The Lesson

The structure of a lesson is important. Try not to sit the child down and start playing immediately as s/he might not be ready. Instead, warm up with some of the following:

Rhythm work - clap simple four beat rhythms to the pupil and get them to clap them back. Use different body sounds, slapping your thighs (patschen), clicking your fingers, etc. Get the child to try making up rhythms that you copy. Alternatively, clap a phrase and get the child to improvise one in response. (As the child progresses, make sure that you start to use other time signatures; 3/4 is hard to work with when impro-vising - pupils and teachers alike prefer 4/4)

Sight singing - this is important as it helps to develop the aural skills that are so important in so many aspects of music making. Excellent material for sight singing has been written by Zoltan Kodály and is published by Boosey and Hawkes. These start with pentatonic exercises using tonic sol-fa and develop through major and minor modes. More on this later.

Sight reading - something most piano teachers don't like to touch unless there is an exam in the offing. You should teach the techniques of sight reading and stress the pleasure of being able to sit and play what is seen.

Aural skills - these can be developed from the music the child is studying. Don't allow these to fall behind as they can create difficulties in exam situations.

A forty-five minute lesson should have a good portion given over to the development of these skills. It is then that things can move on to practised music.

It is easy to say "teach", but the right techniques and approaches are difficult to know, especially for inexperienced tutors. I am convinced that my first pupils learned their playing though a form of psychic osmosis! I was not really teaching - I only listened and made a few general comments. Lessons became increasingly boring for me, my concentration became limited, and in some lessons, I began even to fall asleep! The problem was that I was not focussing on developing specific skills and was becoming too distracted. After I started talking to examiners, however, I found they marked using specific criteria and, by adopting similar approaches in lessons, discovered a valuable focus for my attention.

One such set of criteria is used effectively by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama for their external examinations. By concentrating on what specific skills are required in performance, they have come up with the following 'basic' elements:

Some of you might be shrinking away from the idea of categorising music in this manner, but both the Guildhall and good teachers alike know that there are overlaps, and that one area might easily influence another. But focussing on such criteria helps the teacher to pick out specific faults in a student's playing, and allows the teacher to come up with plans to help solve these - a lot better than the general mish-mash that can take place in piano lessons!

Based on a system that the Guildhall have developed to help teachers in the lesson, the following table might be photocopied and used. (Please note that you will need Acrobat Reader to view the documents in this article).

The table can be easily adapted to suit your own requirements, but in essence, this sheet gives both the pupil and parent a visual record of how they are performing and where strengths and weaknesses lie. You can suggest one or two areas that the pupil needs to keep in mind when practising during the week. For beginners and younger pupils, a simplified system using only three levels can be used.

In line with school educational policies, such assessment tables as these might be kept, helping the pupil to form a personal musical profile which can be used at a later date as evidence of achievement.

The length of a lesson is important and you should be aware that not all pupils are capable of concentrating for extended periods. This is particularly the case with very young children. If you are to teach all areas thoroughly, a lesson should take approximately forty to forty-five minutes, but, in certain instances, this might prove to be too much. There is no reason why lessons cannot be split between two sessions, one concentrating on the playing and the other on tests. Failing this, a shorter lesson in the first instance should be acceptable, although not preferable.

The rate at which children learn can often be a slow process, especially if sight reading skills are ineffective. I have tried various methods over the years but the most effective involves centring on the skills which a piece of music teaches a student.

I experimented on two children of similar age and abilities, asking each of them to learn the same piece of music, but in a different way. One pupil learned the music from the beginning as a complete unit whereas the other was required to use a skills-based approach thus:

Both pupils had agreed to do the same amount of practice on the music, but the results were quite different; the one who tried the latter method had the music perfected well in advance of the other. A similar experiment, using the same piece, with pupils of differing standards (one Grade 4 and one Grade 5) had similar results. By taking the technical problems out of context and studying them, and by being made aware of the techniques needed, a pupil should be able to work more independently, choosing the correct technique for the correct situation. The reason for this is quite apparent: when practising, pupils can become too carried away with superfluous material that one often finds, because it can be played easily, the centre of attention. The difficult areas are not done because there are more pleasant things to do. By re-directing the pupil's attention and efforts during preparation, more can be achieved in a much shorter period.

Tip

When the music gets to the point where the pupil is perfecting it, or for that matter if you decide to teach a piece as a complete unit, it is sometimes a good idea to make the student learn it "backwards" - that is, starting it with the last few bars or section and playing through to the double-bar. This is because when a musician learns a piece from the beginning, the number of times s/he plays through from the start until the point at which s/he can go no further is quite remarkable. The beginning is being strengthened. As the piece progresses, generally it becomes weaker and weaker due to the later sections having not been played as many times. Working backwards will allow the end to be equally as strong.

Recapitulation

• Break the music into differing sections, allowing work to be done on several different musical skills.
• Assess each piece weekly, focussing your teaching on specific criteria and make notes where necessary.
• Rather than 'rail-roading' a pupil through a piece of music, break it down into several smaller sections chosen to develop specific skills and techniques.

Next month, Alison pays attention to the two 'Ps', practice and progression.

Alison Ruddock