The experience I have gained from over thirty years’ experience and shared, via the widely-read articles on this site, have been collected together, expanded and updated in the form of my book Teaching Young Instrumentalists: Engagement and Motivation in Group Instrumental Teaching Group teaching is not a second-rate option – it’s a holistic method that…
Actually, I prefer ‘practice makes permanent‘! Here is a short article exploring some of the often contentious issues regarding music practice. In it, I discuss how informed practice works to consolidate learning and thus the importance of appropriate preparation on the part of the students before commencing. I also examine how the teacher’s guidance during the lesson…
This article deals with one of the problems that, for many teachers, is the most challenging: how do we keep everyone involved while at the same time, giving due attention to the problems of individuals? You will find several solutions and discover why this calculation is correct! . Group Instrumental Teaching III – Keeping Everyone Involved
There has been much debate recently regarding an article that appeared in The Guardian on March 27th bemoaning the ever-diminishing provision and status of music education in the UK: a valid subject, well worth any number of column inches, given the decline in school music provision not “since 2010, when the baccalaureate was introduced” as…
As we all know, group teaching is a controversial topic. One of the most frequent objections to it (in my experience) is that since no two students will progress at the same rate, or in the same way, the activity is doomed to failure because the less able students will hold the faster learners back and…
This article deals with one of the problems that, for many teachers, is the most challenging: how do we keep everyone involved while at the same time, giving due attention to the problems of individuals. You will find solutions and discover why this ‘equation’ is correct! . Group Instrumental Teaching III – Keeping Everyone Involved
During the 1990s, I was director of a music support service for schools in the UK. We provided mainly group lessons, so when interviewing prospective teachers, I would ask them what they saw as the advantages or disadvantages of group tuition as opposed to one- to- one teaching. Their answers almost always (and I mean in…
Actually, I prefer ‘practice makes permanent‘! Here is a short article about the thorny issue of music practice – how the teacher’s guidance during the lesson can make it more meaningful and desirable to the student, and how careful a choice of words can make a big difference to attitudes to practice. All very important…
Following on from Let’s Make Music… the article Demonstration, Imitation, Improvisation then Notation, suggests some alternative ways of getting your students to play musically from the start – without getting tied up reading notation. It goes on to suggest ways of introducing notation when the time is right. A ‘part two’ to this article will be…
It is so often taken for granted (students, parents and teachers) that early music lessons will involve learning to read music. After all it’s essential isn’t it? Well, I’m not so sure it is. In this article, I discuss some of the pitfalls of insisting that beginners – particularly children – read music before they…
