These materials arise from Becta's 'Using ICT effectively in subject teaching' funding strand and have been developed to support areas of the curriculum identified by teachers as being hard to teach.
 

Hard-to-teach curriculum area	Teacher feedback
1. World music	Some teachers find it hard to motivate pupils to embrace musical styles that they do not identify with as part of their chosen youth subculture. They are sometimes reluctant to be seen to be more open for fear of ridicule as 'uncool'.
2. Attentive listening	In a media-rich world, pupils are just not accustomed to listening with focus and undivided attention. It is hard to get them to listen attentively and to articulate with precision what they have heard.
3. Imaginative composing	Some teachers report that they are disappointed by the level of imagination and inventiveness shown by their KS3 students in composing activities. Scaffolding of tasks can ease the process but can also lead to convergence of outcomes.
4. Improvising	Some class teachers feel they were were trained as stave-slaves with no real attention given to improvising skills. They find it hard to teach improvising effectively when they can't really do it themselves.
5. Using vocabulary	Teachers do not really find it hard to explain and demonstrate most musical concepts. But their pupils are not then automatically able to apply appropriate vocabulary themselves in fluent and accurate sentences when appraising music, and this is the aspect that is considered hard to teach.
6. Teaching notation	Some teachers say they find it hard to teach notation and motivate pupils. There was evidence that this is perhaps because their approach is based on their own very traditional background. There is a tendency toward over-reliance on standard notation without due consideration to whether it is the best for the learning context.

Project background
Little relevant existing research was uncovered so we first had to identify the hard-to-teach areas. Five teacher trainers were asked to conduct independent research with their trainees and various partner schools. London, the SE, NE, NW and SW geographical regions were all represented. The researchers then met and identified six commonly perceived hard-to-teach areas to take forward to the authoring phase.
 
Technology can only help if employed in a sound educational context. Researchers sometimes felt that problems reported could be attributed to issues of general teaching approach. Advice under each hard-to-teach area above therefore includes a mixture of general teaching principles and specific ideas for how music technologies can help.
 
Acknowledgements
NAME would like to thank the following people who have been involved in developing this project: Andy Murray (project manager), Abigail d'Amore, Carl Brunsden, Bill Crow, Alison Daubney, Julie Evans, Keith Evans, Helen Fraser, Chris Harrison, Duncan Mackrill, Lis McCullough, Kevin Rogers, Ben Sandbrook, Jonathan Savage.