Delaying the Reading Process with Advancing Students
Found in: Playing-Based Methodology, Reading
Cheryl G., Pennsylvania
I currently have students in the Level 5 book that have not yet begun to read notes. What a trip this is for a former traditional teacher! How far along in the levels can a student be before they really MUST have started to read notes, or doesn’t it matter?
Neil Moore
I always preferred to delay the reading process as long as possible. I was always conscious of making sure that students were very clear about the hands-on, practical, base-tools that they were acquiring, and I was diligent about ensuring that they maintained a strong, comprehensive and diverse Playlist – always and at all times.
What I discovered was that as we got up into more and more advanced material, it would take most of the lesson to unfold the playing-based content of whatever pieces we were working on. However, because the students were now so competent in their playing ability, they would process the new information (receptively) and actually have quite a powerful ability to reproduce everything in a musical fashion (generatively), whilst still at the lesson.
At a practical level, this meant that they really didn’t have a whole lot of new stuff to work on during the week. As such, it became clear to me that it was now, more so than ever before, that they really needed an additional, external source of instruction that could provide them with further new and unprocessed material to work on during the forthcoming week. I found that this was the ideal time to really concentrate on music reading.
Although all of our literature says that we introduce reading after about 12 months or so, with 35-50 pieces etc., my preference is to delay it as long as possible. It is for this reason that the entire Foundation Program, all the way through to the end of Level 9, is presented in the audio-visual, playing-based format.
I never had any difficulty in having students and parents being at ease with not reading, because I was so strong in my belief about the benefits of this, and I was strong in my capacity to articulate it. I do believe it might be harder for you to achieve the same or similar level of co-operation if you yourself are not convinced of the benefits, or if you find yourself struggling to learn and/or teach pieces from the more advanced Levels in an entirely playing-based fashion. However, it’s worth the effort discovering how to teach more advanced materials in an entirely playing-based fashion – even if you just choose a few specific students to try it with until you’ve had some first-hand experience with a very extended delaying of the reading process.