Episode 277: Cheers to Remembering How to Play

Well, hello there, studio teacher friends!  Welcome to your weekly moment of solidarity, otherwise known as the Beyond Measure Podcast. Christina Whitlock here, your host and self-appointed Anytime Piano Teacher Friend. In today’s show, we’re talking about one of my favorite things: play.  Specifically, we’re talking about the ways children play naturally, and how we can incorporate more of those elements into our teaching. This is fundamental Christina Whitlock Piano Teaching Stuff, friends. So, let’s get on with the show!  Thanks for listening to episode 277 of the Beyond Measure Podcast.

Question for you:  When was the last time you watched children play? Not in your studio… but out in the real world?  Watching kids on the playground or running around your neighborhood on a nice summer day?

If you’re new around here, you should know I harbor a real obsession with play. The science of play, the lack of play in our lives at every age…. It’s a whole thing and I’m on a mission to help our profession do better.

I get hyped up about this topic because we – as music teachers – should be the biggest champions for PLAY on the planet. And yet – due to 1,000 contributing factors, we are better known for other qualities. Things like achievement and discipline… which I have NO problem with. I love achievement and discipline. I just don’t think they should be our biggest selling points. Plus, I think when students embrace the PLAY available to them in music, the achievement and discipline follow. I don’t think it works the other way around. If we present piano lessons as a discipline…as a source of achievement… play can easily be missed altogether. Many of us know that because it’s how we grew up.

Many of us – myself included – got hooked on the discipline and achievement to be found at the piano. That’s not a bad thing. My hangup is the fact that most of us will SAY music study benefits everyone, but we only teach in a way that benefits the students who were like us.

Here’s what we know: opportunities for true play – ACTUAL play – are surprisingly hard to come by today, which is why I’m adamant they remain a driving force of my piano teaching.

I have resources that delve into the science of play and I’ll give you a rundown of those at the end of today’s episode, but for now, I just want to focus on some practical, real-life observations of children at play.

I see a lot of teachers make the same mistake: when we start thinking about PLAY in the context of a piano lesson, we think about specific games and materials that are created to center around musical concepts. Teachers say they want to be more playful in their lessons so they start buying and downloading materials for dedicated games. Some of these things are great. We have a lot of awesome people in our profession who create those kinds of materials and I’m all for it. We just had a Teacher Show and Tell in the SuperFriends community this last Friday and my friends shared some AMAZING materials.

Of course, some teachers don’t want to play those games, or they struggle to work them into their lesson plans, so they mistakenly think they aren’t going to be “playful” teachers.

I’ve said it many times here on this show: PLAY is a mindset. It’s not a specific activity on your lesson plan. And I have to say this: one of the foundational aspects of PLAY is novelty. Something out of the ordinary. So if you are a teacher who thinks you need to use an ipad app to incorporate more PLAY into your lessons, I have news for you: apps aren’t novel. They aren’t particularly playful. There are plenty of reasons to incorporate ipad apps into your teaching, just don’t do so in the name of play.

Do you know what’s a million times more novel for children?  Playing a piano. If we allow it to be so, the piano is a rich, complex, fascinating device that is capable of expressing countless aspects of the human spirit. Please understand: I’m not criticizing the use of dedicated games and applications for music study. Those things exist and we are wise to use them to our advantage. But PLEASE, friends: I’m begging you not to lose sight of the fact that the thing in your studio that offers the most opportunity for PLAY is… your instrument.

We make a great mistake when we think our job is to make music study more relatable to students’ everyday lives. Teaching music they already know using tools they’re already familiar with. This activity SHOULD be special. It SHOULD be unlike anything else they do. We don’t need to apologize for asking them to do something out of their ordinary; it’s our biggest selling point! Life is so monotonous… what a wonderful opportunity to take a break from all the other stuff and explore this thing in front of us.  A piano has something like 10,000 moving parts, which we get to control with our own bodies to tell stories, conjure up emotions, explore new ideas… I mean, wow. Don’t lose sight of that magic, friends. Who DOESN’T want part of that?

The tricky thing, of course, is keeping play at the center of what we do so music study doesn’t turn into a checklist of do’s and don’ts. Those checklists exist, and they are important. I don’t want to paint the wrong picture here: I believe in quality instruction where students are learning to play the piano with proper form and attention to detail. It’s not fun if we don’t.

But in any facet of education, we are wrong to assume it’s all about transferring knowledge. “I know this thing, and I’m telling you this thing, so now you know this thing.” Oh, the things we would know if that was how education worked. Right?  Lessons are not simple transfers of knowledge. There are many factors that go into learning, and engagement is high on the list. And how are students most engaged? When they are in a true state of play.

…which brings me back to watching children play in real life.

Put two kids in a room together and they are going to find something to do – whether they have a board game in front of them of not. I’ve assembled a whole list of common trends I’ve observed in play. For those of you who like to take notes on this podcast, here’s a good opportunity to make a list. Ready?  Without any kind of instruction whatsoever, children will often find themselves doing the following things:

They will engage in some kind of role play.

They will create inside jokes. Things that only make sense to them.

They will change variables to see what happens.

They will try to beat a record.

They will take turns.

They will incorporate elements of chance.

They will create counter-examples and exaggerations.

…and the list goes on from there. I don’t have time to explore each of those today, but I do have a bonus video inside my SuperFriends Community that walks you through each of these in more detail. You can join the SuperFriends to check it out, or that video alone is available for purchase. I’ll link it in today’s shownotes.

For now, let’s take a look at three.

Role play is a go-to for children of a certain age. When they were younger, my girls were forever playing Family when they got together with friends or cousins. Someone was the mom, someone was the baby, you get the idea. Children role play scenarios that they know. They play grocery store cashier. They play waitress.

Do you know what role our piano students LOVE playing? Piano teacher. One of the most PLAYFUL activities you can do with your students is reverse roles. Have your student pretend to teach YOU about sharps and flats. Have your student listen to you play and ask them if the second theme of your exposition is staying in tempo. Switching roles is GOLD in the engagement department.  And, bonus, no additional materials are required.

Beyond role playing teacher-student, you can also draw on other student life experiences.  My students know we should never play the same theme twice. So, if a phrase is repeated three times, I might ask, “pretend you are your mom, telling you to clean up your room. The first time is mild… the second time is, intense… and the third time is something else altogether, right?” Clean your room. Clean your room. CLEAN YOUR ROOM. That is a way to bring role play directly into the music, and it applies to every level and every age.

Tell your student to imagine they’re the composer. What do you think the composer was thinking when they did this?

How about the subject of their piece?  Just this week I had a little guy playing a piece from the Hal Leonard Solos book 1, called By the River’s Edge. It is a simple elementary piece with flowing quarter notes in a repeated pattern. I asked him to pretend he was the river as he played it. And – I know – there’s something comical about imagining the crazy piano teacher saying, “BE THE RIVER…” but, at least in this case, it took a little elementary piece from sounding like a student exercise into a legitimate work of art. It was beautiful.

THIS is what I mean by embracing play in our teaching, friends.  We can all do it, it’s not just for young students, and we’ll all be better off for it.

Let’s talk about inside jokes. Children often form little inside jokes with one another. My youngest daughter and her friend have this fruit ranking system for things they like. If they call something a banana, it’s good. There are a few other things in the mix, but the HIGHEST ranking is Flying Watermelon. When they say something is a Flying Watermelon, that is the highest of all compliments. We talk about it so much now, it’s just second nature. When they call me a flying watermelon, I know I’ve REALLY done something great in the Mom department.

Of course, almost no one else understands what that means.

Having inside jokes in your studio is a great way to create a playful atmosphere and create a sense of community. I have a list of favorite Teacher Things on my website that I often share. If you’ve ever looked at it, you’ve surely noticed what I call The Hand.  The Hand is originally from Ikea. It’s made of wood and it has movable fingers. I bought it as a way of helping students enforce proper placement of the nail joint (not collapsed backwards OR too rounded) but really, it seems to exist now as something my students like to pose in humorous ways on their way out the door. They’ll leave me a thumbs-up, a rock and roll or I love you sign, and sometimes they’ll just bend the fingers in funky ways so I will scream and tell them how many nightmares I’ll have that evening.

The Hand has become this silly inside-joke of sorts. It has little to do with my actual teaching, but it gives students a tiny sense of belonging when they notice something funny about it or think of a new way to drive me crazy with it.

Come to think of it, I have all kinds of silly things in my studio kids love to comment on. That’s an easy way to incorporate inside jokes.

Musically speaking, we all have our things. Our own teacher obsessions, right?  I’ve talked before about Scales Build Trails and other catchy things I say. I have a studio mantra every year. This year’s is What’s the BEST that could happen?  I say it every chance I can. Instead of fixating on all the things that can go wrong with our playing – or in school, or whatever – I’m asking them What’s the BEST that could happen?  They roll their eyes at me but I’m convinced I’m helping them.

The magic isn’t in the STUFF. You don’t need a hand or a specific studio mantra… but you should be mindful to cultivate things that your students can giggle about with you and with other students. Things like Never Accent the Last Note of a Phrase. That’s a big one for me. My students will tell you I’m obsessed with phrase endings. And I am. And I’m fine with them teasing me about it, because in making it a big deal, I’ve actually cemented the importance of listening through a phrase into their brains. Mission accomplished, in a playful way.  See what I mean?

Let’s wrap up today with a talk about changing variables.

This past May, my youngest daughter found a $3 game at Target and she begged me to get it. Little did I know, it would become a staple of our summer.

The game was simple: it was a wiffle ball and two scoopers. Think ping pong paddles, but instead of being flat, they are little scoops. You’ve probably seen them, or grown up playing them yourself. The idea, of course, is to pass the ball back and forth from player to player.

Did the game come with instructions? No. It’s pretty self-explanatory.

But I’ll tell you this: if you play a game with a 9-year old for any amount of time, they’ll start changing things on you. That’s part of playing, right?  You take an established thing and you start making variations on it. It was only a matter of time before one of us would say something like, “Okay – this time we’re only using our left hands” or “this time we can’t let the ball bounce between volleys”.  My daughter came up with these silly little moves… like every 8^th catch she would lay down on the ground and yell STARFISH.

The possibilities were endless, and guess what – the more wacky things we tried, the longer we wanted to keep going. Our volleys got longer and longer.

All those statistics we’ve heard about how concepts cement themselves faster in the brain when they’re learned through PLAY?  This is what they mean.

This is good news for us, because this concept is SO easy to implement, if we stay intentional about it. Ask students to make their own articulation. Ask them to play a melody in the opposite hand. Play everything forte… play with an exaggerated amount of rubato… change the pedal technique… transpose a phrase to a new key…

That “By the River’s Edge” piece I talked about earlier?  At one point, as my student was pretending to be the river as he played, he naturally changed the rhythm from four quarters to quarter-two eighths-quarter-quarter.

In allowing him to manipulate the phrases in his own way, he was learning the piece on a deeper level than if he simply recreated the blobs of ink in front of him. And guess what?  If I said, “Okay Johnny…now I need you to play it EXACTLY as written..”  HE COULD DO IT.

So if your student keeps missing the B-flat in the key signature, you can keep saying, “B-flat. That’s a B-flat.  Oops! Another B-flat.  I’ll circle that one for you.”

OR: You could say, “okay. The key signature is giving you some fits here. Let’s try THE WHOLE PIECE with no b-flats. Then, try THE WHOLE PIECE with C-sharps. In doing so, you’re drawing your students’ attention to the key WITHOUT just offering correction after correction. As Martha Stewart used to say, it’s a good thing.

So, again, there are many more common themes I’ve noticed in play, and I walk through them all in video that is linked in today’s shownotes. You can join the SuperFriends Community on Patreon for $9 and have access to EVERYTHING housed there, or you can buy the video itself for $10. Obviously, membership is a better deal, but I know some of you are membershipped-out so that’s a way to score the content with no other commitment.

Beyond that video, I have two different sessions I present to music teacher organizations on the topic of play. If you are part of a group and you are looking for presenters, I would love to meet your organization virtually – or in person. If you ever find yourself on a programming committee, feel free to reach out and let’s see if I can come visit your group in one way or another.

I do have a recorded version of one session available for individual purchase: it’s called The Paradox of Play and it comes with a 50-minute video, additional Q+A and more. That’s a lot of the science of play and how it relates to the studio.

All this to say, if you’d like to learn more about PLAY – actual play – as it relates to teaching, check out today’s shownotes for more resources.

Let’s finish up today with a toast, my friends!  Grab the nearest beverage and raise it with me now:

Studio music teacher friends:  Today we embrace the important role we play in bringing PLAY back into the lives of those who might be otherwise inundated with screens and feelings of isolation. May we remember to view ourselves not only as teachers, but also as playmates. Instructors, but also collaborators. It’s no small thing, and I’m honored to be in this field with you. Hear, hear!

Thanks for listening to Episode 277, friends!  Exciting things are on the horizon as we head into holiday madness. Thanks for making me part of your weekly routine. I love being in your ears and I’ll see you next week!  Onward and upward we go!