Where it all begins.(ad lib)(elementary student music education)

Instructing young beginners, advanced piano teachers, and all levels in-between is a stimulating part of my life as an independent music teacher. Even as a university professor I maintained a wide age and level range by doing extra teaching on Saturdays. This was partially out of necessity as a pedagogy teacher, since helping each new crop of inexperienced intern teachers required me to stay sharp in instructing all the various levels. But the variety made it fun, and working with one level illuminated the others. As time passed, I saw how dramatically transformative it could be for new teachers to work with one level in particular--elementary.

At many universities, the majority of incoming pedagogy interns have not yet taught elementary students, so naturally they teach their students--regardless of age or level--in the same way they are usually taught in their collegiate lessons: they coach rather than teach. This rarely succeeds because most of their students are vastly different from themselves--besides being much less advanced, they usually are not as gifted and are not necessarily single-mindedly and passionately pursuing music.

When interns imitate their studio teachers' approach, it virtually guarantees they will not empathize with their own students' needs. Extensive coaching causes their students to agonize over minute performance details and nuances that are beyond their musical comprehension. This deprives them of first acquiring an essential overview and gut-level experience of the most down-to-earth, pervasive aspects of the music. Measure-by-measure hyper-polishing thus results in myopic learning and readings that end up being aural transliterations of the printed page rather than heartfelt translations. At worst, the outcome is an overwhelmed, discouraged student--at best, someone who relies on a teacher for "transliteration lessons" piece after piece, year after year, sometimes into and beyond college if the student happens to get that far.

The trap of falling into indiscriminate coaching tends to be avoided more often when interns work intensely with elementary students of any age. They see for themselves how people at this juncture learn--what they perceive musically, how they physically learn, how much successful reinforcement is needed, how practice skills are not innate and much more. This is especially true if they also observe expert modeling of such instruction on a regular basis. Teaching elementary students forces teachers to empathize with the person ...