I bought my house about five years ago. It’s small but has a decent backyard, and I was excited to have the outdoor space. Unfortunately, the previous residents had done very little to care for the yard and it was mostly dry, prickly weeds. Even though I had very little experience with landscaping or growing anything, I imagined that within a year I would have a beautiful, thriving lawn and yard.
The grass in the yard was stunted and dry and there wasn’t much of it, so I started working on the weeds. If I could just get the weeds under control, I thought, then I could get the grass growing. I sprayed them and spent hours pulling them out by hand, one by one, but it didn’t seem to do any good. If anything, the weeds were getting worse.
After a couple of summers of mowing down weeds instead of grass, I got pretty discouraged. Maybe my lawn was past the point of no return. Maybe I just needed to tear it all out and start over.
Then a couple years ago, I noticed a few green patches of grass. Encouraged by the new growth, I redoubled my fertilizing efforts, hoping the green splotches might spread a little. Sure enough, with the increased fertilizer, those green patches spread until, for the first time, I had something that resembled a grassy lawn. To my joy, as the grass grew stronger and healthier, the weeds started disappearing.
I had been going about this war against weeds in the entirely wrong way.
Not long ago I had a conversation with my students that brought the story of my grass to mind. We were discussing effective practicing, and I asked my students if they thought it was more effective to focus on what you can’t do or to focus on what you can do. Perhaps not surprisingly, almost everyone agreed that you should focus more on what you can’t do. After all, it makes sense to attack the problem, right? “Fix that fingering. You played that rhythm wrong. We’ve got to cut off together.” Any decent teacher should be able to find and fix errors effectively, right?
In reality, we may be going about it all the wrong way. The constant fault-finding can wear on our students and us. If students feel like nothing is ever good enough, they quickly become frustrated and discouraged. Teachers often feel the same way about their students. I’m sure we have all felt frustrated when our students just can’t get something that we think they should be able to do.
When we are constantly focusing on the problems, we run the risk of creating a negative, discouraging environment for our students, but beyond that, it simply is not the most effective nor efficient way of teaching. Instead, we should be focusing on what our students CAN do and grow the good.
Start Where They Are
I was once told that the biggest problem almost all teachers have is that they teach too much too fast. The longer I teach, the more I believe that. We have to start at a point where the students can feel successful. We have to start in their comfort zones.
In college, education majors are introduced to an idea formulated by Vgostsky called the Zone of Proximal Development. The basic idea is that there is a place just outside of our comfort zone where skills are just a little too hard for us but are still within our grasp. That’s where we can develop new skills and expand our comfort zone if we stay there long enough.
If our students are struggling to master a new skill, it’s probably because it’s too far outside of their comfort zone. Instead of insisting that they just need to work harder and practice more, we should instead modify the task so it’s in that zone of proximal development. Start with what they can do and gradually increase the difficulty level, all the while helping them to be successful.
Help Students See Their Own Progress
Nothing is as motivating as seeing your own progress, but music skills can take years to master. Sometimes trying to see your progress can seem like watching grass grow. Students must be able to see their progress over time. They need to feel successful.
As music teachers, we have a tendency to strive for perfection. We use professional musicians as our models. We listen to professional recordings and compare our performances to those. Imagine that you are a student who has only been playing for two or three years, trying to live up to those expectations. Imagine comparing yourself to other students who have been playing twice as long as you and studying with a private teacher when you haven’t had that opportunity.
Set your students up for success by giving them small, achievable goals to work towards. Instead of asking a second year player to have the tone of a professional musician, ask them to play with correct position. Ask them to play loud and soft. Keep the goals manageable and developmentally appropriate.
One of the best things we can do as teachers is to break the big rocks into smaller chunks. Yes, good tone is important, but how do you get there? What skills do students need to master before they can consistently play with good tone? If you can’t identify those, your students will have to figure them out by trial and error. Some will get it, some will get frustrated. Some will never even know what good tone is.
Once you have identified the steps towards mastering a skill, tell your students what they are! Make it clear to them what they’re working towards and why, then have them track their own progress. Have them do self-checks regularly to see where they’re at and what they need to do to improve.
The Moral of the Story
If you want your students to be successful, you need to focus on the good things they do instead of the bad. Fixing errors will never be as effective as making sure those errors don’t happen in the first place. If there are errors to be fixed, it’s much more effective to start from a place where students can be successful and gradually work your way up to the skill than to expect them to magically just do it right. Don’t focus on what they can’t do; focus on what they can do and how to get them to the next step.
Today’s Challenge
Choose one skill that your students are currently struggling with. Break it down into the smallest steps you can think of. Make a plan to walk your students through each of those steps.