Meet Students Where They Are

Introduction

This post was inspired by an episode of Christina Whitlock’s Beyond Measure Podcast. In that episode, Christina speaks with guest Janna Williamson on the differences between proactive and reactive teaching strategies. It made me realize that my teaching is almost completely reactive. Sure, it isn’t optimal, but pretty typical of traditional teaching.

In reactive teaching, you assign the student a new piece, with little to no guidance, and you spend the next lesson making corrections. In proactive teaching, you send the new piece home with practice strategies. One of the benefits of teaching the same pieces many times is that you learn what might be difficult. Why not share that with the student to help them get a head start?

Furthermore, it helped me make a mental shift in some of my teaching, which I applied to several students who had returned after a vacation of several weeks. Meet Students Where They Are.

Get Them Back in the Ballpark

One of the students mentioned had a particularly marked summer slide, so I backed way up. I asked her to describe her approach to the pieces in her assignment. As a result, I took some time to reinforce concepts important to each of her pieces. This included simple reminders like starting hand position and clapping the underlying rhythms. Once these fundamentals were refreshed, teaching became a lot easier!

Set Reasonable Expectations

Another student that day was fighting against himself to playing up to tempo without first doing the slow practice needed. He gave up because he didn’t do the work that would quickly enable him to play the piece as he desired. Since scales were a big part of the piece, we covered not only the scale in that piece, but also his assigned scale for the week. Armed with the confidence of playing both scales, he was more easily able to play the piece.

Sometimes Reactive Teaching Is Okay

Proactive teaching is especially appropriate for new pieces and when the student gets stuck. It’s not as necessary as a student is wrapping up a piece, and would be better served to get to the problem areas directly. Meet Students Where They Are. That’s where I hope my new mantra will help to guide me.

Final Thoughts

Sometimes a particular podcast episode hits directly, like this one. I’m curious to see where I go with this new strategy, and how it might help my teaching.