DIRECT INSTRUCTION... And Piano Teaching

What is DI? Direct Instruction (DI) is a model for Teaching that emphasizes well-developed and carefully planned lessons designed around small learning increments and clearly defined and prescribed teaching tasks.

It is based on the theory that clear instruction eliminating misinterpretations can greatly improve and accelerate learning.

Created by Siegfried Engelmann in the 1960s, DI mainly focuses on teaching Language Reading and Math to kids in Kindergarten and above.

Can we Teach the Piano using the Principles of DI?

One may argue that Teaching the Piano versus Teaching Math/Language are very different domains, and that is a valid point.

However, I believe that the Core Rules of DI are easily something that we Piano Teachers can incorporate.

5 Rules of DI

RULE #1 : BE CLEAR

"Whatever concept you're teaching," Englemann says, "the rule is to present the full range of examples for it soon as possible, and to choose examples that will lead the students to generate rules and infer things about the concept that will not be contradicted later on."

"If you're teaching 'Blue', you wouldn't just show four blue cars or a fleet of cars a hundred shades of blue. You'd have a blue Car, a blue bird, a blue sky, a blue Lake, maybe a blue table. You'd show that whether or not something is blue, has nothing to do with whether it's solid, liquid, touchable, not touchable, living or not living.

Then you'd teach 'not blue' by showing examples that were the same except for their color. And you'd choose colors that that were close to blue. You might show three identical birds - one blue, one purple and one green. You'd point to the blue one and say 'blue' and point to the other two birds and say 'not blue'

RULE #2 : BE EFFICIENT

The best way to be efficient is to avoid confusing your students.

Re-learning something that has been learned incorrectly takes 3-7 times longer than learning it correctly the first time.

Many times teachers causes confusion by introducing similar concepts together. We must Separate them. It is important that the student masters one, and so is less likely to get confused encountering the other.

Eg. If you met two people at a party named Hansel and Hanson, we are more likely to confuse between them than if we already knew one of them for a while

RULE #3 : TEACH TO MASTERY

Speed must not come at the expense of thoroughness.

This is managed in Two Steps.

First, the teacher must identify the in detail all the skills that go into performing a task and .

arrange them into a logical sequence for teaching.

Next, the teacher should lay out the instruction to make sure students get enough practice to master each new concept or skill.

"The most important rule, and possibly the most difficult one to teach teachers, is that you have to start as close as possible to where the learner performs, and you have to teach to mastery," Englemann says. "You can't achieve mastery if you introduce tasks that are far beyond the learner's ability, and if you don't give kids enough practice."

RULE #4 : CELEBRATE SUCCESS

Sincerity counts.

Empty encouragement is no encouragement at all. "Kids are not stupid," Englemann says. "They know when they're failing, and they know when a teacher really cares."

The teacher's job is not to become the student's friend but to prove to them that they can succeed: that the work they find worthless and hard is infact easy and worthwhile.

RULE #5 : BEWARE INTUITION

Intuition is the student's best friend and the teacher's worst enemy.

Science has shown that the mind often does not know how it knows things, nor can it recall what it how it learned what it knows, much less teach what it knows to others.

We think we know, but our explanations when tested turn out to be false.

for eg, Blind people used to give many different explanations for how they managed to avoid bumping into things. Some said they sensed walls through sensations in their fingertips, others from a tingling in their forehead, still others said they could smell walls. They were confident they knew the mechanism - But infact they didn't know. Every hypothesis but one when tested proved false. Plug up their ears, and blind people - all blind people will bump into walls. They do not have different learning styles. Intuition persuaded them otherwise, but scientific experiments conclusively demonstrated that the blind 'hear' walls - the sounds bouncing off walls - sort of like bats.

So it is with teaching children. Teachers often think they're doing what works and that they have evidence to prove it. But self perception is not the same as independent assessment based on science

IN CONCLUSION

If you've come this far, I think will agree that Piano Teaching can be greatly improved if one pays attention to the above Rules.

NOTE: I have paraphrased from Sheperd Barbash's book 'Clear Teaching' in this post