Advice for new college-level teachers

A little over a decade ago, I began to give graduates of my guitar program a short document about college-level teaching. I usually gave this to them during their final lesson, although I probably emailed it as well. The last version of this is from 2019. Because my students and I had already developed an understanding—developed throughout years of lessons as well as my pedagogy and literature classes—it wasn’t necessary for me to document everything. In this post, however, I have suggested other places to look for those wanting more detail.

Explanatory and Reactive Teaching

There’s a difference between teaching that is explanatory and teaching that is reactive. For example, master classes are reactive. The “master” responds to what the student has done (or not done). Unfortunately, this is often the only way some guitar teachers teach their students. You’ll need to have developed (read: memorize) mini-presentations for each element of technique that you’ll be introducing to students: seating, hand position, finger strokes, slurs, etc. Even advanced things such as phrasing, voicing, visualization, or how to practice are best presented this way. This is important because one can’t teach the means using only the language of the end. This is also essential when students need to revamp or overhaul their approach to technique. Although pre-college guitar teaching has improved considerably in the past four decades, that improvement served to widen the gap between good teaching and ineffective teaching. The latter has not risen commensurately. A rising tide does not always not lift all boats, especially those anchored to imitation and “maestro inerrancy.”

In subsequent lessons, you can then respond to how the student is doing with whatever you’ve assigned. Of course, you don’t want to sound like a robot, and whatever information you’re presenting can be explained in a different but natural way to each student. The failure of teachers to work this way is the cause of most problems I see with entering students at all levels. Many of these explanations of basic elements of technique can be drawn from Mastering Guitar Technique, but, of course, you shouldn’t be limited by that book. One’s understanding and conception of things change and develop over time.

Individual Curricula

Students arrive at college or university with varying levels of skill, understanding, and motivation. It’s unfair to place them on the Procrustean Bed of a rigid or unrealistic syllabus. If you work with The Classical Guitar Companion, you’ll have an excellent tool to use to devise individual curricula for your students, at least during their first years of college-level study.

Countering Faulty Assumptions

Although some of your entering students may not be up to reading Practicing Music by Design: Historic Virtuosi on Peak Performance, the book can provide you with helpful ways to counter faulty default assumptions many students have about how best to work. These faulty default assumptions usually involve things such as a reliance on massed repetition and the expectation that things will work themselves out given enough time. But the problem is less a problem of time than it is a problem of how one uses one’s time. The “why” of things is what is elusive to those starting out.

I’ve received many comments from readers of Practicing Music by Design about how they appreciated the distinction I make between a “how-to” book and a “why-do” book. For example, I often hear from students that their previous teachers recommended practicing scales in dotted rhythms, but they never knew why this was helpful. (See the discussion of “desirable difficulties” on pages 10 and 11 and in chapter six, “Variety in Repetition,” in Practicing Music by Design.) Once students are convinced of the reasons behind something, their practice becomes more purposeful.

Telling students what to work on is a first step; telling them how to work is a little better; but you’ll have to be insightful and eloquent when clarifying why they should work on something in a specific way. If you’re asking them to change the way they think about their guitar study, you’ll want them to leave the lesson convinced that what you’ve just told them will speed their movement towards mastery.

Repertoire

Don’t give students pieces that are too difficult in initial work. You have to make sure that your students are prepared to succeed with whatever piece you assign to them. This is best accomplished by ensuring they’ve had success solving the less-advanced versions of whatever artistic and technical problems exist in the repertoire you’ve given them. (The Classical Guitar Companion can be helpful for this.) Many students who have auditioned for me play material that’s too difficult, and they’re usually uninformed about what to do to get better. This is not a modern phenomenon: pianist Joseph Lhévinne complained about this in 1924. (Read Lhévinne’s words on page 70 of Practicing Music by Design.)

Tension

Tension never just works itself out. It can only be dealt with by breaking things down into individual components. The first of the three main causes of tension is faulty technical instruction, that is., instructing students to do things that are at odds with the capabilities and limitations of the body. The second cause is that students try to learn or do too many things at the same time, and everything becomes compromised. Students may reach a certain level, but at some point, tension will be a barrier to their progress, but they won’t know that’s the cause unless they end up having pain. Oftentimes, students don’t even know that they’re using too much effort because their perceptions of their bodies can become contaminated and what feels “normal” or right to them ceases to be a reliable guide.

The third cause can be found in an often overlooked characteristic of the guitar. The guitar—along with related plucked instruments such as the lute and vihuela—is the only instrument capable of polyphony and other complex musical textures that requires different complex techniques for each hand. Unnecessary tension in one hand can have unexpected and undesirable effects on the other hand. And although the presence of this tension might be noticeable, its cause can remain elusive to inexperienced students and teachers. I mention this in a footnote in chapter three (footnote 31) of Practicing Music by Design. Were that a guitar-specific book, I would have expanded on the thought. (Also see the opening of chapter seven of The Classical Guitar Companion.)

Unproductive tension compels guitarists to use too much effort when playing. That’s bad enough, but this type of tension also decreases the integrity of one’s “proprioception.” Proprioception is a word coined by neurophysiologist and Nobel laureate Charles Sherrington (1857–1952) by combining the Latin word proprius (“one’s own”) and “perception”: one’s own perceptions of the positions and movements of the body, parts of the body, and joints. Research since Sherrington’s time has shown that proprioception informs our actions, rather than our actions informing our perceptions. This is an important distinction because proprioception can become contaminated. When proprioception becomes contaminated and unreliable, movements become distorted and less efficient; and when movements become compromised, artistry suffers.

Performance

Treat this gradually, as you would any other area of study. Ensure students’ pieces are memorized securely, and have them do several practice performances for you before they perform for others. Don’t ever let a student perform publicly for the first time without having done this. A bad experience can scar a student for life. Students might not even know they’re scarred and may rationalize an unsuccessful performance experience by thinking, “I’m not a performer” or “I’m not talented.” Performance is a skill that can be taught, as long as students are well-prepared and are playing literature appropriate to their level.