It Was Suppose to be Incredible! What happened?

It's a full moon. You don't even have to look outside to know what I mean. Your lesson is set to go. The experience that you are going to give your students is so engaging that you almost want to wet your pants with the anticipation of what is going to happen. They show up at your door and BINGO the whole lesson goes right in the toilet! You've got 40 minutes more to kill and you do your darndest to give them that experience that you know is going to be life changing. But the only thing that it changes is your desire to ever teach again!

So what happened? You reached that point where skill building and aesthetic experiences meet but don't mix. Your student would have done better if they had just a few more skills under their belts but you were certain that if you could just do a little more of the aesthetic experience it would take care of itself. It happens to all teachers even if they won't admit it happens. Because of our own artistic desire to create music and because Schulwerk process is so accessible to all learners we continue to push to give our students an experience they are not ready for yet. The more we push the more they push back causing us to question ourselves and our ability to create.

The flip side of pushing aesthetic experiences is trying to push skill building until they are about to burst. Skill building is attractive because it's concrete and easily shown to others as an achievement in learning. Put pencil to paper and everyone understands right and wrong answers. Too much skill building however begins to kill the learner because application of skills without experience is just as bad as experience without skill building.

So now you're saying to yourself "Where does all this leave me?". It leaves you with the task of using keen observation and "on the run" evaluation at it's fullest extent. We have to make sure that as we apply our lessons that we step back and evaluate why it is or is not going well. The biggest mistake that we make in teaching is trying to continue building skills or give aesthetic experiences even when it is noticeable that the class is not receptive to the activity.

How often do you continue to hammer away at a skill knowing full well that the class checked out 5 minutes ago? At this point you decided that you would just beat away at the skills and concepts because you knew that one way or another as "God as your wittiness" they were going to learn that skill!

The flip side will give you these results. Remember the last time you tried to stimulate creative ideas only to realize that everything that was happening came out of your mind and not the students'. Rather than stop that wonderful creative flow (by the way it was just your creativity not theirs)you continued to pour out more and more until there was nothing but unbridled chaos running rampant in your room. Why? Because in an attempt to give that creative experience you missed setting it up with proper skills and technique. What your students did was bring the entire lesson to a halt because of lack of understanding of where the lesson was going and how to develop it.

There is a plus and minus to both types of experiences. During the plus phase of either experience is when we need to be the most alert. A successful lesson that builds technique and skills should be balanced off as soon as possible with an aesthetic experience. Likewise if the lesson was mostly experiential it is necessary to include some type of skill building set-up before continuing on with that incredible "creative flow".

Recognizing this ebb and flow during instruction takes time and practice. You've got to be aware of whether the reason the lesson isn't going well is because of the students attitude or because of an imbalance between skills and application. So the next time you're working hard at a lesson and it's not going very well the fix could be as simple as changing gears