My responsibility as a teacher is to provide quality instruction that meets the students’ skillset in a digestible way. The environment must allow the student to feel safe, explorative, inclusive, and interactive with the learning process. I will provide exercises and repertoire that challenges and exposes the students’ skills. My teaching environment will include assisting the student with proper practice approaches to the repertoire given, so that it scaffolds the new skills in an accessible way that promotes healthy technique on their instrument for years to come. The teacher will guide the student in having objective thoughts on the learning process of a new skill. Harsh, fearful, negative feedback will be removed from the mindset and replaced with positive thought processes that are created in the lesson for each student.
Students should achieve a comfortable level of demonstration in the lesson in preparation to master that skill in the practice room. Personally, many hours of practice that led to minor changes in my performance has taught me that quality practice focalizes on the tactile feeling and reaps significant results in the performance moment. I have also experienced a negative and positive performance mindset in playing throughout stressful times in my music career, and by the end of a period of stress, I have noticed that the ones in which I am open, positive, and objective leave me with less physical and mental barriers moving forward. This is ultimately what led me to include teaching a positive performance mindset within my lessons.
PHILOSOPHY
"The duties of a teacher are neither few nor small, but they elevate the mind and give energy to the character." - Dorothea Dix
In order to have a safe culturally inclusive environment in a lesson, I will need to reflect on my own cultural lens and recognize any bias within the system, communicate with my students real world issues within the classroom and use proper verbiage that is culturally responsible, draw on students culture to allow them to shape their curriculum and instruction, model high expectations for all students and promote respect for their differences within the lesson and studio. The content I use in a lesson will include a variety of traditional and contemporary exercises and music that will diversify the students’ abilities. I will provide fundamental concepts at the start of a lesson that allows the student to start learning the skill successfully while maintaining properly established technique. A student should not allow prior technique to fall to the wayside when learning a new skill. While exploring the skill in the lesson, I want students to create mental verbiage that is non-judgmental and focuses on the feeling. An example would be “recall the feeling of the whole arm moving and listening to the pitch as you approach your target note”, whereas many of us would just say “Don’t miss the big shift”.
Once the student begins attempting a new skill it is important to check in on how the student feels while performing the activity. The student should evaluate how their body feels by using descriptive words that target the areas in which they are feeling the movement, tension, or release of tension. From the teacher’s viewpoint, the evaluation of the student would include demonstration of the ability to move freely around their instrument while performing the activity. Consistent, successful repetition is the final assessment of the concept. Consistent repetition of the skill over time is the mastery of the concept. Some assessments cannot be given for a period of time for the content to be fully absorbed by the student. Students should be able to describe in words their approach using keywords that relate to how the body will perform the activity. Then, their evaluation of their attempt will not include a negative tone and will specifically target what was not achieved, this could be the speed of the shift being too slow or fast for example. I wish for my students to challenge their beliefs and performance abilities in my lesson by focusing on the present moment of their playing. Students are expected to release their ego at the door and to think of each lesson as a new day to play their instrument.
The most important learning goals I have for my students, is that they have a series of tools in their playing and practice that allows them to categorize the technical aspects of mastering their instrument so that they can determine the absence of a skill and work on that one concept in the practice room. Many times, we are unable to take off the layers of playing all the way down to what the root of the problem is. This is the challenge students have as they progress on their instrument. Layers and layers of skills are piled onto each other and many times they can depend on prior skills that were not re-enforced enough.
Students should leave my classroom with a sense of control over their playing that can be transferred into the performance moments of their musical journey. They should feel respected and valued in my studio as a contributor to everyone’s musical paths as well as their own. They should know they have tools in their pocket that equip them with knowledge that narrows down their technique into individual qualities that can be manipulated and refined. As students encounter difficulties, I hope to learn valuable new approaches to challenges the student and I encounter who may have different learning strengths than me. These challenges will expand my resourcefulness inside the lesson with the students and outside the lesson through professional development opportunities. This new knowledge will be invested into my students and repeat the learning cycle of refining, applying, and reviewing. This process will increase the pace and success of each individual student within my studio for times to come.