Thomas J. West, of the Music Education Practice Tips blog, has a short, but fabulous post entitled, Technique Targeting: Becoming Your Own Music Teacher. He writes,
In order to become independent, a music student must learn the skills a music teacher already possesses. They must learn:
* to detect musical errors or inaccuracies
* to isolate errors to focus on for repetition
* to apply various techniques (a bag of tricks) that result in successful repetitions of the problematic passage
* to recognize an accurate performance when it occurs and repeat that performance until the neural pathways are established and the performance becomes “automatic.”
Thomas expounds on each of these points a little bit with some important reminders that we would all do well to keep in mind as we go about our daily teaching!
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