How to Set Music Homework Without Creating More Marking
By a music teacher who has quite enough marking already, thank you very much.
I've always had a slightly complicated relationship with music homework. I absolutely believe students should be doing it, and there's no doubt that a little regular practice outside the classroom can make a huge difference, particularly with things like notation, key signatures, intervals and aural skills.
The problem, of course, is that someone has to mark it.
As a music teacher, I'm sure I'm not alone in finding that the school day is already fairly full. Between teaching, rehearsals, concerts, organizing ensembles and trying to work out where all the music stands have disappeared to, the thought of collecting another 90 pieces of homework isn't particularly appealing. Especially when half of them haven't put their names on.
So, over the last few months, I've been trying to find a better way of doing things.
The problem with traditional music homework
Music is a slightly unusual subject when it comes to homework. In Maths, you can set 20 questions. In English, you can ask for a paragraph. In History, there's always something to research. But in music, some of the things we really want students to improve at don't lend themselves particularly well to traditional written homework.
Take interval recognition, for example. You don't get much better at recognising a perfect fifth by writing a paragraph about one. You need to hear lots of them, make a few mistakes, and gradually become more confident at identifying what you're hearing.
The same applies to rhythm, melodic dictation, key signatures, chords and plenty of other musical skills. They all benefit from regular, repeated practice, ideally with immediate feedback so students know whether they're getting things right.
Of course, we can do all of this in lessons, but with so much else to fit into the curriculum, wouldn't it be useful if students could practice these things independently at home?
Preferably without us having to mark every single answer afterwards.
What I actually wanted
I started thinking about what my ideal music homework system might look like, and the answer was actually fairly simple.
I wanted to be able to set something in about 30 seconds, have students complete a short musical activity at home, and then receive a result that I could quickly check.
I didn't want to collect books, download endless attachments or spend Sunday evening marking whether someone had correctly identified B flat. I also didn't particularly want students to have to create another account, remember another password or enter lots of personal information just to complete ten minutes of music homework.
Most importantly, though, I wanted the activities to be genuinely useful. Something that would help students become better musicians, rather than simply keeping them occupied for a few minutes so that I could tick the homework box.
A bit of regular, focused musical practice. Nothing particularly revolutionary, but something I thought could make a real difference.
So I ended up building something
This actually started as a bit of fun. I began putting together a few small online music exercises for my own students, initially things like key signatures and melodic dictation. Then I added a few more, followed by some rhythm exercises, chord recognition, cadences and various other activities.
Before long, what had started as a handful of little exercises had somehow turned into MusicClassLab, a website full of free music activities for Middle School, High School and Advanced High School students.
I even gave it a proper name and made it look like a real website, partly in the hope that my students might take it a bit more seriously!
As I developed it, one of the things I was particularly keen to get right was the homework system. There are plenty of excellent online music resources already available, but I wanted something that would fit easily into the way I actually teach, without creating additional administration.
How the homework system works
I've tried to keep the whole process as straightforward as possible.
First, you choose an activity. That might be a note-reading exercise for Grade 6, a key signature challenge for Grade 7, melodic dictation for High School or cadence recognition for Advanced High School. You can then select the relevant settings, such as difficulty and number of questions, depending on the activity, and generate a homework link.
That link can be shared through whatever homework platform your school uses, whether that's Teams, Google Classroom, Satchel One or something else entirely.
Students click the link, complete the activity and receive a score at the end. They don't need to create an account or enter their email address, and once they've finished, they simply return their score and unique result code.
You can then check the code on the website to verify their result.
And that's pretty much it. No collecting worksheets, no marking individual questions and, hopefully, no chasing students who insist they definitely handed their homework in last Tuesday.
What I particularly like is that students can repeat the activities as often as they need to. If they struggle with something the first time, they can have another go, rather than completing one worksheet and never looking at the topic again.
But is it actually useful homework?
I think this is probably the most important question, because it's very easy to create online activities that students enjoy doing but which don't necessarily help them learn very much.
My feeling is that music homework works particularly well when it's short, focused and repeated regularly. Ten minutes of identifying intervals, for example, is probably more useful than spending 45 minutes producing a beautifully decorated poster about them.
Sorry, poster enthusiasts.
With many musical skills, confidence comes through repetition. Students need to recognize patterns, develop their listening and become quicker at applying their knowledge. If they can do this independently, with immediate feedback, then they're hopefully arriving at our lessons a little more confident than they were the week before.
And that means we can spend more of our lesson time doing the things that really benefit from having a music teacher in the room.
Like actually making music.
What about students who struggle?
One of the things I've found particularly useful about this approach is that students can work at their own pace.
If someone gets 4 out of 10 on a key signature exercise, they can try again. They can make mistakes, receive feedback and gradually improve without feeling that the whole class is watching them struggle.
Of course, online exercises aren't going to replace good teaching. If a student fundamentally doesn't understand how key signatures work, they're still going to need someone to explain it properly. And a score alone doesn't necessarily tell us why a student is finding something difficult.
But it does give them an opportunity to practice independently, while giving us a quick indication of who might need some additional support.
There's also something quite satisfying about seeing a student who initially struggled with an exercise come back having improved their score. It's a small thing, perhaps, but those little improvements can add up over time.
Not all homework needs to be marked by us
I think this is really the point I've come to appreciate.
I'm certainly not suggesting we stop setting creative homework. Composition, performance practice, listening, research and extended written work are all important, and some of the best work students produce is thoughtful, creative and completely impossible to assess with a ten-question online quiz.
Those are exactly the sorts of things where our feedback as music teachers is particularly valuable.
But I do think there's a difference between homework designed to develop a skill through repetition and homework that genuinely needs detailed teacher feedback.
If a computer can tell a student whether they've correctly identified a diminished seventh chord, I'm perfectly happy to let it do so. That leaves me more time to listen to compositions, give meaningful feedback on performances and help students develop their musical ideas.
Or, occasionally, have lunch.
Give it a go
I've made MusicClassLab completely free, partly because I originally built it for my own students, but also because I know only too well what school budgets are like. There are no subscriptions, no student accounts to set up and no need for students to enter personal details.
It's still very much something I'm developing, and I'm regularly adding new activities and improving the existing ones. I'm particularly interested in making tools that are genuinely useful in the classroom, rather than simply adding features for the sake of it.
If you're a music teacher, you're very welcome to have a look and use it with your own students. And if something doesn't work quite as it should, or there's an activity you'd really like to see, please do let me know. Suggestions from other teachers are always appreciated, particularly when they're things that might save us all a bit of time.
You can find it at www.musicclasslab.co.uk or www.musicclasslab.com if you're across the Atlantic.
Hopefully, it'll make setting music homework a little easier, give students some useful extra practice and, most importantly, save you a bit of marking.
Because there's always another concert to organize, another rehearsal to run, or another pile of music to sort out.
And I still haven't found those music stands.