catapult magazine

Last fall I did a research study for a piano pedagogy class at Northwestern. I interviewed about 50 School of Music piano students, freshmen through doctoral level, about the nature of their experience as piano students. The most interesting result was in regards to self-analysis. Not one person felt that they had been taught how to hear their own performances well enough to make judgements on them. Obviously, this is a huge obstacle to improvement—the students felt completely tied to their teachers’ recommendations and ideas, and did not really know what to do to improve on their own.

Does this translate into other areas of education? How do you teach your students to both look at what they do in a realistic manner and to know what steps to take for improvement? Is it possible to teach self-analysis?

As a middle school teacher, I can say yes, this definitely does translate. I was surprised at the beginning of the year by how much my students want my approval of their work. I think you can help them learn to self-evaluate though. A couple of things I’ve done is first to just ask them if they think something is good. Often my writing assignments have criteria that have to be fulfilled. I ask them to check their work against the criteria. I think the biggest help to showing people how to self-evaluate is modelling. I take a piece of my writing, and show my students what I do with it, and how they might begin to look at theirs. I’ve found it to be a very slow process because of everything else that’s tied up with this question—the use of grades, approval from those who give the rewards, etc…

It seems to me that grades are the single biggest impediment to effective self-analysis. When I teach my students to write, I want them to learn to (somewhat intuitively) consider hundreds and maybe thousands of factors to determine what is working well and what isn’t. If I give them feedback but no grade, they pay attention to the feedback. As soon as I give a grade, it is done. The student no longer considers whether the piece fulfilled their expectations, or even (usually) whether they agree with the grade or not.

I think, as long as we have grades, our students will have to learn effectice self-analysis somewhere else.

Any of you ever read Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards? It speaks to some of this (though he is admittedly a bit over the top.)