A main-stay strategy for today's music teachers.
Music teaching is evolving. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes faster than we can even imagine. These days I’m really grateful for all the teachers who have embraced Students’ Own Repertoire Choice as a mainstay strategy. That’s not to say it was easy to get things going. Because it took trial and error. Figuring things out wasn’t an overnight undertaking. Now if you’re new to Students’ Own Repertoire Choice, we’ve got timely information available so that you can get this amazing teaching strategy up and running as soon as possible. And if you’ve been teaching with Students’ Own Repertoire Choice for some time, a quick review to confirm the various layers might be appropriate.
Right from the First Lesson - Music teachers can initiate students’ own choices right from their very first lesson by exploring selections from their own musical experience. And their choices are wonderfully diverse: Christmas carols, Happy Birthday, kindergarten songs like “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “Hot Cross Buns”, Disney themes, movie music, and popular songs heard at home. For students who are unsure, we might start with the opening notes of a familiar tune such as “Jingle Bells”. The point is that students begin by exploring music they already have in their ears, even if it’s only one short phrase.
As Students Develop - With beginner students, I always rely on their ears as their starting point. Then as students develop their reading abilities, the printed page becomes an increasingly practical resource. Yet, there may be challenges for students at the elementary reading levels and above, as the printed score may not always adequately translate what’s in students’ ears. This means teachers help students explore what’s necessary to make pop song arrangements playable and sound like the original recording.
Who Finds the Music? Looking for music online or through music stores can be a time-consuming activity for music teachers that may not always turn out that well. Especially after teachers spend a considerable amount of time to locate the selection at the most appropriate level for the students - the student tries it out - and then informs the teacher that the piece wasn’t as engaging as they originally thought!! Therefore, the best persons for searching out the appropriate level are the students themselves. What’s interesting in this process is how students find out that not all repertoire suits their personality or fits their hands. Through the process of finding pieces that work and pieces that don’t make the cut, pieces that are too easy and too hard, arrangements that sound super and arrangements that don’t sound anything like what students anticipated, they get really skilled at finding music for themselves. And that skill will make a huge difference for continuing their journey as lifelong music makers.
What About Difficult Repertoire? When students choose repertoire well beyond their current learning mastery, there are several options. Firstly, I’m always open to seeing how far they can get. Even learning one line of Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” may be adequate and inspirational. Sometimes they get further than I anticipated. Next, with my help, they may utilize more productive processes which they might not be able to find on their own. From another perspective, I also have a responsibility to protect students from unhealthy technical demands which can be damaging to students’ ongoing development. This may involve delaying the selection to a time when the student is better prepared to tackle its demands, finding a simplified arrangement more suited to the student’s current ability, or making a partial exploration similar to what I mentioned above in terms of learning even one line without over-extending students’ capability. On other occasions, there’s nothing wrong with moving on to another choice.
The Benefits - I appreciate how teachers may gain deeper insight into our students’ interests, motivations, and learning processes by consistently including students’ own choice alongside our own instructional framework. By doing so, it’s amazing to watch how our students become increasingly aware of their own musical personality. Students learn to play by ear. They learn how to locate resources, adapt, and arrange. They learn how to evaluate repertoire choices and make personally meaningful artistic decisions.
The result is something hard to predict but remarkable to witness: the gradual emergence of each student’s unique musical voice. That voice is already present when students enter our studios. Exploring students’ own choices is a remarkable way to create, nurture, and expand the conditions for their voices to be heard.
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