My Experimental Student :)

I know this has been a long time in coming, but my camera decided to die, so I had to charge it for a while...

So I really wanted to talk about my new teaching style on this post with one of my bassoon students. My student (in the following pictures) is my experiment for this year as I have been growing as a bassoon instructor. I used to just ask kids to play what they heard from what I played. I was really comfortable with teacher-centered learning as this is what I have grown up with,  but now I am starting to incorporate ways for the students to analyze themselves and help themselves improve without me telling them everything. While my students were doing well the old way, they have now become excellent sight-readers and have a good sense of whether a note is in tune or not.

In this first pictures, my student is buzzing on her reed. This is a little warm up that I do with all of my students first to see if the reed is working, and second to stretch out the jaw and the back of the throat. This helps relax the muscles and gets her ready to play the whole instrument :)

           

 Next I usually have her sing lines that we are about to sight-read (after I've modeled; going along with the familiar) while she fingers it on her horn. This has made her play the line with 98% accuracy on the first try, whereas if we just read it we would've been stopping every two measures. This has helped know what pitches actually sound like and what fingerings to use to get the right notes. Once she's sung it in her head, it's pretty much ingrained.

     Lalala

Last Friday in our lesson we were working on half-holing for some very difficult notes for a sixth grader.

In all honesty it takes a good three weeks for a beginner to get these completely accurate, but my student is way further along than some of my other students have been in the past.

Here are the notes (the ones I was working on are the notes before the "FLICK NOTES!":

                     
Here is a fingering that I was teaching her. For those of you who don't know, I was working on half-hole G, or on the bass clef space G

A lot of the time I was asking her to match me to get the notes perfectly in tune. She may have had the correct fingering, but G on the bassoon is really sharp, so she had to lower it a whole bunch. I had told her in the beginning ways to do that, and I asked her what she did. Most of the time she replied in saying that she opened up her throat to make it more resonant, and in tune with me. I'm getting to the point where I don't have to ask her any more because she automatically does it :) This is what I considered student-centered learning because I was asking her to analyze herself.





Has anyone else had a big change in their teaching style (in any subject!) that has worked out better for the kids? Let me know!