I’ve been rehabbing senior horses as a hobby for over 10 years now. Horses rarely verbalize. 99% of their communication is with their body. Observation is key to understanding what they are saying through their body.
Teaching piano, or any other instrument, I have found the same thing to be true. A student’s body is communicating all the time: what they do, what they don’t do. Sometimes what they verbalize is in harmony with their body. Other times it’s not. Sometimes they don’t have the skills to verbalize or they are afraid to verbalize.
My job is to create an environment where students feel safe expressing themselves. When students feel safe, learning goes up exponentially.
I recently had a 9 year-old student come to her lesson not having practiced except for one day. This was unusual for her. I was about to launch into a lecture about practice, and something stopped me. Instead, I chose to get curious about what happened in this student’s world that she barely practiced that week.
It took about 10 minutes to unearth what had happened. But it was time well spent. When I asked questions, many times the student just shrugged her shoulders. But I didn’t let it go. I kept looking for ways to draw her out.
I then said, “If I were in your shoes, and I saw this new piece, I would freak out when I got home because it has way more notes than I’m used to. Is that what happened to you?”
Then the dialogue started. The student was able to verbalize one tiny sentence about her experience. Then her dad chimed in saying that when it was time to practice at home, she didn’t want to because all the pieces were hard, and she wanted easy ones.
So then we went to each piece and I asked, “On a scale of 1-10, is this easy, medium or hard?”
After the student rated each one, we got rid of the “hard” one. Then I found another book that started easy, where she could sight read it, and each following piece added one very tiny new thing.
She had a smile on her face. She felt like she could do it.
Then, my assignment to her: learn a new piece each day. Keep going until you get stuck, and then show me next week. She left that lesson energized about piano again.
Children are learning how to express themselves. They are learning to recognize what they feel in their body and translate it into words they can verbalize. They also test the waters: Is is safe here to express myself, or will I be chastised?
As a teacher, create an environment where the student feels safe being an imperfect human. The more we are at peace with being imperfect humans ourselves the easier this is to do. Share your own experience and challenges learning to play an instrument. The dialogue can begin. Learning will go up, and smiles happen all by themselves.