Episode Summary
In this episode, Sally and Sharon from The Curious Piano Teachers share eight types of questions we can utilize in our lessons, from what they call “skinny” or easy, closed questions to meta-cognitive, emotional, and more.
Guest Host Bios
Sharon Mark-Teggart, MA is the Co-Founder of The Curious Piano Teachers. Sharon says: “Being curious has taken me to places I never thought I’d reach. As a piano teacher, with incredibly humble beginnings, I’d never have moved on without my sense of curiosity and my courage to change.”
In 2007 Sharon achieved a Masters of Music Education with distinction. She has 20+ years of piano teaching experience and since 2012 has delivered Associate and Licentiate teaching diploma courses to groups of piano teachers – with well over 100 piano teachers successfully gaining accredited piano teaching diplomas.
Sharon has been described as being a visionary entrepreneur within the world of music education. After founding evoco in 2012 (Northern Ireland’s Music Education Organisation, specialising in piano teacher training) she founded The Curious Piano Teachers in 2015 with Dr Sally Cathcart.
Sharon lives close to the beautiful Mourne Mountains in County Down, Northern Ireland, with her husband Philip, their 6 year-old son Reuel and 10 month-old daughter Damaris.
Sally has many years of teaching experience both as a piano teacher and as a classroom music teacher. After her travels as a Winston Churchill Fellow, Sally founded the Oxford Piano Group as a place for pianists and teachers to collaborate and share experiences. She was awarded a PhD from the Institute of Education, UCL in 2013. Her topic was the first comprehensive study of UK piano teachers, exploring common practices, expertise, values, attitudes and motivation to teaching.
She is very involved in teacher training and is a Principal Tutor on the Piano Teachers’ Course (UK). Furthermore, she is a trained Kodály practitioner a senior musicianship practitioner of The Voices Foundation. Sally is an examiner for ABRSM and is on the ABRSM Music Education Advisory Committee. She is a Fellow member of the ISM.
Items Mentioned
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8 Types of Questions
- Skinny Questions – closed questions that are easy to reply with a yes or no answer
- Fat Questions – inviting them to think for themselves and consider their responses
- Low-order Questions – factual questions that test their knowledge
- High-order Questions – questions where they need to analyze or problem-solve
- Emotional Questions – how the student feels
- Meta-Cognitive Questions – encourages them to reflect on themselves and the process they just went through
- Imposter Questions – avoid them because they’re not really questions – they’re just a piece of advice with a question mark at the end
- Awe Questions – And What Else
Transcript
Do you ever have memories about random things that are really of no consequence at all, and yet they, of all things, stick with you?
The first time I heard about The Curious Piano Teachers website was one of those for me. There’s not even a good story with it. I just clearly remember my friend Joy back in maybe 2015 or 2016 asking if I had heard of them yet, and until then, I hadn’t. From then on, I remember paying close attention to all they were doing for piano teachers through their blog and membership site.
Well, today is one of those moments that may easily stick in your memory – except it will be for good reason as Sally and Sharon – who together are The Curious Piano Teachers – bring us eight types of questions we can use in our lessons from what they call “skinny” or easy, closed questions to meta-cognitive, emotional, and more.
If you’re new around here, I’m Amy Chaplin, the regular host of this podcast, but today, as we do every six weeks or so, I’m leaving you in the capable hands of a guest host.
If you’ve missed any of the other guest hosts this year, scroll back to find Olivia Ellis & Davis Dorrough from The Creative Piano Teachers, who, in episode 83, talked about the benefit of lead sheets and chord charts. In episode 73, composer Chrissy Ricker gave us a peek into her past experience with travel teaching. Episode 66 was our Australian friend Samantha Coates covering how to NOT give makeup lessons. Melody Payne walked us through steps for improving our businesses in episode 62, and finally, the first guest host of 2023 was Abigail Proffitt in episode 58 on motivating students with ADD and ADHD.
And now… I’ll hand it over to the ladies.
The Curious Piano Teachers was founded in 2015 by Dr Sally Cathcart and Sharon Mark- Teggart. Both are outstanding practitioners and communicators, as well as researchers in music education. They realized the power of learning from each other to make their lessons work better, pursue new opportunities, and increase their love of teaching piano. Together, Sally and Sharon created their unique online Community that is now helping hundreds of piano teachers from across the globe to learn as much as they teach.
Sharon: Hello there, my name is Sharon Mark Teggart. I’m one of the co-founders of the Curious Piano Teachers, and as you may be able to tell from my accent, I am from Northern Ireland. I live very close to where the beautiful mountains of Moran sweep down to the sea.
Sally: And my name is Sally Cathcart, and I’m Sharon’s cofounder and director as well. I live up in North Yorkshire, over here in the UK, in the land of sheep. Round me, it is. And we’re here today, and we’re going to be talking about the importance of asking the right kind of question in an instrumental lesson, piano lesson, questions that lead to your student’s learning because there are definitely. Questions that will do that. And there were questions that would actually just spoon-feed people.
So let’s get started. Skinny questions are now. I think we ask a lot of skinny questions. I know I do. And Skinny questions are interesting, aren’t they, Sharon, because they’re quite closed questions. Any other thoughts about those skinny questions?
Sharon: Yeah, so it’s those questions where you might say to a student do you think you played that skill well? And all they can really say back to you is yes or no. So you’re not getting them to you’re not getting them to reflect and really think about
I think then the opposite we have is the FAQ questions, which are the much more open questions. So we’re inviting our students to think for themselves and to consider their responses. So Sally, can you give us any examples?
Sally: I think as soon as you turn it into a why or what or how kind of question, why might you play the left-hand quieter? What does that mean? It means the student has to start thinking about giving a response. Give the scale a smoother sound. How might you achieve a very spiky staccato sound? So immediately, there’s a big difference between the skinny questions with the yes or no answers and the fat questions, which open them up and get them thinking for themselves.
Okay, let’s move on to the next pair of questions that you can ask, and these are what we call low-order questions and high-order questions. With low order questions these are important, they are factual questions. Things like, what key is this piece in? What does forte mean? So it’s testing their knowledge, really, that one. Would you agree with that, Sharon?
Sharon: Yes, absolutely. They are important. We need to be throwing some of those in there as well, just to find out what they do know. And then, the high-order questions are questions where our students need to analyze our problem solving. And of course, this is doing just a little digging a little bit deeper. Again, those questions begin with what and how. So what would happen if that went faster? And how was the rhythm different at that time? So again, just encouraging that analytical brain, switching on the analytical brain of our students.
Sally: But it’s also, I’m just going to come in there because it’s also about engaging their curiosity. We’re big on curiosity, but this is getting them curious. And creative about what it is they’re doing. And in today’s society, I think that is such an important part of what we do as piano teachers to engage our students in this creativity, in their curiosity, and to get them really, yeah, thinking, but maybe, thinking outside the box, which is a phrase that’s often overused, but that’s really what we’re trying to get them to do, isn’t it?
Sharon: And even if we’re thinking about just taking that question, what would happen if that went faster? What responses might they come up with? They might say, “I would get very muddled up”. Or they might say, “Oh, that would sign really exciting.” Or maybe what it says it’s supposed to be. It’s a piece that’s related to a snail, so I don’t think it should go faster; otherwise, it wouldn’t be a snail piece anymore.
Sally: Yeah. I’m just going to come in again because I remember when I started my PhD, one of the first things I learned was that you might have a question, but there is no answer. There are not any answers; there are just more questions. And that is so true. What you’ve got to do with your students is help them give up the search for the right answer because there is no such thing. There is just something that leads to another question. So there’s not one way of playing the piece, it just leads to different ways of playing the piece, and that’s a really interesting space to explore, I feel.
Sharon: Absolutely, and even that thing of where are we as teachers. We probably shouldn’t have; sometimes, when we ask questions, we have expectations about what they’re going to come back with. And if we don’t get back from the student a response that we expect, sometimes we can almost try to lead them to answer the question the way we want them to answer it, rather than just really deeply listening. So I think, yes, absolutely Sally, there’s that.
Let’s listen to what our students are saying. Because, of course, when they talk to us we it’s a way of us getting inside their head and just going, okay, so where are they coming from? Because listening to responses, yeah we’ve got to really.
Then we have emotional questions, which are questions about how the student feels. And I think this is really important. Just even taking a moment to think about feeling. Maya Angelou once said that people will forget what we said and what we did, but people will never forget how we made them feel. And I think, as teachers, really bringing in this kind of this feeling is important. So yeah. Emotional questions how does it feel when you play it slower? Which section did you enjoy playing the most and why? Sally, thoughts about that?
Sally: Yeah, no, very gives you lots of insight as well into your students and again helps them connect in a different way to themselves and to what’s going on.
Okay, so let’s move on to question number. I think this is the sixth type of question, and this is a very useful question, type of question, which is a metacognitive question. And these are questions that encourage the students to reflect on themselves and the process they’ve just gone through. And it’s to get them to think about their own thinking, really; that’s what the metacognitive kind of question is about.
So it might be. What steps do you need to take in order to play that piece more securely? So they have to think through the process for themselves, or how will you remember the practice stages you’ve just gone through? Or even if they’ve just played something, to get them to reflect on how that was going through your head as you played that scale with the correct fingering? What did you focus on? It’s quite a mature thing to do, metacognitive questions, but really it’s quite an essential thing.
Sharon: And I think another point just quickly to mention, Sally, there is also that we don’t want to stuff our lessons full of these questions either, just from what you’re saying, because I remember doing that, and they were exhausted students were exhausted by the end of them. They were like another deep question. So yeah, absolutely.
Sally: Yeah, choose your questions wisely. I can use one or two in a lesson rather than all eight. Okay, let’s go on.
Sharon: So, imposter questions. And these are the questions that you want to avoid. Because actually, they’re not really questions. They’re just a piece of advice with a question mark at the end. So have you considered? Or, did you try practicing it like… and you’re just giving, you’re giving it all away. Or have you thought of practicing it like this? So you can see there that you’re putting a question mark at the end, but they’re not really a question. You’re not expecting a response from the student.
Sally: No, and if you record yourself giving a lesson with permission, etc., you will find that I’ve done it. I know thousands, not thousands, but a lot of imposter questions do creep in.
But we’ve saved the best question till last, and this is the “A.W.E.” Question. A W E, the and what else? And what else can you do with this? And what else could you think of, doing with the articulation? And you just keep asking this all question. It’s fantastic because you keep asking it over and over again. The student will come up with a response, but actually, you want them to come up with as many as you can until you both have exhausted, literally, yourselves and the question. But it’s a, it is such a powerful question, isn’t it Sharon?
Sharon: And I love asking this question. They’ve just, I’ve just played something for you, and you ask what you think you did well and what else. Yeah.
Sally: So there we have it. We have eight types of questions for you just to quickly go over them again. We had skinny questions and fat questions. We had low-order questions, high-order questions, emotional questions, metacognitive questions, and imposter questions. And finally, we have the question, what else?
Sharon: So as Vanessa Redgrave once said, ask the right questions if you’re going to find the right answers. And also, let’s remember that questions can lead to more questions. And that’s good. That’s really good tip.
Sally: It’s about giving up the search for the perfect answer. And indeed the perfect performance. It’s staying open and staying curious. Thank you so much for listening. It’s bye from me, Sally Cathcart.
Sharon: and bye from me, Sharon Mark Teggart. Have a great day.
Thanks again, Sally and Sharon for taking the time to chime in and share with us today. Be sure and follow them on social media at The Curious Piano Teachers.
As we wrap up, today’s tiny tip is to put a little TLC into the stacks and piles on your desk and around the room. Believe it or not, I don’t mean clear them out entirely. Yes, that would be idea but, I’ll admit, I find I almost always have one or two stacks of something on my desk and another somewhere else in my studio no matter how often I try to clear them away.
I hate them, but they just always seem to be part of the space no matter how hard I try. I find that rather than having them be ruly, if I can at least be conscious of keeping them straightened up, it eases the stress of them being there.
This is just one tiny tip from me to you. Stay tuned next week for our next teacher talk episode, which will feature one of my favorite Indiana colleagues who was also the recipient of our state’s teacher of the year award! See you soon!
