Not long ago I was talking to a colleague about his concert the night before. He mentioned how frustrating it was for him that his students would play so well one day and so terribly the next. He knew they had the ability to play well, but they lacked consistency.
This topic came up again just yesterday as I met with some other colleagues in my district. Another teacher talked about how he works with his students to play more in tune. “They get it right while I’m helping them with it,” he explained, “but the next time we play it, they play it wrong again.”
As I’ve talked with other teachers about these problems with inconsistency, I’ve thought back on my experiences with my own students. I vividly remember having the same feelings of frustration, knowing that my students could play well but facing those huge inconsistencies and never knowing what they actually would do. Performances were nerve-wracking. My students might perform amazingly well, or they might completely fail. I never knew.
As I’ve had these conversations, however, I’ve realized that my students have become more and more consistent over the years. When we approach the day of the concert, I can be fairly confident in how my students will perform.
What changed? That’s difficult to pinpoint and I don’t have any hard data to back up my theories, but I believe much of that increased consistency has come from the way that I teach.
I no longer expect my students to learn and remember things the first time I teach it to them. Early on in my teaching career, I felt that if I told students to fix something, they ought to be able to do it and they should remember to keep doing it forever after. Now that idea seems laughable to me. Of course they aren’t going to get it after one time. Who could? I certainly can’t. How many times have I been told to eat more vegetables and less sugar? Do I do it? Not nearly so well as I would like to. It isn’t that I’m stubborn or forgetful or incapable. It has much more to do with the habits I already have in place, my environment, and my lack of knowledge about healthy eating.
Once I started approaching teaching with a more long-term view, understanding that students will not get things consistently the first time, then I started setting up additional exercises to allow my students to practice skills. For example, if my students struggle to get a certain finger pattern in tune, I create exercises that specifically target that finger pattern and do them with the students over the course of several days or weeks. When we encounter that finger pattern in the context of a piece, I refer back to the exercises and remind them of what we’ve been practicing.
I also have created a culture of marking up the music. Students are more likely to play things correctly if they mark their music in a way to remind themselves what to do. At the end of last year, I collected the music back from the students to file it away. As I was sorting through the music, I was struck by how much writing there was all over the music. Almost every person had made some markings, and much of the music was covered in markings from beginning to end. For me, that was a proud moment. Those markings represented students listening to my instruction and taking the time to do something about it. Those markings meant more consistent performances.
Lastly, I think my students have become more consistent because I have become more aware of their capabilities. I try not to program music that is going to push them to the edge of their abilities. Yes, let’s challenge our students and ourselves, but those challenges need to be developmentally appropriate. Also, I look for ways to challenge my students in a variety of ways. We don’t always need to be playing faster, harder music. Sometimes a piece of music looks easy but offers challenges in musicality. Sometimes I give my students easier music than what they could do because I want to give them practice with new skills.
My students still aren’t consistent all the time, and that’s okay. None of us are. Even professional musicians strive for greater consistency every day. My job as a teacher is to show up more and more consistently for my students by continually improving. If we can do that, I believe our students will follow.