This reading was interesting in many ways but at the same time, I feel like it only relayed information that was obvious and did not go very far in depth. I found it interesting that there was an experiment done with this subject and was incredibly interested to see what the results would be. I wanted to know what the techniques teachers used were and also if they worked for the students or if they did not. However, the discoveries weren’t anything different from what I’d expected or already known. Especially the points like the one in which they discovered that teachers often orient their lessons to their students skills level and give them achievable goals, they seemed obvious and like common sense to me. Even so, it is nice to know that teachers do have some overlapping techniques that are affect and do work. It’s good to look over these regardless of whether we think we know them or not and be aware of the techniques we are using that work across the board. I think that further studies on the topic and even more in-depth experiments would be incredibly helpful for the furthering this thought and understanding more precisely what makes a good teacher. It would interesting to see if these techniques worked with students at different levels of practice. How would the effectiveness of the technique change with beginners, intermediate and expert musicians who are trying to further learn their craft? I wonder if there would be a point where the teaching methods would become less effective and what the teachers would do to mold themselves to the new students. If they choose not to change anything, I wonder if it would affect the students learning and how encouraged they felt after each class. There are so many variables to play with here and I think that a lot more could have been and still could be learned from taking the time to do more in-depth experiments even possibly with a greater pool of data. Overall, I found it interesting to get to read about experiments that are occurring in music about music education but I would love to be able to look for more in-depth experiments to and maybe even other documented experiments on my own time to look further into this topic and see what similarities or differences may arise in the data and information collected.
Duke, R. A., & Simmons, A. L. (2006). The nature of expertise: Narrative descriptions of 19 common elements observed in the lessons of three renowned artist-teachers. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, (170), 7-19.
