Better Practice Blog- Teach Students To Teach Themselves: Building Interest and Style
Teach Students To Teach Themselves: Building Interest and Style
The best students know how to teach themselves. They're motivated, love what they're doing, and take the initiative to explore what interests them and to really understand what they’ve already learned. This concept of learning and exploring on one’s own has never been easier with the rise of technology: students today have countless tutorial videos, backing tracks, and online communities at their fingertips. But none of these can replace the knowledge and guidance of a real teacher, only supplement and expand their teachings.
Marc Prensky, an internationally acclaimed writer and speaker on education, hits the nail on the head in his article “The Role of Technology: in teaching and the classroom”. He writes that “technology’s role - and its only role - should be to support students teaching themselves (with, of course, their teacher’s guidance).” And I think the best use of this is to have students constantly building interest and finding things that they’d like to learn more about.
So, how do we teach students to teach themselves? Well, there's actually 2 parts. The first and arguably most important step is to build interest, and to find ways to constantly feed and grow that interest. Your students won't be looking to improve in their own time if they aren't motivated to do so. The second step is to actually show them ways to figure out things on their own and give them skills they can apply to any of their musical interests.
Build Interest
1. Expose them to the availability of materials online.
This could be as easy as attaching videos to your assignments on a platform like Better Practice. Because let’s face it, who doesn’t get sucked into YouTube? Include those video links in your assignments and get them online! With all the recommended and related videos on the side, they’re bound to find something else they want to watch. Yes, this is a risky move. I’d advise to do this only with older, serious students (students who are really into music and/or mature enough to not get too distracted). With these students, I see huge spikes in interest when they accidentally stumble upon a new favorite artist, learn a cool new technique, or find one of those “World’s fastest piano solo!” videos. Sometimes they’ll even share the video with their classmates, and the interest spreads. I know that personally, my interest in music grows with finding new and exciting things to listen to (new to me; it could be an old recording) and the internet is awesome for discovery.
2. Find recordings/live performances of professionals playing your piece.
This is mainly YouTube again, as it’s probably my favorite place to find videos of live performances - these can be the most inspiring. My professors often used Spotify and shared with us a playlist of the assigned songs, professionally recorded. Of course, to learn music, you have to listen! And this was a great, simple way to get us acquainted with the pieces without having to purchase them on iTunes. I had a teacher who would make me a CD of tunes in the style I was learning to play. These, I could keep in my car and learn from every time I went out! Or, I could just import the CD into iTunes and have it easily accessible on my iPod/iPhone. Another professor would tell me to find my favorite version of the tune and bring it in (this was for jazz). All of these methods worked great - it got me listening, interested, and learning!
Self-teaching skills for life
An anecdote on learning to listen and transcribe
As someone who started out in classical piano, I never transcribed anything. My teacher was very traditional, and she just had me learn pieces one after another. When I entered into the world of jazz, one thing became very clear - jazz musicians barely read music (of course they can - but reading every note off a page isn’t the point of jazz). I had transcription assignments thrown at me from every jazz teacher I worked with. I struggled through the first one, definitely. I thought I had to get each note, each rhythm down perfectly, and it took me days. However, when I got to the lesson, my teacher simply asked me: “What scales did you hear being used?” and “What were your favorite lines?” This blew my mind. Simply listening for these two things would allow me to learn how to get the sound I wanted and to discover what notes worked over what chords. From then on, my perception of music completely changed. I started to listen to music actively and analytically - always thinking, “How did he get that sound?” or noting a lick I really liked to learn later. This was really got me thinking, "What sound do I really like? What do I want to imitate, develop, and learn more about?" For me, I hadn't been getting that from my classical "read and play" lessons. But when I was taught to listen, I started delving into all sorts of genres and, consequently, discovered a different side of playing.