I often come back to Ed Kreitman’s four fundamental pillars of masterful teaching…
- Mastery of the instrument
- Ability to communicate with parents
- Ability to communicate with children
- A complete understanding of one’s teaching sequence, start to finish
Kreitman’s Complete Sequence
The complete understanding of one’s own teaching sequence is the pillar which appears most daunting to me.
Most teachers start their teaching journey with students who are in the middle. For example, many college student teaching programs send young music educators into public middle and high schools to teach students who have already started the instrument but are not yet masters. While this sort of teaching requires personal instrument mastery and hones communication skills, I don’t believe it really develops a music educator’s understanding of development itself.
To understand development, a teacher must move from the middle to the extremes. A teacher must come to know the way of the masters, inside and out, as well as the beautiful, beginning mind of a novice. Then, and only then, can a teacher start draw their own connective tissue from one extreme to the other.
Duke’s Holistic Vision
This idea of complete understanding is also reflected in Dr. Robert Duke’s principle of visioning the student as an accomplished learner, which I discussed a few weeks ago as a strategy to avoid “upside down” teaching.
Dr. Duke’s research shows that masterful teachers have an extremely detailed vision of exactly what the student will look like as a master. By visioning out to the very end of a student’s journey, a teacher can define student success, keep an eye out for issues that will prevent progress, and therefore make the learning process as efficient as possible.
The most important aspect of this vision of mastery, though, is that it is holistic. The vision of the student as an accomplished learner represents a moment in time in which all aspects of the student’s playing function successfully AND coherently. In other words, all components of the teaching process must meet and work with each other for the student to be successful.
If the vision itself isn’t comprehensive or holistic — leaving out any detail in the ecosystem of skilled movements, attitudes, and conceptual understandings which make up the act of playing the violin — then any sequential process you build from the vision is fundamentally misguided. [Read more…]