in everything else after.

Our own community keeps telling us the same thing. The most clicked link in our newsletters over the past six months wasn't a framework or a theory pack. It was a one-page chart of common chords. Teachers and students want the fastest route from opening the instrument cupboard to playing in a band.

Half a term in

In the UK and international schools, half term is a good moment to ask one question. In your last lesson, how many minutes were students actually playing?

In Australia and New Zealand, Term 4 is when next year gets planned. It's a great time to build the playing in from week one, rather than saving it for the end-of-unit performance.

Try this next lesson

A quiet classroom looks tidy. A noisy one is where students find out that they can play.