The following is something I wrote for an upcoming pedagogy assignment where I reviewed the things that I've learned or the things that have changed in my teaching after my first five years of teaching piano. It's not a perfect article, by any means, and of course is subject to revision, but even in its imperfect state, I thought it was worth sharing...
Although many things are similar to when I first started teaching, some things have definitely changed since then. Technically, I started teaching in 2008, when I had my first student Emily under Dr. Knerr’s supervision during my Pedagogy I class at the University of Missouri. That was crazy! I had no idea what I was doing back then! I was learning right there alongside Emily, trying to act like I knew what I was doing the whole time. Ultimately she quit lessons after the fall semester of the following year. It was so sad! I tried to keep her going, but she hit that wall—the one we’re all too familiar with—when a student realizes they can play by ear and decides to stop reading. That is definitely one thing I have learned: not all students make it past the first year or two.
I think one of the most valuable things I’ve taken away from my early experiences though, is that life happens in a given week. I always knew this growing up, but when you first become a teacher, you’re inspired and taught to push your students as much as humanly possible, which is great and true in theory, but not entirely realistic. It’s important that they aren’t ever bored in their lessons or in their assignments, but it’s also important to balance expectations with reality. At some point (I don’t remember when), I started including the student in the conversation about what was realistic for them in terms of their weekly assignments. I ask them directly, towards the end of their lesson when we’re reviewing their assignment sheet, “Is this enough to work on? Do you want something else? Is this too much? Are you going to be bored? You know, the last thing I want is for you to be bored.” I also often tell them, “You know if you get bored, you can always work ahead,” or conversely, if I know they have a stressful week ahead and are normally hard workers, I might say, “You know, if this is too much, you can always drop ____ (specific assignment) and we’ll wait on that til next week. But see if you can work on it anyway.” Sometimes I tell them, "You know, if you don't make it through all your assignments, it's not like I'm going to show up and burst into flames." I think I learned this after over-assigning and watching my students deal with the stress and then thinking they’ve failed at life: that mentality is just not ok. Life is too short to continue to do something you think you’re constantly failing at, and in my estimation, it’s the teacher who can make or break it for a student by either recognizing the reality a student is living in or ignoring it and steamrolling ahead. I prefer the former over the latter, mostly because I would rather see a student succeed and love their instrument than quit.
After my first year of teaching in St. Louis, I also realized that it was really important that students like what they’re working on. In my pedagogy classes and in my instruction as a student teacher, I think I had been taught that it doesn’t matter so much in the beginning if a kid likes what they are playing, because they’re going to like the fact that they can play, which I think is definitely true. Kids are smart though, and at some point they realize that they’ll be able to play things they like sooner or later and that playing in general gives them pleasure, but playing things they like gives them an even greater pleasure. Again, I think there’s a balance here. There are some things I insist my students work on because it’s good for them, because it’s great literature that would be stupid to leave out of their education, or because there are specific things I want them to work on. I often tell them why I want them working on a specific piece, or ask them to figure out if they were the teacher, why I gave them a certain piece and what skills I want them to take away. That being said, there is also a huge benefit to giving a student something they like. Not only does it hook them into continued playing, but the pieces they like are often the pieces that push them into the next level, or can relieve a plateau in learning.
Another thing I’ve taken away from my first five years in teaching piano is to clarify the “practice/not practice mind games” that often occur between teacher and students. When the lesson starts, I ask my students how their week went (both at school and at the piano) and they often give me the expected answer: “good.” But then we get into lesson and I can tell that practice did not in fact go so “good.” Rather than play mind games with them though, I will often ask them directly, “How did you practice this? Tell me what you did.” When I first started doing this, they would often look up at me sheepishly, as if preparing for Catholic confession, at which point I would say, “I’m not here to make you feel guilty. You can confess to me, and I hope you do, but I’m here to help you be a better pianist, not to make you feel bad for lack of practicing.” I would then proceed to hear what they have to say and ask them what a better practice strategy would have been. (This still happens occasionally, although most of my students know now that they can’t hide a lack of practice from me). In lesson though, after “confession”, if they can’t come up with any effective practice strategies (or even if they do), I will often give them a laundry list of much more efficient ways to practice that piece/passage/section so they can finally conquer it. Often, I will have them do certain things in lesson (such as ghosting one hand while playing the other, practice a passage in dotted rhythms and then reverse the dotted rhythms, or go back and forth between chords, etc) so that they can see their progress in a matter of five minutes or less. This usually inspires them to go back the following week and do what I ask.
One thing I definitely do now, that I didn’t do in my first year of teaching is have both my students and their parents sign studio contracts each semester. Not only is this a legal protection for me in terms of payment, but it’s also important that the student read, review, and re-sign the studio policy each semester before committing to lessons. Every student needs to remember each semester what they’re getting into and what’s expected of them.
I think, on the whole (based on the examples I’m remembering as I write), the biggest things I’ve changed in my teaching since my first year or two is honesty and transparency in the teacher-student relationship, as well as checking my high expectations against their realities. The best thing I can do for a student is to show them how much I actually care through my interactions with them and my expectations each week during lesson. The most loving and instructive thing I do actually, is give them grace when necessary, which I think I was less inclined to do as a new teacher having been freshly pruned as a teacher myself. I also think one of the greatest things I’ve learned is how to discern when a student really needs grace and when they need grace with a side of pushing. Of course I want them to learn to read music, play with a nice tone and nice voicing, be able to move around the keyboard efficiently, make lovely musical phrases, pedal correctly, and play each piece as if it were the greatest thing ever written. But I think what I’ve really learned in the past five years or so is that if grace is the one thing they take away from their lessons, then that in itself is worth it.
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