Divided We Fall - Arranging children into groups

There are several ways of dividing a class of children into smaller groups. It is fun, but time consuming, to have them arrange themselves in alphabetical or age order. If you believe in star signs, and opt for the age thing, you may wish to mix them up a bit afterwards to avoid having all the leading Leos in one group and the recalcitrant Capricorns in another.

My own favourite, because wherever possible I begin work in a circle, is to give each child a number. If I want five groups, the person on my left is number 1, next to them is number 2 and so on round. The child next to number 5 is number 1 again. Once numbered, all the ones gather together in their group, as do the twos, threes and so on. I like this because it's fast, transparently arbitrary, breaks up subversive cliques and mixes boys with girls.

The other day I found myself working with eleven Year 5 children (aged 9/10). It was my first time in the school and we had 45 minutes to produce some music for a performance based on Creation myths. They nearly all had formal instrumental lessons and most were obviously very bright. Being young enough to 'play' they took to improvising very well. I would give each sub-group a title and they would play a convincing 'Sprinkling Stars' or 'Building a Mountain'.

Twice I split them into groups, using the method described above. The third time, when we chose groups for the imminent performance, they asked if they could choose their own groups. I was dubious about this but they had worked very well so, after a brief discussion about the potential pitfalls, I let them get on with it. This gave me a strong group of three and an able and reasonably cohesive group of four. It also left four less able and apparently low status children who were not a group. None of the others wanted to work with them and they didn't especially want to work with each other. Fortunately this was a selective school (albeit on religious grounds) in a well-to-do area and the 'less able' students would be shining beacons in many other establishments. The four remaining children accepted the result of the process to which they had agreed and coalesced into a functioning group. Each group produced wonderful music in the final showing to their peers and younger children, much to my relief.

Most of the schools I work in tend to be in less favoured areas and the proportion of socially able, high achieving children is lower. I am not in a hurry to repeat the 'sort yourself into groups' experiment in any of them. The fact is that able children, and I mean able both academically and socially, want to work with each other. They are usually capable of cooperating in ways less able children simply can't. But they are also capable of leading and inspiring the less able and can derive benefit from this. If there is a small amount of dumbing down from their perspective it is greatly outweighed by the overall rise in quality. And ultimately, in music at least, the session has to work for the whole class for it to work at all.

Damage limitation

Four breakages in one session last week and none in any others. Coincidence? The children were not unruly and in each case the damage could be put down to 'fair wear and tear'.

This session was different in that, because the materials had not arrived for the instrument-making session I had intended, I implemented a Plan B. The session was one that is familiar to music teachers across the land. In fact I'd walked in on one earlier in the week. Every child held some kind of percussion instrument and was ostensibly composing a piece of music. The teacher was sitting at a desk in the corner, beyond numb. It was impossible to hear what any of the groups (each of three or four children) was playing and I doubt the participants had any real sense of what they had created until they premiered it for the rest of the class at the end of the lesson.

The casualties in my session were an mbira (key detached), a dulcimer (broken string), a stick tambourine (jingles fell off) and my beloved kokiriko, pictured (the string snapped). The first three are easily mended but the kokiriko was assembled by the hands of someone who knew their craft. Restringing it will be a project in itself.

So why the damage? It's no coincidence that when teenagers form bands they usually do it in groups of three or four and don't practise in the same room as all the other bands. When you can't hear the instrument you are playing it's natural to play it a bit louder. If you still can't hear it you play it louder still.

The fact is that good instruments, of the kind that inspire children, are often delicate and expensive and need close supervision. You need instruments built like tanks for the kind of session described above.

So why do we teach music in this way? If you learn an instrument you are usually taught one-to-one or occasionally in small groups. It is accepted that you need to hear what you are doing. There are lots of useful things we could teach children but choose not to either because we lack the facilities (astronomy, skiing, bricklaying) or because we simply choose not to (typing, cycle maintenance). So why do we persevere with classroom music when we lack the space and staff to make it worthwhile? It has reputation amongst children as being a 'doss' subject. Unfortunate, perhaps, but fully deserved under the circumstances.

My childhood experience of classroom music involved a genial old bloke chatting to us about everything under the sun, including, but only occasionally and in passing, music. (I didn't really get what we were doing until I studied philosophy at university some years later.) There was a piano in the room but he never played it, perhaps because he didn't think we would appreciate it or perhaps because he knew better than to turn his back on us. Or maybe he couldn't bear the fact that it remained untuned from one year to the next. I wonder what he would have made of the National Curriculum? It's contents may be workable in a school with excellent facilities and well-disciplined, bright and motivated children. In many places even trying to implement it smacks of appeasement and I'm sure the old chap would have had none of it.