A Typical Day?
It’s Tuesday at 2:37pm. Your concert band rehearsal is winding down. The students are checked out, not focusing, missing entrances, and your teaching prompts on how to do the uber-important forte-piano at the end of the piece are going in one ear and out the other. The forte-piano is just not happening. And when you model it again for them, you look at their tired eyes focused in every other direction instead of up at the podium at you. It’s as if your voice just projectile-vomited shards of glass that stayed suspended in the air in every direction, and that’s what they’re choosing to stare at. The final bell rings and they can’t wait to get out of there. They seem to like band some days but other days, it’s like you’re teaching a band of zombies. Yet in a sense, you get it, because there’s days you feel like that. One day after another, following the same schedule, going through the motions, rehearsing the pieces for the concert. The concert happens, there’s a new program and the cycle starts again. It feels apathetic, complacent and boring at the same time.
Sound familiar? At least they’re holding instruments and not smartphones, right? But what gives? I know a lot of people who are quick to say “Kids these days…” but these kids have been playing these instruments and participating in this elective for awhile, right? What keeps them there? What are they looking for?
Once you find what it is, you’re closer to finding the vehicle to take them- and you- out of the rut that everyone is in and make your music room a place to find exhilarating experiences. The quickest answer is to foster growth mindset in your instruction.
The Solution Is Growth Mindset
So what is growth mindset exactly? It’s a blanket term to describe the movement of one’s psychology away from a destructive or stagnent attitude and into one that is always growing and always improving. If you weren’t raised as a child to have a growth mindset, then the change won’t happen quickly, but as long as it happens progressively, you’ll get there.
Why have it? First, it diminishes day-to-day stress and emotional connections to things, large and small, that happen to you. It takes you away from being a victim and into a mental place where everything is a lesson and everything teaches you something about the way the world and people work. It brings you peace in a profession that can be very turbulent. It refines your communication skills so that you may interact with family and friends more effectively. It also helps you set your boundaries so that your decisions remain consistent with your values and your overall health as a person and as a professional.
Growth Mindset and Music Education
But that’s just for you. You are a music teacher- a person of influence. And if you’re like most music teachers, you’ll be teaching your students year after year, making more of a lasting impact on their lives. You’re helping them develop a talent that will become part of their identity, even if only temporarily… and that develop requires growth, right? Students have most of their teachers for one year. If you teach grades 4-12 in any discipline, that’s EIGHT. There’s plenty of marriages that don’t last as long.
How to Get Started with Growth Mindest As A Music Teacher
It’s worth it for you to take a hard look on adopting a growth mindset, if you haven't decided to do so already. There’s plenty of tools and resources online to help you define it, and I have some favorite books that helped me foster it in myself that I would recommend to you.
Check out The Little Book of Talent by Daniel Coyle to start with. It’s quick and easy reading and begins to implant the ideas of what you should do, how you should think, how you should approach different situations in life.
Then move onto any resource, podcast or book by Tony Robbins. He digs into growth mindset in so many different ways: attitude, relationships, health, finances, and more. Just pick a title that vibes with you and start there. There’s no shame in self-improvement books, or rather I like to call them personal development books, but there’s a lot of wise words in there.
If you consider yourself already a decently positive person, it’s still worthwhile to read one every now and again. It’s self-affirming that you’re navigating this thing called life correctly and successfully. And it’s helpful in case you missed a step. No one’s perfect after all, right?
The Music Teacher Brain Requires A Little More Growth Mindset Work Though Because of Who We Are
But, music teachers of the world, your utilization of growth mindset has the power to influence every single student you interact with. Their attitude towards developing their musical abilities and talents will be carried over to whatever abilities they develop later, including ones that shape careers, influence their own families and subordinates someday, and help them to be successful. Think of it as the mental anti-disease. It’s contagious, it spreads and manifests and consumes, but in the most positive of ways.
The importance of the education of growth mindset specifically for music teachers has not gone unheard to us at Uplevel U: Music. Be on the lookout for the release of a new professional development course aptly named “Growth Mindset for Music Teachers”. It will focus on how to develop this for yourself and how to infuse it into your teaching.
Your implementation can become your legacy and your little way of changing the world. And if somehow it isn’t so little, that student will come back, tell you what you did to help their mindset, and tell you what amazing thing they did with that. You’ll know. And I can’t think of a better mark of success for a music teacher.
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