A few months ago I received a call from another teacher. One of my students had moved to his area and he had just heard her play. ‘Do you think she’s plateaued?’ he asked.
As I have become more experienced as a teacher I am increasingly aware that there are discernible patterns in the way the majority of students develop. There have been notable exceptions, and I’m sure all teachers have experienced them – times when you are compelled to find new methods of working with students who think and learn in a different way. Without doubt this student was one such person.
From the first lesson it was clear that this was going to prove challenging. Each time we had a lesson I was concerned that I wouldn’t get very far and did the only thing I could – experiment and observe the outcome. For a start, maintaining focus was a major issue. Before long I realised that the size of the teaching room made a tangible difference to concentration levels; the smaller and barer the room the better – and the way I set the room up was critical to getting the best out of her. If, for example, she could see out of the window and it started to rain, it took forever to refocus. I found that the way I used language was important; instructions incorporating her name garnered most concentration. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’, something that I usually avoid, seemed especially good – so I became prescriptive.