The struggle to motivate students to practice is not a new phenomenon for piano teachers. Many piano students find it difficult to merely sit on their piano bench once a week, if at all. While this could be due to our students’ lack of discipline, most of the time, our students are just too busy. Afterschool activities throughout the week, such as tutoring, sports, art classes, homework, and afterschool care are taking up more and more of children’s time. In our students’ busy schedules, oftentimes, practicing is not an option.
Furthermore, most of these afterschool activities are adult-supervised, highly structured, and adult-evaluated activities; they are often a sort of extension of school. Many of them, such as tutoring, sports, and music, come with pressure to perform: if children do not achieve what the adults, including parents and teachers, wish for them to achieve, they have somehow missed the mark, and will need to work harder to make up for it. In Canada, children’s free time is increasingly being consumed by activities in which what they say, do, and produce are constantly being evaluated, assessed, and compared. Children’s free time is disappearing; their lives typically mirror the busy, scheduled workdays of adults. Children are also experiencing earlier and earlier the weary burnout of full-time working adults. It is no surprise, then, that when children do have free time, they are less inclined to work on activities that might be associated with pressure and stress.
When they have time, children are more inclined to engage in free play. Children’s free play looks like running around, making friends, making up games, trying new things, and freely expressing thoughts and ideas. Children don’t have to be motivated to develop, learn, or be curious; they already are! But, if they are continually pressured by adults to do things “right,” and even made to feel shame if they don’t, their curiosity can be beaten down; their intrinsic, internally generated, motivation can quickly fade. So often, in our society, children are rewarded for obedience, rather than exploration and creativity. What do we think this has done to children’s natural inclination to learn?
While my students may not always be motivated to get to the piano, I do see that they love music. In their recesses at school, students will teach one another songs or clapping games, and they love to dance. My students always show me new dance routines that they learned on TikTok and songs on YouTube that they love to sing. Children are still drawn to music in their free time, both with their friends and on their own. How lucky are we as teachers to have students who are naturally motivated to be around music, to learn music, and to teach music to others in their free play? This is not the case for teachers of all subjects!
While adults may see it as trivial, free play is the key medium through which children learn about themselves, others, and the world around them. Children’s play is sophisticated; in free play, children set their own rules to their own games based on what they know they can handle. Their inner drive and curiosity usually help them set rules to push them forward, and other playmates and teachers can also help them move forward in their learning by providing challenges. Children’s learning through play allows them to engage in and absorb everything around them, and it helps them sort through information, organizing and constructing their own knowledge from their experiences. When societies deprive children of play, they deprive children of the necessary tool for their natural learning and holistic development.
Piano teachers can incorporate activities that resemble children’s play – even activate children’s play – in their lessons in order to help students learn from within their own learning contexts. This learning can help students engage with the piano in ways that encourage their curiosity and ignite their internal motivation. But how can we do this? How can we set up a playful lesson space that is so inspiring that our students want to play the instrument on their own without being asked, bribed, or forced?
For me, I think the best way to facilitate playful activities in lessons is to approach each lesson as a joint exploring session. I am my student’s musical friend, and we’re going on an expedition! That’s what children do in play: they jointly explore their surroundings. This might look like allowing my students to explore ideas out loud, to verbalize a thought while standing, or to demonstrate an idea that isn’t part of the plan. To become a joint explorer, I have to become a curious participant, equally as excited as my student is in the world and in sound. To encourage this exploration of sound, I am often using the phrase “what would it sound like if…?” For example, “What would it sound like if a squirrel were playing this song?” Or “What would it sound like if this song were on a boat?” As teachers, we are so used to the instrument, that sometimes, we can be a bit numb to the exciting and imaginative possibilities it has to offer in “simpler” music. For a students’ exploration, we can bring ourselves right there with them, becoming curious and excited collaborators.
Another way to create a playful and collaborative lesson space is to embrace spontaneity. When introducing something new for my students, I often use the phrase, “I just got an idea!” Children say this to one another often, and the excitement of the phrase captures their curiosity. Even if I actually got the idea ten years ago, it may have just popped into my head in that moment, so I say so! And if my student has an idea, all the better! I want him to be able to blurt it out, to freely express it without fear of shame or failure. Anything, any idea can be taken up and used for learning in the lesson, no matter how off topic or “distracted” it may seem. Anything that my student says can be redirected to the piano in a spontaneous and exploratory way. For example, if my student starts talking about his camping trip, I can listen for a moment and then say, “I just got an idea! When we play this song, let’s imagine that we are playing piano in a tent while it’s raining!”
As we are exploring, I give my students “clues” of where to look and what to look for. For example, “if you look here, this will help you find where to put your hands.” Or “if you look here, you can find how many counts are in each measure.” Through these clues, my students learn symbols, finger numbers, rhythm, clefs, notation, technique, and more. When information is presented as a clue, my students are thrilled; they have a new tool for understanding and learning. Clues are suggestions, not commands. If I were to tell my students to look somewhere, it’s no longer their own. By saying, “If you look here,” I am giving them the option to guide their own eyes, to guide their own learning. These clues help them when they go home with the task of exploring the next songs on their own. Next week I will ask them “How did you know where to put your hands? Where did you look?” And they teach me.
Children learn through their curiosity, which drives them to explore and discover. Playful learning experiences, such as joint exploring sessions, are relevant to, understood by, and memorable for our students. When my students go home, I hope that their lesson experiences lead them to look at their piano as a toy, another method of exploring the world. I hope that they can glance across the room at the piano and think, “I want to try that thing again,” or “I wonder if I can find that tune.” I hope to help them develop a relationship with the instrument that is not coloured by stress and frustration.
If our students have the option to build a relationship with the piano that is surrounded by free, spontaneous, and exploratory play, we might be surprised. We might find that our teaching is more fun than we had ever imagined, and we might find that our students are capable of more than what we had ever imagined!
Written by Bronwyn Schuman, Founder of Music Theory Playground™ (Originally written for APTA in 2022)