www.musicalfutures.org.

uk

12 Top Tips for ITT Students and Newly

Qualified Teachers
It is not recommended that you take on the complete Musical Futures approaches straight away,
unless you are particularly confident and at ease with the MF style of teaching and learning.
There are several things to try first! These are still possible, even if your school doesnt run
Musical Futures.
1. Use your PGCE year to experiment and develop your own teacher personality. This is the

year to do it while there is support in place, and help to clear up any potential chaos that may
result!
2. Think about starting with some of the non formal, whole class strategies and ideas. This will
help to establish your teaching personality and create a safe learning environment
3. Focus in particular on developing strategies and skills that enable you to lead and support
whole class practical and musical activities; such as whole class rhythmic or vocal
improvisation.
4. These can be short and relatively simple tasks to begin with. Build up the complexity and
length of these task as you gain confidence and gradually develop the variety of skills needed
and as your pupils start to gain in confidence and understanding of the musical futures
approach
5. Talk Musical Futures over with your mentor and ensure that you have their full support.
Establish areas of the curriculum that already utilise musical futures pedagogy and start with
those. These may not be labelled as musical futures but may be operating as such.
6. Trial aspects of Musical Futures with one or two of your best classes to experiment with
what works and what doesnt
7. Intersperse aspects of Musical Futures with the tried and tested approaches already in place
at your placement school. Drip feed aspects of the musical futures approach into what you are
already doing in your lessons. You could do this via starter activities and when using pupils to
demonstrate and model tasks(see workshopping ideas)
8. You could also practise the following aspects of informal work through the development of
small group tasks based around the departments current schemes of work: stand back,
observe, diagnose, guide, model, demonstrate
9. Access support and advice from the Musical Futures website (www.musicalfutures.org.uk),
and by attending training/networking sessions
10. Try and set some time aside for reflection as soon after the lesson as possible. You could
initially use the reflection prompts provided to scaffold your reflection
11. You are a skilled musician so dont be afraid to use your musical skills and knowledge when
developing ideas and resources already in place or creating your own.
12. Mould, develop and apply the Musical Futures ideas to suit your teaching style, your
school, facilities, and most importantly your students