Thoughts For Next Lesson

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My first lesson was an overall success. I realized quickly that there was a lot I needed to keep in mind when approaching the next one. After thinking more about my assumption that less visual pressure will allow the student to learn quicker, I've realized that my body posture has to change and stay consistent. Since I will be video taping the lessons from here on out I will be able to study my posture with the students and the overall ability to learn guitar because of it. My basic theory is that passive posture will be the best place to start to let the student ease into the lesson. Based on the first lesson, I could tell that I wanted to move closer in to see what the student was doing. I started to slouch and I could tell my face was more intense. In retrospect I can now see that this could become detrimental to the student as they may feel pressure and eventual frustration with the process. However, too much passive posture can make the student feel that they are not doing well as you are uninterested. I am basing this idea on my own experience with music teachers. A lack of interest or physical response can also make you feel that you are not doing something right. Or, what you are doing is boring the teacher. I believe that posture should change given the circumstance.

For instance, when the student starts to learn a guitar chord I have them play each string first. They start by plucking the heavy E string and do not move to the next until a click is heard. A click will not happen until the teacher hears and sees the string played cleanly and correctly. Once the teacher clicks, the student moves to the next string. This can be a very potentially frustrating time for the student. There are many things involved during this process. They are concentrating on holding the chord, playing the string cleanly and fretting the note correctly by the teacher's instruction. On top of that their hands are getting tired and their fingertips may be sore or hurting. I consider this a "Peak" time for the student and they need to feel relaxed and be able to concentrate. It is at this moment that the teacher should have a nice passive posture.

--Passive posture however should not involve sitting back on the chair (i.e. the way we would sit back on a chair to think of a problem or to analyze something in our head). While the teacher may feel that this is comfortable, the student may feel as if they are being judged or over analyzed. Again, this is based on my interactions with past music teachers and people.

When should posture change? Well, the first thing I believe we should to think of when approaching this question is, "What would we want?". In the spirit of click training as well as operant conditioning and positive reinforcement I would only want to change my posture or body language to signal a success to the student. A success would come in many forms, however, we don't want to use body posture as much as we use the clicker. I have a feeling this would condition the student to also look for a body language response and take away from the clickers effectiveness. Instead, I believe that the best time to change body posture would be to signal a "Large Success".

--For example: The student plays each string of the chord. They do not move to the next string until a click is heard. This is a "Peak" time for the student. When the student finally makes it through all the strings the teacher asks the student to play all the strings i.e. the entire chord. Given that the student has learned how the hand should be placed and how the fingers should be placed to play chord cleanly (the student learns this because to play each string cleanly the technique must also be clean)the student now has the hand and fingers situated to be able to play the whole chord correctly. If this is done successfully the student will play the whole chord perfect. This is considered a "Large Success" as the student has made many small successes to get to the final goal: To play the chord correctly. It would be at this point that the teacher would not only click to signal a success, but also rearrange their body posture to show that they are impressed with what the student has accomplished.