7.7 Teaching Principles

Essential Question: What makes a music teacher truly effective, and how can we cultivate those qualities in ourselves?

Reflecting on Your Own Teachers

Before we discuss what makes effective teaching, take some time to think about your own experience as a student. You have spent years in lessons, rehearsals, and classrooms with many different teachers. Some of them changed your life for the better. Others may have been ineffective, discouraging, or even harmful. Both kinds of experience have something to teach you now.

Think about the teachers who meant the most to you or had the biggest positive impact on your development. What made their teaching so great? What did they do in lessons that worked? How did they make you feel?

Now think about teachers who were ineffective or worse. What didn’t work? What did they do—or fail to do—that held you back or made the experience negative?

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Principles of Effective Teaching

Being a great performer does not automatically make you a great teacher. Teaching is its own skill, and like playing an instrument, it takes intentional development. The good news is that the qualities that make teaching effective are not mysterious. They come down to a handful of core principles.

Care about your students as people. Students are people first, musicians second. Know who they are, what matters to them, and what is going on in their lives. When students feel genuinely cared for, they are more willing to take risks, be vulnerable, and do the hard work that growth requires.
Give honest, specific feedback. Your students trust you to help them improve. Saying “good” when you don’t mean it, or overlooking problems to avoid discomfort, compromises that trust. Effective feedback is honest, specific, and directed at the problem—never at the person. Telling a student their intonation was sharp on a particular note is not unkind; it is exactly what they need from you.
Teach the student in front of you. A preplanned lecture delivered the same way to every student is not teaching—it is presenting. Effective teaching means observing what this particular student needs right now and responding to it. What are they struggling with today? What are they ready for? Let the student’s playing guide the lesson.
Respond, react, and problem-solve in real time. The best teachers are active listeners and creative problem-solvers. When something isn’t working, they don’t just repeat the same instruction louder. They try a different approach—a new image, a physical demonstration, singing together, simplifying the task—until they find what clicks for that student in that moment.
Understand how students learn. Effective teachers draw on an understanding of how learning actually works: why slow, accurate repetition matters more than mindless drilling; why spacing practice over time beats cramming; why struggle and effort are signs that real learning is happening. When you understand these principles (covered in Lesson 7.1), you can design lessons and practice assignments that lead to lasting improvement.
Share your passion for music. Play expressively when you demonstrate, even the simplest passages. Let your students see and hear why you love this. Technique matters because it serves the music—always bring the lesson back to the beauty and expressiveness that drew your students to their instrument in the first place.
Build student independence. Your ultimate goal is to make yourself unnecessary. Teach students to listen critically, diagnose their own problems, and practice effectively on their own. A student who can only improve in the lesson room is not being well served.
Do no harm. Teachers hold enormous power over their students. The lesson should always be a safe, positive environment where students are challenged but never belittled. If a student isn’t progressing, look honestly at your own teaching before blaming the student.

I have come to a frightening conclusion. I am the decisive element in the classroom. As a teacher I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanized or de-humanized. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather.

—Haim Ginott

Reading

The following excerpt from From the Stage to the Studio: How Fine Musicians Become Great Teachers by Cornelia Watkins and Laurie Scott (Oxford University Press, 2012) expands on these ideas with 22 detailed teaching principles and practical guidance for applying them in lessons.

Revisit Your Toolbox

In Lesson 1.4, you wrote 5–10 teaching principles into your toolbox at the very beginning of this course. Go back and read what you wrote then. How has your concept of effective teaching changed? What would you add, remove, or rephrase now that you have spent time studying pedagogy, instrument technique, and the science of learning? Update your toolbox to reflect your current thinking.

More Resources

How to Speak, by MIT’s Patrick Winston (1 hour – worth every minute!)

Alan Watts, on Music and Life

Dave Eggers’ TED Talk: My Wish: Once Upon a School

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