While I was driving up to Matrix this past weekend I was listening to a podcast, The School of Greatness (highly recommend). It was the episode from this past Friday (January 7), and it was a mash up of 4 different episodes. The overarching theme was 4 habits that you need to crush the new year. The episode is about an hour and a half long and I highly recommend taking the time to listen to it.
I want to talk about one of the lessons that I have kind of been focused on for a little while (even before listening to the episode). I want to set it up with the most memorable quote from that podcast episode. "If you had a genie that could grant you any wish, with no limit on the wish, you would wish for more wishes. Well, I am your learning genie. What would you wish to learn? I would tell you that you should wish to learn how to learn." (I am doing that from memory so the wording may not be exact, but the idea is there.). They go on to say that really it would be to learn faster, and that is what I want to focus on today.
In the last year or so, I have made a shift in how I teach skills to my students at all levels. In the past I would teach the skill, breakdown the skill, reinforce/clean the skill, and then rep the skill until we were all blue in the face. While this was successful, the roadblock came when that skill was presented in a way that was different from how it was taught. There was little to no transfer of knowledge from the exercise to the application.
Now, it is my goal to teach the skill as fast as possible and then throw as many variations of the skill at the students as possible. In fact, I find myself throwing variations at students before "mastery" of the skill is even achieved. However, if you think about it don't we do that in most areas anyways? We don't wait until students have a mastery of a primary language before we ask them to read. In sports, we give students the fundamental training needed to throw a ball, or shoot a basket, and then put them into game time situations. We don't have them "master" all the different locations/distances they could need to shoot, or throw, from before putting them into performance pressure situations.
However, I witness it all the time in music. "Well we haven't worked at it at this tempo, or this sticking, or off this hand, or while moving, or whatever situation you want to insert here." And usually the students are well trained in these instances, BUT only at the skill in the application they have been accustom too. Any variance to that application throws the student into chaos. So they are well trained, or I would say well-taught, but not as well learned.
So what does this look like for me? At the high school level, I split up exercises into small chunks and change dynamics, or directions, at the chunks. So when we play our scale exercises, I will split the scales into thirds (splitting at the major thirds (C to E, E to G#, Ab to C) make the students spell the thirds correctly please) and change dynamics from the bottom third to the middle to the top. Then we will change directions where one third is played backwards to get them to play scales starting descending first. The we split the hands on some scales (assuming the exercise is originally in double stops). I will eventually layer all of these on top of themselves. So an example of this would be, "AD (our scale exercise), fortissimo (bottom third), mezzo-forte (middle), mezzo-piano (top), forwards (bottom), backwards (middle), forwards (top), hands together on the lower manual scales, split on the top manual scales."
At the world class level, we would add modes into that. A favorite of mine is playing through the major modes, so major (bottom third), Lydian (middle), Mixolydian (top), or through the minor modes (minor, Dorian, Phrygian). Again, the goal of all of this is to get the students to think faster and in the moment. During performances (concert or marching), we don't have time to think about the entirety of the one skill that we are applying to the piece. As musicians, we have to make decisions in the moment by adjusting tempo and/or tuning as things change. Also, once you get past Grade 1 (roughly) music the skills are dictated by the piece of music and less "exercise-like."
I will say that I also layer some skills while doing this with my younger (HS) groups. Like anytime I do a hands split variation of an exercise, either 2 mallets or single alternating strokes with 4 mallets, I give students the option to stay on the hands together variation if they are younger/newer to the skill. At some point I do push the students to at least experiment in the split version to experience what that feels like.
The last thing I will say about this, is that you will watch students struggle and fail while doing this. THAT IS ALRIGHT and the point of this. My goal in all of this is to get them thinking faster to replicate "game time decision making," which is also a skill. As long as they demonstrate a basic understand of the skill, they will dig themselves out of any hole they find themselves in. It is our job to create a safe space for them to experiment, and fail, in. The best way to do that is to put even your best students in a situation where they are failing so they can support each other by experiencing the same things.
So, that is my approach to getting students to think/learn faster. Do you have any tricks/methods for this?
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