Pretty Wild!

Temperaments can vary greatly. Some students are easy in class, participate well and make good progress. Others are quickly distracted, impulsive, impertinent and make it difficult for themselves, and their fellow students, to make progress, to get into the flow, and to be enthused by music making.

But what can we do, as music educators, to help these children stick with their lessons and to reach their full musical potential?

There are several aspects of our lessons that can be easily adjusted and can ensure calmness. Interior Design that offers few distractions, attention to Lesson Atmosphere and the Dealing with Disruptions are all important, and a good Lesson Structure is also very helpful.

Interior Design

Often, we have little influence over the design of our classrooms, however, using a little creativity, a less than optimal room situation can be turned into something positive.

Try to keep your room as tidy and distraction-free as possible. You can cover untidy tables or shelves with white linen cloths, ask yourself whether every poster or photo on the wall is really essential, and test whether lamps or ceiling lights are too dazzling or provide a pleasant, calming working environment.

It could also be helpful to figure out the least distracting corner of the room and position the music stand in such a way that the student faces this corner.

Teaching Atmosphere

Are you more of a restless or excitable type? Students are sensitive to our own characters and tend to mirror our behaviour. The keyword here is “mirror neurons” (check Dealing with Stress below). Taking a short break before a lesson helps us to calm down and focus, which can prove invaluable. When we are excited, we often start speaking faster and at a slightly higher pitch. Try slowing down a bit. Softer and deeper voices tend to have a soothing effect on people.

Regularly working on a good student-teacher relationship also helps contribute to a better teaching atmosphere. Students these days are not used to facing authoritarian teachers and prefer to be taught on an equal footing. They feel comfortable when they have the feeling of being accepted by their teacher for who they are, and that all their wishes, questions are welcome, and their needs are being met.

Lesson Structure

An easy-to-understand structure helps students orientate themselves within a lesson. A student that knows that their least favourite part of their lesson, for example technical exercises or scales, is always followed up by their favourite element or their favourite piece, will find it easier to endure the parts of the lesson that they don't enjoy as much.

Showing the structure of a lesson in a visual way, writing it down, or working with physical building blocks can be really useful. Involving the student in this process can help you respond to the student’s individual needs in a better way, and also means you can expect more calm and motivation during the lesson.

Tim: “I would love to be able to play the new Ed Sheeran song!“
Teacher: “That's a great idea! How about I look for the sheet music, while you play the scales you prepared for today? Then, we can try Ed Sheeran afterwards!“

Dealing with Disruption

Dealing with disruption is also a skill that needs to be learned. A deep discussion, however, goes well beyond the scope of this article. Generally, making your rules clear and enforcing them consistently helps a great deal.

Since your rules are designed to achieve certain goals, it would be wise to inform the students of these goals before the start of a lesson:

“We want to make beautiful music together. In order to do that, we need a calm working environment. I always open the door to the rehearsal room five minutes before the rehearsal. After entering the room, you unpack your instruments on the tables back there and sit down in your place. Put your sheet music and pencil on the music stand. While sitting down, you can play whatever you choose during the warm-up time until 6 pm, but only at a volume where you can still hear everyone else. As soon as I step up to the conductor's podium and raise my arms, I expect silence!”

The younger or more restless the group is, the clearer the rules need to be. It is better to have two or three clear rules, and to practice them consistently over a longer period, than to have lots of rules that are difficult to enforce.

In the case of persistent troublemakers, it is a good idea to have a one-to-one conversation before or after a lesson, in which you can work with the student to find a good solution. A solution could look like this:

“Let's try taking part calmly for the first 20 minutes of the lesson. After that, I will remind you up to three times that you intended to cooperate. If that doesn't work, you will sit down at the table in the corner, where there is something for you to colour in, and I continue working with the group.”

Help for Fidgets

Not every disturbance is caused by obvious, loud behaviour. Fidgety children can give us an unsettled impression without saying anything at all. A young person's natural urge to move should not be underestimated. Of course, a music room is not a playground, but movement exercises or musical games involving movement can help channel a student’s urge to move. These exercises don't need to be complicated, have your students bounce a rhythm or ask for musical terms or intervals while doing push-ups or 'jumping jacks'.

Some younger students are not yet fully in control of their own movements, or not aware of them at all. In this case, fine motor-skill training can be very helpful, as I also describe in my book Ganz schön wild – Besondere Schüler entspannt unterrichten: Balancing exercises for use during lessons, like body exercises with pens or balloons, can quickly be incorporated into a lesson without much preparation, and can do a lot of good.

It's not just mirror neurons however, that make us feel empty and burned out after a few hours. Teaching students that come to our lessons with goals that are different from our own, or who have a different music making philosophy, costs us an above average amount of energy. Some students might just want to learn a few cool pop songs on piano, to impress their friends.

You on the other hand, might want your students to learn more than just some ‘noodling’, and have them build the necessary skills to make music independently, and at a higher level, good instrumental technique, solfeggio and a broader musical horizon that reaches beyond the first few bars of “For Elise” and The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain.

These tensions and discrepancies between a student's wishes and our own can cost us a lot of energy, and we should try to identify these problems as soon as they arise, and then open a dialogue with the student in question, to find a suitable solution.