Welcome back to "Working With Parents". In Parts 1 and 2, we took a look at past parent/teacher interactions and recent research into parental involvement. For Part 3, let's weave all this information together and consider - How can music teachers and parents work together given the many layers of influence in today's context?
At the top of my list, I always want to keep in mind that the parents of my students are real life people. As pointed out by Culturally Responsive Teaching researchers, parents have their own backgrounds and ways of making things work for their children. They live in the real world and they’ve got a lot going on in their lives. Their days are packed full of obligations - they have jobs, partner needs, laundry, making meals, housekeeping, planning for next year and the next ten years. They have a million things on their minds. Their child’s music lessons don’t take place in some kind of idyllic setting. It takes place within the real life schedule of daily life.
Recognizing real life parents means that I welcome parents for who they are, and I anticipate that parents will come with various degrees of involvement - from highly involved to not involved at all. - And how I involve them is always a reflection of Student Independence and Autonomy.
For parents who want to be involved, my focus isn’t on giving parents an endless list of things to do at home. My focus is on strategies that purposefully nurture and support students’ independence.
This means I’m very particular about the language I use during lessons so that I put students in charge at all times. For example - I never turn the parent and say, "Make sure your child does this at home." Or, "Please monitor such and such during your child’s practice." These are statements that put parents in charge not their children.
Right from the very first lesson, I always put the child in charge with statements like: "Why don’t you show your Dad how to do this when you get home? Why not even show him the wrong version and right version so your Dad knows about both?!"
At home, I encourage parents to keep a 3-part framework in mind - Step in, Step back, and Let go. With Step in - parents can provide assistance, but if parents are Stepping in all the time, most likely students get impatient with parents always taking charge. So that’s where Step back is important - in allowing space for children to take ownership of their learning. And Parents Letting go is important - as students benefit when they’re given space to learn and make mistakes, to learn from their success and failures. I also have a timeline for parental involvement — with parents assisting 5 and 6-year old beginners for approximately 2 to 3 years with this age group - and with older beginners - I encourage parental involvement for a much shorter period of time.
That’s what I do with parents who want to be involved. What do I do with parents who want their child to pursue piano lessons on their own? And I should say that I have just as many parents who attend lessons for those first three years as parents who don’t.
What’s really interesting for me is that how I teach doesn’t really change whether parents attend or not. Because what’s most important is how I empower students’ independence right from their very first lesson. When students can’t take ownership of what we’re working on, then I’m the one who needs to make some adjustments.
I need to find ways to make things do-able and manageable - to keep things simple, because if what I’m teaching is so complicated that students can only achieve success by their parents monitoring their practice, then I’m making things much too hard for everyone. And I help students get the most out of doing simple things by doing those simple things several different ways. What’s important when parents aren’t involved is that I teach in a way that my students can take ownership - knowing that at times, everything will go well and on other occasions, it may take more than one week of fine tuning on my part before students get the optimal results.
I hope you can see how working with parents isn’t some kind of one-size-fits-all undertaking. It’s about respecting parents as real life individuals whose daily life includes a wealth of valuable experiences and a ton of responsibilities and obligations. Under such circumstances, involving parents in their children’s musical development works best when we music teachers value parents for who they are and what they’re prepared to do, rather than trying to reconfigure them into some kind of idyllic version of parental involvement.
What seems important for us as music teachers is to be the teachers parents can depend on. We use our awareness into the lives of our students' families to fine tune our teaching. We give our best to make things work for THEIR situation. Accepting parents as real life individuals is fundamental to this process because how parents participate in their child’s musical journey will always be in relation to the values, priorities, and background they bring forward.
Having explored various layers of parental involvement, where do you see commonalities with your own approach?
What stands out for you in this exploration?
