Watch Your Words: Communication in Teaching
I recently had the realization that I have been teaching in some capacity for twenty years. I started with swimming lessons in high school, and that led to the private music lessons I teach now. In between there I have taught private lessons, group lessons, clinics, and in classrooms of all types. In thinking about my own experience and hearing about some of those of all my teacher friends, the little things you don’t learn about in teacher school continue to astound me. There really are certain things that you can only learn through experience, and the most significant thing that comes to mind is how to communicate with your students.
Sometimes the communication comes in deciding how much to tell a student. At the beginning of my teaching career I had to learn to not talk too much. As a student I always wanted to know the why behind everything, so when I began teaching I approached all my students with that in mind. It took me a bit to learn that not everyone has to know the why. In fact, sometimes giving students the why can influence the outcome. If I do an exercise because I want to see how a vocal student’s jaw is moving, or what a violinist’s wrist is doing, and I tell the student that’s what I’m looking for, it will make them more conscious of those movements, while typically negating the observation because it warps what the issue might have been.
Identifying which students need what kind of information is the key to this. I currently have a student who wants to know the whys, and is incredibly resistant if I don’t tell him. My agreement with him is that I will tell him why unless I have a good reason not to, and even then I’ll usually tell him the reason. Most of the time it’s the “don’t want to influence the outcome” factor, and I’ll tell him the why after. I have plenty of other students who are completely fine just doing anything I tell them without any further explanation. This sort of personalization is a bit harder to do in a classroom setting than in a private lesson, but is still possible. In the group settings you will often find that each class or sometimes the different sections will take on a personality. Your second period cellos might want more technical information than those in third period. You may have a whole choir who needs to be communicated with in a different way than the choir after them – even if most of the members are the same.
It isn’t just how and what you communicate in general that is important; word choice itself can also be incredibly influential when you’re teaching. One of the first big epiphanies I had with this came from “The Inner Game of Music,” which has a section that focuses on what it calls “do this” instructions, advocating for more awareness based language. One example is the difference between “play with the correct intonation” versus “be aware of your intonation. Notice when or if you’re playing sharp or flat.” The latter actually promotes musicianship much better, because it puts the emphasis on the student diagnosing issues themselves rather than the teacher just telling them something is wrong. “The key to change a ‘do this’ instruction into an awareness instruction is simply to rephrase it so that the focus of attention is on the student’s experience.”
Perhaps the biggest takeaway for me from that section of the book was use of the word “try.” The books states that “the suggestion of ‘trying’ creates doubt in our ability to succeed. We don’t talk about ‘trying’ to sit down on a chair; we know we can do it, and we do.” Instead of telling a student to try playing a passage, the simple phrasing of “play the passage” eliminates this problem. Even if they don’t play it well, they have still played it. They can then be guided through awareness based instructions to improve how they play the passage.
This idea is just as true before they even play a passage or exercise. The psychological difference between telling a student that something is “hard” versus telling them it’s “tricky” is remarkable. When we tell a student that something is hard we condition them to think they won’t be successful. Scales are a perfect example. We often see the keys that have four or more accidentals as hard; but we only know that because someone told us that. Are some keys less friendly than others for different instruments? Absolutely. But if we say that a D-flat Major scale is harder than D Major before a student even plays the former we can create a self-fulfilling prophecy. I tend not to preface any of my exercises with these words, but if I have to, I will go with something like “tricky.” The word has a very different connotation, and I find it helps the student take the subject as more of a challenge than an obstacle.
Sometimes you will simply show a student a piece of music and they will say “that looks hard.” My response is usually “it isn’t as hard as it looks,” because that is generally true. I’ll usually follow that with something like “which parts look hard to you?” and then I’ll have them explain why they think so when they point them out. This gets them used to identifying and analyzing potential problem areas in a new piece, a good skill for any musician to have. In doing so they will often find that the hardest looking parts are familiar patterns like scales and arpeggios, or something that can be easily worked with the various practice techniques they’ve learned. Focusing on this sort of examination not only takes away any anxiety or stress over the difficulty of the passage, but helps train students to be self-sufficient, which is always my ultimate goal.
It is important for us to be constantly evaluating the ways we communicate our ideas to our students . One of the main goals of music is to perform for an audience, and in doing that communicate some sort of meaning through the piece. In order to create effective communicators we must be effective at it ourselves.
References
Green, Barry, and W. Timothy Gallwey. The Inner Game of Music. New York: Doubleday, 1986.