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VMT009: Finding the transfer student gaps

 

Transfer students are tricky because what they know so far won’t necessarily align with what we would have taught them. In this episode I’ll share strategies to catch them up, fill in the gaps and have success with your transfer students.

VMT009 - Finding and filling the transfer student gaps 2

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VMT009 – Finding and filling the transfer student gaps.mp3

You’re listening to Episode 9 of the vibrant music teaching podcast. I’m Nicola Cantan. And today we’re going to figure out how to fill in the gaps in your transfer students knowledge.

Two weeks ago on the podcast in Episode 7 go to vibrant music teaching dot com slash 7 if you missed that one. We talked about first lessons with transfer students and what the best practices are. When were working with transfer students and taking them into our studio. What should we do in that first lesson. How can we get to grips with where they’re at and where their reading is at. And also have a great first lesson and give them some fantastic wins to take home with them that week.

So that was the very first lesson. And after that first lesson we start to get an idea of where they’re at where they’re going and where they want to go with their piano studies. But we don’t really know the full picture yet. We can’t see all of the gaps if there are lots of gaps. That is we can see where they are yet and also it might now be a case of actual deficits in their learning or things like that. It might not be the neglect of the previous teacher and I don’t like to talk about blame on previous teachers or anything else. In cases like this because it might just be that that teacher teaches in a completely different order to you but that still leaves you with a gap if you want to move forward with the way you teach best and your curriculum for your students and your priorities for them. So you’re left with this job of filling in those gaps in order to move forward with this student but you have to keep them moving forward. In the meantime or at least feeling like they are. We can’t just go backwards and redo everything. Even if we feel like that what is required now the first area. Often the biggest area that I see and transfer students that’s missing is really good reading skills. So if this is the case for your transfer student I think the best way forward is to work with lots of levels of repertoire so you’ll have a easy pieces or one week pieces or one quick studies I often call them and then you’ll have slightly more challenging things and then you might have one big project piece.

That’s the way I like to move forward with most students at a early intermediate and onward level because it gives them the opportunity to keep their reading skills fresh with quick studies and also to tackle those big projects that they want to do at this stage with transfer students. This is extremely helpful because they can keep learning pieces that are maybe at the level they were playing and or that they think they are at while also going back and maybe filling in some of the gaps in their knowledge in their reading level and bringing it up to where they think they are or where they should be in air quotes. So the first thing I’ll do with transfer students where reading is the issue and will do a lot of levels of repertoire going forward for however pretty much the other thing I’d like to introduce them to is rote work and it might sound a bit odd to talk about rote pieces when we’re discussing a problem with reading because it seems like the other end of the spectrum but often if a student is having trouble with reading it’s because or they have developed a great ear and we should make use of this. We shouldn’t just neglect that or tell him that’s the wrong way to do to read music or to understand music is to play a by ear.

We want to move forward with their skills and if they already have this great skill for playing by ear for memorizing use it but use it in a context where the pieces are actually designed to be learned that way and it’s actually moving forward their technique and other areas of their studies. So those are my that’s my two pronged approach to students who they’re reading is falling behind at their level. Do lots of levels of repertoire for reading and do some rote pieces to keep things fresh to keep them feeling like they’re playing great music and not going backwards and taking baby steps forwards again in pretty much every other area. One of my favorite ways to work on transfers student gaps in knowledge is with games and you may know that I run a whole site dedicated to games so this might not be a surprise to you but I’m not the only one who feels this way I achieve a great quote to share with you from a member who gave this to me on her membership feedback form. This is from Rebecca who’s a piano teacher in Sussex in the UK and she said I’ve inherited a bunch of new students at a school and are finding their landmark no games and the keyboard layout games absolutely essential for these students. It is providing me with a fun way to go over these concepts that they kind of think they know but they don’t.

So I love that quote from Robach because it’s so true. There are so many things that transfer students will think they know because of maybe the way they were taught or some other factor and they actually don’t or they don’t know them thoroughly enough. Such as. Like she’s saying here Lamark nodes or keyboard layout. That’s actually something that I find is skipped over a lot or I used to certainly skip over it myself. Whealy teaching the key names and students will come to me really not being able to find C all that easily or maybe they can find three but not Seward’s G or a right. So if that’s the case doing covering those concepts in a game is so much more beneficial because it’s enjoyable for the students they learn it thoroughly and they don’t notice so much that they’re going backwards to beginning concepts. It’s just a game so I want to give you a few examples of how I would work with various strands for student gaps through the use of games. The first gap that your student might have been the most obvious use for many people for games is fourth theory terms. Dynamics tempo marks that kind of thing. Basically all the words of music and I have some great games in a library from for this. I mean tons of them. Three of my favorites though asked the symbol splash pitstop and flower power and the reason I love these ones so much is because they are multi-level games.

So these three I created to have four or five levels. So if I have to transfer students together a transfer student and a long term student just me and a transfer student. It doesn’t really matter because there are levels from primary level all the way up to like a solid grade three or four level where they’re you know being quizzed on tempo marks and terms like Grazioso and stuff like that. So it’s great to be able to work at different levels in these games. I also have others that work at one level and whichever option you choose. It just feels so much more relaxed so much more chilled than when you’re saying do you know what this means pointing their music because if they don’t know it it makes them feel bad about it and we don’t want to place blame because it’s not their fault. It’s probably quite often not their previous teacher’s fault. It’s just happened so all we want to do is move forward from there we dont want we placing blame on anyone and asking them in the context of their music often can feel like a test like a theory or practical piano exam you know where they’re asked different terms on the page and there is a right or wrong yes or no answer whether they know it whether they are up to that level or not and that’s not how I want them to feel I want it to be fun so games like these symbols Blash your falling in the water if you get the one wrong.

Nobody minds falling in the water it’s wearing back to the start. I mean they they groan within the context of the game but it’s all in good fun pitstop. They need to wait at various pit stops on a race track and they love the race track team there and then Laro power. Sometimes though Estess and we lose all of the petals on our flowers which is super fun and makes for lots of giggles and really knowing the theory turns because they don’t want to lose their petals. So those three are great for working on theory terms and dynamics. The other probably most common area that would come up in terms of theory games is note names right and I have a whole host of various note name games on my site so I don’t want to go into all the different ones I have and would use in this context depending on what method book they’re in. What they’re struggling with but there are three I think are especially useful in terms of a transfer student and that is Face jibbidy which is Face jibbidy jibbidy face I should say which is a game to work on these skips alphabet which is actually the way Piano Safari teaches the note in book 2. That’s where it comes from check out Piano safari if you haven’t already. I give full credit to them for this note naming method and its popularity in my studio.

But we work on it in our in the context of a game called Face jibbidy jibbidy face because its face G B D right for the skips alphabet or for the line version. It would be G B D F A C E and this is a great way to work on their notes. It’s not so much about the method the method is good and it is one of my favourite ways for a struggling note readers to finally find their way around the nose because it goes up the full staff. But really it’s just about having one solution so they don’t even necessarily need jibbidy face right they could have just faced jibbidy just for spaces and that’s fine and it unifies a whole staff and it’s one thing many student in this country are still learning with mnemonics. And while that’s useful for some student for the majority it only slows them down. It makes it adds this extra Yep between figuring out what the note is and playing it and there’s already so many steps involved in it really we don’t want to add another one in and have them go through every good boy deserves fruit. The other problem with mnemonics and the big reason why face everybody is different is that those different ones for a treble clef bass clef lines and spaces so those four are often students will have four to remember and they mix them up. It’s as simple as that. Every good boy deserves a cow does not work bright. So having one system is so beneficial and face jibbidy helps to teach this to them and reinforce it and practice it a ton and get them really confident with using this method of note naming so that they have one system.

Ultimately we want them to instantly recognise notes. That’s what all of us want. So I’m not getting down mnemonics. I know it’ll get students there and they’ll all end up in the same place eventually. But working with landmark notes or face jibbidy and intervallic approach to reading really is more beneficial in my opinion and it gets on there a little bit faster. So that’s a win in my book. Another name game that would be great for transfer students is called spellar Belstaff. This is basically my add to two notes spellers those books that are popular most popular in the in the state as far as I’m aware. I didn’t grow up with them but those are just basically books of notes to name and we’d like getting lots of practice in like that. But I have a game version of this it’s called Belstaff and it’s all these individual cards with note words you know like a face or a or tons of other words that you can spell with just the first seven letters of the alphabet and they write on those with whiteboard markers so they’re totally reusable and they really love them. Students get through a ton of them even if I just leave them to their own devices while I’m doing something else like if I’m working with another student and we have overlapping time or anything like that.

If a student is struggling with notes I set them on as Belstaff and they get through a ton of them and they’re still loving the process. I don’t know what it is about spelling words were music notes but they love it. The last one I wanted to mention is more for intermediate transfer students and that is the legend of the Leger’s so this is working on ledger lines. And again really understanding them in a comprehensive way where they can see how they fit on the staff and the logic of them. Leger lines are not notes to be memorized nor are any other notes really. Eventually yes they will recognize them but the bigger win comes from understanding the staff understanding why the ledger lines are there and that’s what Legend of the Leger’s helps with. Another thing that transfer students will sometimes come to me with a problem with is intervals and Paton’s and this is maybe less obvious to include in the game but I have to. That I’ve released recently that not just work on intervals I have more work on interval recognition but these ones actually work on translating that into the fingers which is a big problem that I see transfer students coming to me with that they’re really just not seeing the pattern and it’s equalling moving this finger to that finger skipping over fingers gripping two fingers moving to the next finger moving down moving up that kind of thing.

That’s where the game’s Tippy taps and foam finger gymnastics come in and these have been a really fantastic addition to my collection of games over the last few months as I’ve been developing them because they are both away from the piano and it is so beneficial for these students to work away from the piano where they don’t feel like they’re getting something wrong all the time. Yes they can press the wrong finger but it doesn’t feel this pressurised situation and some students do feel that way at the piano especially if they’ve been pure readers and they’ve just been corrected about notes as they’re going through. It really feels like there just aren’t show when they’re playing something and try to get the notes right in air quotes once again. So Tippett absent jiving or gymnastics both work and tapping things out on a hard service such as the surface of the piano lid or a table or the floor or whatever. Getting them to tap these padder and out with their fingers is really fantastic for working on pattern recognition and building up that kinesthetic sense of what that pattern means in their hands. Another thing that years Tranter a student might be struggling with is rhythm and for this my favourite go gotos would be relative rhythms and rhythm vocab and for those of you who aren’t VMT members rows of rhythms is actually available for free on my blog if you go to Cliff bookie’s dot ee slash relative rhythms all one word.

You can download it there. These are cards that have proportional sizes to each other. So a semibreve or whole note is four times the size of a quarter note or a crutch it this just makes the relationship between the different note values that much clearer especially for students who don’t understand fractions yet or haven’t encountered that in school so they can be really fantastic and I use them for all kinds of rhythm work like dictation or creating rhythms composing improvising all this stuff can be done with these cards just to make these note values. William Baird the sense that the note values are related to each other hence the name relative rhythms right. Wear them vocab. On the other hand are separate cards with one bar rhythms on each and therefore levels of those. These are really great for building up a aural centre for them. So I’ll have them working on patterns of these and working just with quavers and crotchets or that’s eight notes and quarter notes too for several weeks to build up that sense of what these feel like what they like when you drum them what they’re like when you play them what it’s like to listen to them and then adding another note in another note in as we go through so that they really have this sense of a vocabulary of rhythm will give you one last example of how I might game a fly for transfer student gap filling.

And that is when it comes to scales and chords because really anything can be framed as a game for any student. It doesn’t matter what it is. So scales and chords will often be working towards a scale challenge and this is a great way to motivate students to fill in these gaps that seem maybe a bit dull to them. So working on their scale challenge chord challenge gives them a tangible target to work towards and they get their name up on the challenge board if they completed and that sticker on the front of their folder and it just gives them a sense of accomplishment without working towards an exam because that’s often not the next best step for transfer students in my studio.

I also have games to work on these as well and on pattern recognition but I won’t go into those now.

So with all of these things filling in any kind of gaps with the transfer student I’d like to use a lot of games like I’m saying to make the process fun but there’s always this decision to be made and that’s between disguising what’s going on and the gap that is there and being honest with them and in different circumstances. I think both are necessary with older students especially often. Being honest is very important and I’m not saying that were lying to them otherwise just that being straightforward and explaining to them where the gap is why it exists and what you’re doing to fix it and why it’s important is so valuable especially with older student with teens and adults they will understand that they need to do.

Mary had a little lamb much better if you explain to them where it’s going to take them and why they need to do it at this stage and make sure they know that they never have to play it for anyone except you.

So often when the year is ahead of their reading skills it’s best to just be honest have that conversation and make a plan that you’re both on board with because if they don’t practice the reading outside of lessons it’s not going to get you anywhere anyway with other theory especially with younger students. I will often disguise it. And games are great for that. So you have to make that choice when it comes to any of these gaps between the being the Swan and the kids feed flapping under the water or being this one with its feet up in the air showing them exactly what’s going on. It always is going to be a debate you have with yourself when it comes to each student and even each concept that they’re not getting whether you’re up front with them or whether you try to fill in that gap without them noticing and disguise it with some gamification or using other method. Either way make sure you’re setting achievable goals both for your own sake and for your students. If they’ve been at a grade 3 level apparently and their reading is more like a preliminary level then don’t try to get back up to grade three by the end of the year. It might happen but it’s unlikely. Make sure you set goals that are really realistic and achievable and that you understand what your priorities are for that first semester for the first year and going forward from there. And of course reassess these goals regularly as things change as their goals change as yours change and as things develop. Help that you’ve enjoyed today’s dive into transfer student and how we can fill in the gaps in their knowledge. If you have any questions for me write to me in the vibrant music studio teachers Facebook group and I’ll be happy to chat to their

If you enjoyed this podcast episode you might like to check out and fiber music to membership at VMT dot Ninja.

The transferee students transition’s of course is now in the library to special video only for members as is the webinar recording that I did a couple of weeks ago. There is a whole library of games and activities that can help you fill in your trines for students. Gaps in their knowledge. These are super supportive community and tons of other goodies inside. Check it out. Add VMT up injected a.

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