JAVS Spring 2024

The teacher’s challenge lies in creating a lesson environment where students are open enough to inhabit a concept physically so that the learning process becomes natural, commonplace, even predictable, and a reward unto itself. And this necessitates an enormous act of effort and empathy to go back and remember how it felt when something seemed confusing or impossible. Sometimes called the curse of expertise, experts can forget how difficult it can be to learn something because they have already mastered it. In three broad categories, I accumulated the following exercises from these pedagogues: 1. Focusing the Tone stressed the ideal sounding point with the corresponding weight and speed while drawing one long, slow bow, finding the “sweet spot” of resonance specific to my instrument. 2. Developing Right-hand Arm Refinement emphasized the smoothness of the bow change at both the frog and the tip through coordinating the motion with the breath. 3. Varying the Bow’s Speed involved changing the bow speed to serve the trajectory of the phrase, playing notes with shorter duration (e.g. eighth notes and sixteenth notes) with faster bow speeds. Finally, I wanted to figure out how to persuade my students to care more about their sound as I was, developing more specific skills. The social science behind what makes people care identifies five principles that are supported by research from a range of academic disciplines. 11 Collectively, these guidelines can offer a framework for building and assessing one’s communication strategy and design efforts in the teaching studio more likely to result in belief and behavior change. These include: • Principle #1: Join a Community º Suggestion: Identify a group whose change in behavior could make a profound difference for your issue or inspire students to take action and figure out how to bring that group value. º Musical Corollary: A violist can directly serve an ensemble (both chamber music and orchestra) with greater resonance. • Principle #2: Communicate in Images º Suggestion: Use visual images instead of abstract concepts to help a student connect with your work/ approach. º Musical Corollary: Teaching music through images was the most common approach in the time spent

• scaffolding, or supportive activities provided by the educator, or more competent peer, to support the student as s/he is led through the ZPD I was most interested in refining the collaborative dialogue with my students. The usual way I had approached my teaching relied on language to reinforce the desired results (e.g., saying ‘great job,’ or, ‘no, that’s wrong’). I realize now that it may have gotten in the way; that praise and criticism tended to make students pay attention to me as a teacher and focus on what I think of them, not on the technique or their own discernment. Without these emotional crosscurrents, my students could ideally concentrate on the task they were learning if I could ask them targeted questions about their perspective, asking them to articulate how something physically felt to them. These lessons I took also demonstrated the enormous role kindness can play and provided an example for how I could reframe the power of self-criticism. One person has power; one does not. One person has expertise; one does not. One person can offer praise; the other is hungry for validation. This relationship can be damaged in a single, unthinking moment. Students rarely reveal feelings of humiliation or shame, but they are listening and internalizing the reactions they hear from their teachers. Inevitably, the voices of teachers subconsciously become part of the way students talk to themselves in this progress towards independence, especially when recognizing how fragile learning moments can be when everybody is trying hard. This approach suggests that teaching can be effective without the use of criticism, but also without the use of praise. The student must cross that bridge of understanding concepts for themselves, but the teacher is anything but a bystander. It is the teacher who designs the world in which the student learns. In the case of sound development, the teacher, Tanya Carey made the point that other people in one’s environment also matter: The first prerequisite to having a beautiful tone is to have the sound in your head. Just like we speak with the accent of the language we hear, we will want to produce a tone like those we hear from our peers, teachers and in recordings and concerts. The sound is internal, not external. We must have an efficient, flexible and balanced body that is able to produce that sound. 10

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring 2024