Do your students ever get frustrated during their lessons? Have you ever had the following situation? The student repeatedly returns to the beginning of the piece, starting over again and again in order to create sufficient momentum to make it through the unwieldy challenges in bar 3. Finally, after several unsuccessful attempts and in acknowledgment of having hit a brick wall, the student fumes, “I can’t believe this! I played this piece with no mistakes every day last week!” The tone of frustration is evident in every syllable and the ever-increasing body tension. What do you do? What do you say?
Consider these options:
A. The teacher says, “Don’t worry. It happens to everybody. Why don’t you just give it one more try?”
B. The teacher says, “Just calm down and don’t put so much pressure on yourself… Everything’s okay.”
C. The teacher says something else.
While it’s easy to appreciate the teacher’s attempt to neutralize the situation in both options A and B, it’s interesting to consider how each of these options uses statements that are completely contradictory to the student’s experience.
“Don’t worry.” – The student has already passed the point of worrying. Telling him or her not to worry will most likely have no positive impact.
“It happens to everybody.” – A nice bit of information, but knowing it happens to everyone else doesn’t really give the student any sense of what to do next.
“Why don’t you just give it one more try?” – At this point, it’s highly unlikely that trying it one more time will produce a different result.
“Just calm down and don’t put so much pressure on yourself.” – Good advice that goes completely opposite to what the student is experiencing.
“Everything’s okay.” – Obviously everything is not okay. Saying it’s okay only indicates the teacher doesn’t really understand what’s going on.
As an alternative, I’d like to suggest that when teachers encounter student frustration like the above example, we consider four steps for follow up.
- Acknowledge the student’s response – “I hear what you’re saying.” "I see what you're going through." These simple empathic statements go a long ways to confirm that teachers are on the same page as their students.
- Solicit the student’s involvement – “What do you think is going on?” Rather than jumping to solve the situation, teachers indicate their confidence in the student’s thinking process.
- Allow the student sufficient time to process what’s happening. It could take an entire 60 seconds of reflective thinking for students to come up with an accurate assessment.
- Demonstrate your willingness to contribute – “What do you need from me?” “What can I do to help?”
The point is for teachers to respond to the student's frustration with language that conveys their understanding of the situation. And for teachers to avoid contradicting the student’s own personal experience by using language that dismisses or neutralizes what the student is going through. When teachers downplay the intensity of the student’s experience, it’s easy for students to lose confidence in the teacher’s ability to really grasp what they’re experiencing. When teachers create safe space for students to recognize their own frustrations and (over time) come up with students' own solutions and test out those solutions, they prepare students for the inevitability of the next frustrating situation. Something that may not be all that far off...
