The topic of this article was very familiar to me. I’ve had 6 years of experience teaching private lessons and have taught in many different settings with a wonderful variety of students.
I was 16 when I started teaching, and I used to constantly doubt my methods. I was trying my best to emulate teachers I’d had in the past and follow the path the method book laid out, but since I didn’t have a piano teacher at the time, or know many other piano teachers, there was no one to ask if I was doing things right and no way for me to know how to make changes. As mentioned in the article, in the isolated setting of private lessons, a teacher relies “…on her students’ performance results to indirectly validate her own success” (p. 5). They don’t go into detail about what that could mean for the student, or the teacher’s behavior, but I think that’s a lot of pressure to place on a child, and could result in the teacher being very sensitive to the student’s progress (or lack thereof). I used to also get very self-conscious during a lesson if the piano was in view of the parents. Teaching in a closed-off space felt much easier, so I understand the appeal of the isolated setting of a studio. The self-consciousness came from a place of insecurity about my methods, and I found this quote summed it up perfectly: “Such insecurity and vulnerability seem to exist…because of the lack of context they have for their own approach in relation to formal structures, and therefore a strong reliance they have on feelings and intuition in making pedagogical decisions.” (p. 12). After a couple of years of struggling to develop a pedagogical method, I signed up to take an online RCM course about elementary level piano pedagogy. Actively engaging with the other students was a key part of the course, and I think I learned more from talking to them than I did from the actual course! As informative as the course was, the other teachers could give me real life examples and creative activities that they had personally used in their own practices. It was also very validating to have others comment on my own ideas in a positive way. I understand the fear of accountability and unwillingness to share that is apparently common among music teachers but getting over that and engaging in a community of educators was one of the most rewarding pedagogical experiences I have ever had. Something that stuck out to me in both the article and Prof. Chiles’ lecture was that in the master and apprentice model, there is supposed to be an extended community of masters that the apprentice is exposed to. That is what I was missing when I started teaching, and that is what I found when I took the online course. I wasn’t backed by any institution, so I understand why I didn’t have access to a whole network of teachers, but it’s terribly frustrating that institutions with the power to bring together a community of educators don’t do so. There is so much potential for professional development within larger institutions, and I hope that institution backed community events become a normal part of being a music teacher. Bibliography Burwell, K., Carey, G., & Bennett, D. (2017). Isolation in studio music teaching: The secret garden. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 18(4), 372-394.
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