Sylvia Coats is active as a performer, teacher, adjudicator, and workshop leader and has published several articles on piano pedagogy. Dr. Coats is currently writing a book about piano pedagogy. She is Associate Professor of Piano Pedagogy and Class Piano at Wichita State University, and previously served on the faculties of the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and Texas A&M University, Kingsville. She is a member of the Sotto Voce Trio who have performed contemporary Music from coast to coast, most recently in a tour of Missouri Kansas, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Other recital tours have included universities, recital series, and children's concerts in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Virginia, Nevada, and Oklahoma. Dr. Coats has given presentations at several Music Teachers National Conventions. She presented a session on "Dancing the Baroque Dances" at the 1999 MTNA convention in Los Angeles, as she did at the 1997 National Piano Pedagogy Conference in Cherry Hills, New Jersey. Topics for Pedagogy Saturday III and IV in Nashville and Minneapolis were "Group Dynamics" and "Advanced Technique Lesson." She also presented "Technology in the Piano Pedagogy Curriculum" at the 1996 MTNA Convention in Kansas City. She is President of the West Central Division of the Music Teachers National Association and is a past president of the Kansas Music Teachers Association and has served as MTNA National Chair for Student Chapters. The graduate and undergraduate programs in piano pedagogy which she directs at Wichita State University are recognized as leading programs in file field and draw Students from the US and abroad. Dr. Coats holds bachelor and masters degrees in piano performance from Texas Tech University where she Studied with Louis Catuogno and a Doctor of Musical Arts in performance and pedagogy from the University of Colorado where Dr. Guy Duckworth was her major professor.
Sylvia Coats
School of Music
Wichita State University
Wichita, KS 67260
316.978.6433
coats@twsuvm.uc.twsu.edu
Following is an excerpt from a book that I am writing on teaching piano in individual and group lessons. I have overlapping roles of teaching children to play the piano on all levels of advancement; teaching college students to teach piano; and teaching college students to play piano as their second instrument. My daily writing is inspired by graduate and undergraduate pedagogy students, whose teaching I supervise. These students prepare lesson plans and comment on their lessons; then, I observe a video of their teaching and evaluate their teaching effectiveness. These lessons provide food for thought as I write and give me real lessons for examples to explain the teaching process.
The student's exploration of music concepts is aided by the group setting. In other words, two or more heads are better than one. As music teachers we want to present music concepts to students in each lesson and develop their skill in playing musically with ease. The ideas of several students give more possibilities for exploring a concept and discovering how to apply the concept. The teacher's responsibility is to help students identify the problem, limit the conditions of the problem, facilitate the exploration of solutions to the problem, and provide clues to help solve the problem. Think of the problem to be solved as an objective for the lesson. A lesson may focus on one objective such as to improve a performance, or several objectives such as to learn a rhythm, a scale, and dynamic contrast. Problems will arise from the student's playing, a student's question, or from the teacher's presentation of a musical concept.
Plan Lessons Rich In Concepts
In planning a lesson consider these areas that will encourage problem solving: include music concepts and direct experience with concepts, limit conditions to focus on particular concepts, and transfer concepts to other music.
Plan lessons that are rich in musical concepts, that appeal to students' expressiveness, and that enable the contrast of several approaches. Find a balance between introducing enough concepts to provide challenge, yet limiting the number of concepts to provide focus. For instance, if a student's scale playing is uneven, concepts to consider are tempo, rhythm, fingering, metric stress, dynamics, and technique. Any one of the related concepts may give direction to the student to improve the scale playing. There is more than one solution to uneven scales, and each student in the group may use a different solution. For instance, playing in a slow tempo or in dotted rhythms with the metronome may improve the a tempo scale. Choosing a legato fingering as it relates to the white and black keys may work for another student. Playing in a meter such as 4/4 with varying stress to each beat will give direction toward the first beat and help make the scale even. Changing the placement of the thumb to eliminate unintended accents may improve the scale playing. Because many concepts are utilized in effective problem solving, students benefit from learning more than one approach to playing a scale evenly.
Too Few Concepts
Following is an example of a lesson that uses only one concept contrasted with a lesson that uses many concepts. A student teacher, Tom, complained that a class of freshman piano majors did not understand his presentation of the secondary dominant chord. His lesson included a theoretical explanation, transposing cadential exercises, finding secondary dominants in sight reading and lead line harmonizations, and using a secondary dominant in the harmony for a song played by ear. Yet his students did not seem to understand the new chord. In observing Tom's lesson I commented that in addition to the theoretical explanation, he might also describe the expressive basis of how the chord effects tension and release of a phrase, the shaping of the phrase, and the strength of the cadence. A suggestion was to direct the students' listening to the tension of the secondary dominant and its need for resolution. Appealing to the students' sensitivity in performing the examples gives them an expressive reason for understanding the theoretical concept. The secondary dominant in a key naturally resolves to the dominant chord because it sounds like a brief modulation to the dominant. For example, in the key of D Major the dominant seventh is A7 and the dominant of A is E, so an E7 resolves to an A then finally back to the tonic D. An expressive interpretation is to crescendo to the secondary dominant and diminuendo when it resolves to the dominant. The V7 of V often precedes the dominant to strengthen the V at the end of a phrase. The louder volume keeps momentum until the dominant appears and provides impetus toward the resolution to the tonic in the next phrase. Expressive playing using the concept of dynamics will help students understand a theoretical concept.
Talking about expressive playing is not the same as doing it. Conduct the students in their playing so they experience the tension created by the secondary dominant. After the presentation and experimentation of a new concept, ask questions to assess and clarify their understanding. At the next class Tom reinforced the new concept by having students transpose the following progression to several keys: V7 of V to V to V7 to I. He directed their listening to the tension and resolution created by the progression and as each student played, others labeled the chords out loud. The students' responses were evidence that they understood the secondary dominant and could demonstrate it theoretically and expressively.
Contrast Concepts
During the first year of a group of children's study, Diane used contrast of concepts effectively in a lesson on introducing the touches of legato and staccato. First she told the students to play a piece legato, then she asked them to play the same piece staccato. They explored the similarities and differences between each student's legato and staccato performances. After they had experienced the touches, she asked them what symbols are used to show legato and staccato. This is an excellent demonstration of a direct experience in which students first explore the concept's sound and its physical production before defining the abstract symbol.
Jim also used contrast of touches in the first lesson with beginning college music majors. He explained and demonstrated five-finger scales and had the twelve students play several scales together. The sound was unmusical with some students playing much louder even though the digital pianos had the same volume adjustment. Jim gave a short lecture on posture and legato playing. An effective analogy he gave was to think of playing like being on a teeter-totter. One end goes up when the other end goes down, just as one finger rises on the key as the next finger descends on the next key. When he had the class play a scale together, the legato sound was quite astonishing. The students looked amazed at their beautiful legato in a balanced ensemble sound. Jim then directed them to play the scale staccato which they found more difficult. The beauty of Jim's teaching is that he focused their attention on the sound and expressiveness of playing a scale, rather than only on the theoretical fact of the whole and half steps in a major scale.
Symbols Equal Sound And Movement
Too many symbols to learn can frustrate the beginning student. Students see abstract symbols of pitch, rhythm values, and clef signs that are supposed to relate to a keyboard that looks like a checkerboard of black and white. If we teach musical symbols without relating them to sound and movement, we inadvertently train students to respond to symbols like typists with finger strokes devoid of any aural sensitivity. Students have no motivation to just push notes, but when they relate to the sound they get from playing, their response is both emotional and intellectual. When their listening is directed to sounds that move higher and lower, they can respond by singing a melody, and therefore relate those higher and lower sounds to the keyboard to create a song. When their listening is directed to sounds that are longer or shorter, they can physically respond by walking the beat and clapping the rhythm values, and therefore relate those long and short sounds to the movement of a melody played on the keyboard.
Limit Concepts
In the first lesson with five beginning students ages eight to ten, Barbara planned to teach note values of quarter, half, whole, and eighth notes; note reading from treble and bass clefs; and the dynamics of piano and forte. She introduced the symbols with flash cards and directed students to choose a piece in their method book, practice it, and play it for class. The students had no idea how to relate the abstract symbols they saw on the flash cards to sounds on a piano. The class became one of individual lessons with the teacher trying to explain the symbols of each chosen piece. Other students waited impatiently for their turn with the teacher. The students became quite noisy with students running around the room. Barbara felt she had no control of the class and was very frustrated. In classes thereafter, she limited the number of concepts, taught the concept at its most basic level and provided activities to experience the concept, not just to name the symbol. She had students clap rhythms of each others' pieces and directed students to describe step and skip movement rather than pitch names. Limiting the concepts along with establishing rules of conduct helped the children focus their attention and enjoy their lesson.
Transfer Concepts
Teaching music concepts and their expressive relationships, which form general principles, enables students to see more similarities rather than differences in their music. No longer will students start from scratch with each new piece. Concepts that students learned in previous music will transfer to music new to them. In order to encourage transfer of a concept between pieces, I asked Michelle, a graduate student teacher, to use the following model for introducing tonic and dominant harmony to her beginning college music majors. The students' text introduces harmony with only the single-note, chord roots of the tonic and dominant rather than the full chord. The chord is difficult for beginning adults to coordinate and the roots focus their attention to the primary notes of the scale. A suggestion was to announce that the topic of the lesson will be harmonizing with tonic and dominant chords. As the students play five-finger major scales, direct them to name the first and fifth notes (tonic and dominant notes). Direct students to analyze and to write in I and V for tonic and dominant notes in their reading, transposing, and repertoire assignments. Other suggestions were to improvise using only tonic and dominant notes and play rhythm exercises using the tonic note in the left hand and the dominant note in the right hand. In the next lesson, Michelle taught sight reading and limited the pitch range to a fifth. Students were asked to identify the key of each of four examples and identify the tonic and dominant notes as they played. They were directed to write in the intervals and label I and V notes in both right and left hands. Next they transferred what they had learned about tonic and dominant by transposing what they sight read. Then half of the class played a written melody and the other half chose either dominant or tonic notes to harmonize the melody. Then they improvised melodies in major five-finger scales while accompanying with the tonic or dominant notes, and were directed to end on the tonic. Focusing on the concept of tonic and dominant and comparing the similarities of tonic and dominant in several skills gave the lesson unity and direction and solidified the students' understanding.
In summary the teacher provides problems that are rich in musical concepts, that appeal to students' expressiveness, and that focus on general principles that can be transferred to other music. The teacher finds a balance between introducing enough concepts to provide challenge, yet limiting the number of concepts to provide focus.
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