This is just a sketch of a sketch of an idea.

I love watching musicians work. We have a vision of the romantic composer scribbling on scattered staff paper–even on the walls if they must– just to get their ideas down. But now, we also have musicians working in Digital Audio Workstations. What they call DAWs, pronounced ‘dauh.’ You can even watch them do this work on YouTube.

JC Logic Session Breakdown

Other industries have other versions of DAWs.
– Graphic designers use Adobe Illustrator.
– Architects work in CAD.
– Writers use Scrivener.
– Film makers use Premier.
– Fashion designers use dress forms.

The function of these modeling softwares is that the creator has dominion over the dimensions of their art form. For example, musicians were forced to write on paper before because that was the only way to document and constrain time. Now the time and timbre of music can be embedded, recorded, even programmed appropriately into the workstation. Musicians can listen back to what they’ve made. They can save and return to it. They can scoot elements around, visually. They can speed or slow the entire composition all at once. The DAW gives a musician the opportunity to work with the music as an object.

DAW’s allow you to span time with a timeline, develop harmony vertically, embed the information of the sound (timbre, instrument, volume, decay, etc.), and copy/paste or loop if desired.

CAD (computer aided drafting) allows you to work in 2d or 3d space. You can rotate yourself around an object. Embed information on different materials.

Premiere (video editing) is like a DAW, but also contains the visual element. You can scrub through all footage in a timeline. Cut in different footage. You can even layer videos and audio over the top of each other on a vertical grid (much like the music software).

As I watched Jacob Collier work for hours with such fluidity in his DAW, I started to wonder about the Teaching work space? How do we work on and work out our art form?

We use lists, and back of receipts, and the margins of conference session handouts. Maybe a particularly organized teacher has a collection of three ring binders with teacher training notes and a few sequencing ideas. Some teachers have it written out for their parents on handouts? Some teachers embed some notes in the Suzuki Volume books themselves.

I know there are teachers out there who must be getting at the heart of our craft in really clear ways. They must really understand how teaching works from the inside. But I know that I am not yet there, and it is hard for me to figure out how to break through into the center of this. My hunch is that it has more to do with the tools available to me than any sort of lack of willpower.

What do we have?

Written word. Video. Audio. Sheet music. Those are our tools.

So visualize with me, for a second, what a DAW for teachers could contain. These are just ideas.

Should we call it a DTW? Digital Teacher Workspace? Doesn’t have the same ring to it…

What if it was something like a database? It stored all footage from every child’s lesson. The lesson was mapped and tagged with important data (like new teaching points, the one point, powerful learning experiences, frank coversations, and things the child was excited to share). A teacher could settle into their DTW and review that childs’ history. From the week to week scale to the year to year scale. Or the teacher could simply look at the highlights.

What if a DTW could project forward? It could artificially render a projection of your student in 10 years time. Visualizing your student as an accomplished learner.

What if the DTW was self referential? What if it could map out the Matrix. What if it could show the intersecting grid points of all of the vertices? What if those intersections could store examples from your students’ lessons from above? Infinite room to stretch, store, sequence. Effortlessly toggling through the parts or the sum.

What if the DTW could perform functions like Scribe?

What if it could identify for you fuzzy spots and black holes? Places where you haven’t investigated. Errors or contradictions in your own method.

What if the DTW could 3d model the bow arm, the violin hand, the body stance? What if it could would model your conception of particular techniques, or even how that technique fits into the repertoire. What if that 3d model were flexible enough to take into account not just your own body dimensions and mechanics, but children with different proportions or different stregths (a short pinkie or wider shoulders, for example).

What if the DTW was able to offer a flight simulation? What if you could teach the same situation real time, over and over again? What if you could get repetitions. What if you could change specific variables of your choosing? What if you could learn from and re-do particular moments in particular lessons? What if you could dive in to a child’s stream of lessons (years later) and reteach particular moments to see what their effects were?

Again, these are just ideas, and I certainly don’t have the resources to build something of this nature right now. But I’m not going to let my limitations stand in the way of my vision. Even just visualizing the possibilities cues me into sorts of work I would bounce off of otherwise.

Do you have the resources to put something like this together? How would you use a DTW?