Once in college I remember my professor asking us what we should do about those students who just weren’t as good at music as others. Do you try to teach them anyway? Let them drop out? Encourage them to stay? I didn’t come away with answers, just more questions and confusion.
Recently a colleague was talking to the instructional coach at her school. The coach asked her what it was like to teach a subject where some kids will just never be as good as others. My colleague was caught off guard and didn’t quite know how to respond.
Both of these conversations show a common belief about music: some people are born with natural talent and some aren’t. This belief isn’t unique to music, but I’ve noticed it does seem to be more common in the arts and specifically music.
So what is natural talent?
Talent is extremely hard to define, and even harder to measure. People have tried for decades to measure natural aptitude with limited success. Some people with a lot of “natural talent” never do anything with that talent, while other people who seem to lack any sort of talent at all go on to become the top of their field. History is full of Michael Jordans, Thomas Edisons, and Vincent Van Goghs who start off as failures and are counted as talentless but are later acclaimed for their accomplishments.
If we can’t define or measure talent, then why are we so obsessed with it?
I had that discussion with my students. I asked them, does talent matter? That conversation was one of the best things I’ve ever done with my students. We talked for quite a while, going back and forth between sides, and eventually we came to some conclusions as a class. My students agreed that natural talent exists. Some people really do have a natural advantage in some areas. My students also agreed that having talent doesn’t really matter until you reach the highest levels of the discipline because everyone can learn and progress with time and effort.
“People get so caught up in the fact they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.”
James Clear, Atomic Habits
If you’re familiar with Carol Dweck’s work on growth and fixed mindset, this will all sound familiar. To summarize, Dweck found that we tend to adopt one of two mindsets as we go through life and encounter challenges. A fixed mindset means that we believe that we were born with a fixed amount of potential. If we succeed at something, we must be naturally good at it. If we fail, we must be naturally bad at it and there’s no point in trying to improve. A person with a growth mindset, on the other hand, believes that we can always improve and gain new skills. Failures are just learning experiences that help us succeed in the future.
As teachers, it is crucial that we come to our students with a growth mindset. We have to believe that they can grow and improve with time and effort. Yes, some students will progress faster than others. Some students will be more motivated, have better fine motor skills, or more musical experience. It’s no different in any other subject area. Some students will do better in math than others. Some students learn languages faster than others. Some students write better than others. That’s not the point. The point is that all students can learn. All students can succeed.
So what can we do to foster a growth mindset in our classes?
We can start by educating ourselves and identifying the areas where we have a fixed mindset ourselves. If you haven’t read Mindset by Carol Dweck, you should. She has a lot of great ideas about how to adjust your mindset and how to foster a growth mindset in others.
We can make our classrooms a place where everyone is expected to succeed. One of the reasons why I don’t do traditional seating in my orchestras, with the best players at the front and the worst players in the back, is because I don’t want my students to rank themselves in some hierarchy. I expect every student in my class to perform equally well on the music we play, and I show them that by trusting them to play any part I give them, anywhere in the orchestra.
We can adjust our teaching to make sure everyone gets the skills they need to succeed. Too often we rely on the skills that students already have. We bemoan the fact that these students just can’t count, or we hope that the four students who take private lessons can somehow carry the rest of the group. If students don’t have the skills they need to be successful, then we need to teach them those skills. If they can’t count, we need to spend more time counting. If the music is beyond them, we need to choose music that’s more on their level and then build up their technique.
We can have discussions with our students and colleagues when those fixed mindset beliefs come up. When a student makes a comment about not being as good as someone else, you can help them see the progress they’ve already made and encourage them to keep working. When another teacher asks what it’s like to teach a class where some students just aren’t as talented, ask them how they do it in their classes and help them to see that it’s not any different. We can bring it up with our classes and help students think through their own mindsets.
Most of the students we teach are not “naturally talented,” whatever that means. Most of them are average. Most of them are there just because they enjoy making music with their friends. That doesn’t diminish our responsibility to teach them and help them achieve as much as possible. It also doesn’t diminish their contribution to our music programs.
No matter how fast or slow our progress is, we’re all in this to grow.