Episode 188: Cheers to Avoiding Common Teacher Oversights

What follows is a rough-edit of the episode, so please forgive typos and/or formatting errors.

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Well, hello, studio teacher friends!  Welcome to the Beyond Measure Podcast, your weekly shout-out of solidarity in the music teaching profession.  My name is Christina Whitlock; I am your host and self-appointed Anytime Piano Teacher Friend.  If you’ve been searching for like-minded teachers who embrace things like humility, curiosity, and the fact that we will never know it all… look no further, because you’ve found ‘em.  Welcome to your people. Seriously – some of THE best teachers from around the globe have rallied around this show, and we’re so glad you’re here with us today. So – without further delay – let’s get on with the show!

Today’s about as practical as it gets around here, friends.  We’re talking about the most common oversights made by teachers.  As always, my experience is framed around piano teachers, specifically, but most of these ideas hold up to teachers of other instruments and voice types as well.

I originally thought I’d title this episode something about “Rookie Teacher Mistakes” but I was quickly reminded these are traps we can ALL fall into on occasion. Each of these points are things I’ve been guilty of at varying points in my teaching career, and I don’t think any of us are exempt from falling into their traps.

So, let’s get rolling, shall we? 

First up on my list is this:  Keeping your eyes on the music, instead of your student.  This is something I’m known to harp on my pedagogy students about, but we all need the reminder.  When our students are playing, where are we looking?  It’s easy to fall into the trap of letting our eyes follow along the student’s music… but in doing so, we’re missing SO MUCH. This is especially tricky when your student is playing a piece you don’t know well, but I find teachers struggle with this even when teaching familiar repertoire. 

As your student plays, we should be watching THEM.  We should be looking for where they hold tension in their bodies, where they are moving in an inefficient manner, how they’re producing their sound, etc.

We should ALSO be paying attention to their facial expressions.  There’s much to be learned from watching your students’ face. Where are THEIR eyes?  Where do they lose concentration?  Where are they most uncertain?

8 or 9 years ago, I had a young student who wanted to record us playing a duet for his mom.  He planted my phone directly in front of him on the music rack.  When I said, “don’t you want her to see our fingers?” and he adamantly replied, “nope!”.  So, we recorded a duet and the only thing you could see on the video was his face. Watching it back, I found it SO enlightening!  At first, I just thought it was cute.  But the more I watched it, the more I was able to notice slight changes in his expression that clued me in to where he was most comfortable, and where he wasn’t.

It is so rare we get to look straight-on into our students faces while they play the piano.  It’s next-to-impossible to do with piano students.

Anyway, that’s the first thing on my list of teacher mistakes today:  Get your eyes OFF the score, and get them ON your student.

Second on my list?  Not listening to music WITH them.  I know, I know.  Every minute is precious in our lesson time and there is so much to do.  But I am here to tell you:  If WE are not our students’ gateway into great music and great musicians, how do we expect them to find it?  When was the last time you pulled up a recording of your favorite musician or your favorite piece and listened to it with your students?  

Just last night, I had a student working on Taylor Swift’s So Long, London.  If you don’t know it, the beginning of the song is sort of reminiscent of the Westminster Chimes, featuring these pairs of broken chords.  As he was playing it, I couldn’t help but fixate on how much it reminded me of Liszt’s 5th etude, the one that sounds like hunting horns?  So, we took about 60 seconds and listened to the first part of that piece and my student was completely enthralled.  He vowed to go home and listen to the rest and I’m confident he did!  

So often, we think students don’t care about classical music… or even classic rock… or whatever you’re into.  But the truth is, they can’t get excited about what they don’t know. If we are not introducing them to this music and these performers, how do we expect them to form an educated opinion about them?

Back in the day, I was teaching general music appreciation classes at a local university and my FAVORITE thing was helping nay-sayers fall in love with opera. When we first started studying it, everyone was rolling their eyes and grumbling about how they were NEVER going to spend their spare time listening to opera.  Sure, it’s not like I converted everyone, but I can say with great certainty that I have turned a decent number of college students into appreciators of that artform.  Those students came into my class knowing only stereotypical portrayals of a strange style of singing they couldn’t understand.  Yet, all it took was someone enthusiastic about the material and willing to spend time introducing them to the juicy plotlines, beautiful sets, and costumes to make them understand why opera is so loved by so many. 

So, again, I say:  Don’t be afraid to spend time with your students LISTENING to the music and performers you hope they will appreciate.

Third on my list of common teacher oversights is something I talk about quite a bit here: simply, not playing FOR and WITH your students.  I’ve said it a million and twenty times on this show, but we should all aim to be Talking Less and Playing More.  Talk Less, Play More.  I was just talking two episodes ago about missed opportunities we have when it comes to playing WITH our students.  It goes beyond taking time to play the prescribed duets in their method books.  There are SO MANY OTHER WAYS to play WITH and play FOR your students.  And we should be taking advantage of them.

I’m leaving that there since I talk about it a lot, but I also HAD to include them on this list.

Fourth on my list?  Not having students play their pieces at multiple tempos.  My theory is this:  each student has what I call a “comfort tempo”.  Some of our students play EVERYTHING at lightening speed, right?  Others have a tendency to plod through their work until we urge them to move the pulse forward a few notches. I have a lot of adult students who just like to hang somewhere right in the middle.  Every piece tends to come out at one, even-keeled, not-too-fast, not-too-slow tempo. 

The thing is, when it comes to developing our students RHYTHMIC LANGUAGE, we need them to understand the relationship between pulse and note values.  We ALL know about students who see eighth notes or sixteenth notes and just try to play them as fast as they can, but this issue actually extends far beyond those shorter note values.  So much of our students’ rhythmic struggles comes back to the relationships between note values and how that fits on a pulse.  There are many, many ways to work on this with our students… but one of the most simple is to make sure they are routinely playing their pieces at multiple tempos for you, and at home. 

You can broach this by telling students to prepare their pieces at slow, medium, and fast tempos for you, but that can backfire a bit.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to provide ANY indication that I find merit in playing fast and sloppy.  And that’s exactly what I get when I ask for a FAST performance tempo.  

Instead, I tend to reverse-engineer that assignment a bit.  I will often tell students to find their “max tempo” for a piece – as in, the fastest they can play WITHOUT breaking the pulse. Then, I’ll ask them to try two different tempos that are each slower than that.  You’ll generally end up with this “max tempo”, the next, a bit slower, will likely be their “ideal tempo”, and then you’ll have one that truly is a SLOW tempo.

I can’t urge you enough, friends: this type of assignment should be part of your student practice habits FROM THE GETGO.  This works for early elementary students as well as advanced players.  

Encourage students to play in different tempos to make sure they understand the rhythmic relationships between their notes, instead of just conditioning certain speeds into their fingers.

Okay… here’s our fifth, and final, teacher oversight.  This one deserves it’s own episode, honestly, and maybe I’ll do that later this year.  We’ll see. 😊

Teacher friends: we must be careful not to use methods we don’t understand.  If we’re going to use a method series, we’d be wise to educate ourselves with all the available materials.

When it comes to published method series, each one has been designed with some specific teaching philosophies in mind.  We are wise to seek out the training materials available to us to learn more about how these materials are designed.

Maybe this inclusion surprises you, since I am someone who speaks often about not relying on your method books to do the teaching for you. I *do*, in fact, encourage teachers to use method books as series of graded repertoire and to take their own responsibility for teaching concepts and technique.

But I also work with teachers all the time who find themselves using books whose foundational elements they do not understand. So, they are constantly fighting with expectations of the repertoire in their method books, because they lack a clear vision of how their books are designed to be used.

Almost every published method series has a teachers guide or teacher resources, yet I know for a fact that most of us skip them.

If we look at Faber’s Piano Adventures… most of us see that series as sort of a Turn-the-Page-and-Go method, right?  And YET…. I will tell you, there is a Teacher’s Guide for that Primer book that is chock full of ideas and implementations that may very well blow your mind.  If you use the Faber Primer book, I would absolutely recommend getting your hands on the Teachers Guide.

For the record, I do not use the Faber Primer, because I find Hal Leonard Book 1 to be FAR SUPERIOR to that book, but I do find great value in that Teacher’s Guide.

If you ever find yourself saying, “I don’t like such-and-such method because students don’t learn how to (fill in the blank)”, I’d venture to guess you stand something to learn by checking out the Teacher Guides.

There are methods like Piano Safari, which truly do require some teacher education up front to make the most of those books. Fortunately, Katherine and Julie, the authors of that curriculum, have many generous resources available online to help learn their methodology.

The same goes for Keyboard Games of Music Moves for Piano fame…

But even methods like Celebrate Piano, The Music Tree, Alfred, Hal Leonard, etc. have teachers guides that should not actually be ignored.

They may be the most overlooked resources in our profession.

AND – once you read your teachers guides for your chosen curriculums – you can check out MY resource, titled Making the Most of Your Chosen Method, which will help you incorporate those materials on your own terms so you don’t feel like your materials are the tail wagging the proverbial dog. 😊   I’ll put a link to that resource in today’s shownotes.

So there you have it, friends, my list of FIVE common teacher oversights:

•         Watching the music instead of your student
•         Neglecting to listen to great music and great musicians with your students
•         Not playing with and for your students
•         Allowing students to play at only one tempo
•         Using a method series you don’t fully understand

This is a different kind of episode for me, mostly because I prefer to focus on the things we do RIGHT than on the things we don’t… but I hope these have served as reminders from a well-intentioned friend, and I hope you are inspired to CHOOSE ONE and aim to implement it this week.

Nicola Cantan uses the acronym JDOT:  Just Do One Thing and I love that. Don’t run out and try to do all five this week,  but take note of the changes you’d like to make, and dole them out one at a time over the next year or so. You have time.  JDOT.  Just do one thing.

So, while you’re pondering YOUR one thing… I’m going to offer up a toast to us and this profession of ours.

Studio music teacher friends from all around the world:  Today we vow to be strategic in the ways we wish to improve our teaching.  May we focus our attention on actionable changes, and may we be kind to ourselves, knowing everything is an experiment. As long as we’re trying, we’re doing our job.  This is me, raising my glass to you, my impressive teacher friends!  Here, here.

That’s all I have for you today, my friends!  Links to all the resources mentioned as well as a transcript and related episodes can be found at today’s shownotes.  Visit ChristinaWhitlock.com/episode188 for all the good stuff.

Until we meet again next week, friends!  Onward and upward, indeed.