General Teaching Philosophy

My general teaching philosophy addresses several responsibilities of the teacher: 
Responsibility to the student
Service to the academic community
Involvement in the larger community that supports the institution.

Throughout my career I have worked with a variety of educational institutions, in Canada, in Thailand, and in the U.S.A., providing me with a good overview of education regarding learning and teaching: community college, community schools, private university, state university, and non-profit organizations. 

I believe that there is a strong connection between arts education and a student’s cognitive and social growth.  Gyorgy Sebok once told me that after mastering technical skills, one can play any piece, but one also plays who one is. In other words, in some cases, it is work on self that is needed, not work on the instrument.

All students have an ability to go further in music. In encouraging students to get out of their comfort zone, to take challenge as an opportunity, to find a sense of purpose for music in their lives, to know themselves, how learning happens in their brains and how they react emotionally to hidden cues, a teacher can help a student develop a life-long love relationship with music, independence, and self-efficacy. It is easy to gain knowledge; it is much harder to gain skills to become self-sufficient, and to find one’s own voice. A teacher’s role is to inspire students to be passionate about what they do so that they persist in their own path, discovering and overcoming their own mistakes and creating their own definition of success.  

Responsibility to the student: Find ways they can relate the new information to existing ones, build on what they already know. It’s important to get to know the students well so that examples or vocabulary are relevant to their past experiences.
I believe that experiential learning is retained longer in memory than other kinds of learning, because of the involvement of our emotions, past experiences, physical memory, and contextual memory. Demonstration is important in teaching an applied instrument. After all, a student can only produce a sound they have already heard live. Yet too much demonstration can lead to simple imitation, not skills and true understanding. There is a balance to be found in saying too much or not enough, and there is also a balance to be found in playing too much, or not enough.

A performer-teacher needs to be able to offer different strategies for working with anxiety, physical attributes and fatigue, and present to students several stress reduction methods. Each student is unique, not only cognitively and emotionally, but in physical attributes as well.

Students must take an active part in the learning process. This gives students a focus and a sense of ownership in their progress. Research has shown that when students set their own goals, they will be true to themselves when they do self-evaluations. In asking for reflections on the way they learn or their learning strategy, students learn better the next times. Mindful stops or slowing down at appropriate measures or beats and alternation of audiation and actual playing are some of the practice techniques I teach.

An “open-door policy” is the best way to describe my style. I like to have students drop by my office for questions, to clarify a topic, to help them narrow down a subject, to discuss learning skills, or find the best resources for their papers. In classroom teaching I love the flipped classroom which allows for more exchanges of ideas in class discussion, and more focus on the weaker areas for that particular class. 
These are some methods I have used: ask students to guess what skills I am trying to teach them, or allow them to give themselves grades for particular assignments, or to use peer grading. Sometimes students get to choose between topics, or choose the types of assignments that fit their strength. I have used many types of assignments (online shared documents, online forum, hands-on group work that requires creativity, presentation, demonstration, journals, setting learning goals, and of course, the quiz, tests, papers and other traditional forms of work.) In team settings I try to mismatch the different interests so that they can learn from their peers. 

Service to the academic and general community:
Master classes, workshops, demo lectures, poster session, guest lecturing, performing and publications of articles are important ways to contribute to the broader academic community.  I have also commissioned and premiered new contemporary pieces, published articles, and collaborated with other professors at other Universities in many different ways. Involvement with organizations beyond the university is essential as well. As a member of several, including the College Music Society, the Music Teacher National Association, the Society of Ethnomusicology, the Music Teacher Association of California, I have learned much from journals and correspondence with other members. I have been presenting at national conferences and advocated for music in small communities. I have created a series of personalized online tests, custom-made videos posted in two different Management Learning Systems (MLS), interactive ear training videos for the Iowa Music Teacher Association. I have my own YouTube channel with lectures and instructional videos. 

Offering a musical education to students, regardless of their background or ability level, is to help build the larger community who believe that art matters. After all, we need to develop our future audience as much as we need musicians.
For many years I have been active in the music education community and performing arts institutions on the highest level. Yet I believe that the smallest thrill of a beginning student in the discovery of sound is one of the joys of teaching that keeps music teachers in the field. Music, after all, is an expressive tool; it is meant to be communicated, to be shared as a community. 
Any expression of music should be respected for their earnest desire to communicate, to organize sound to be meaningful. In teaching about music around the world, I spend the first class exposing the students to sounds and ask this simple question: “Is this music?”  We then discuss what music is, how the concept of beauty in music forms, why it is important to have participants and an engaged audience, how one defines oneself with music, how meaningful it is for people’s cultural or generational identity. My hope is that education systems are preparing students for a life-long involvement in music with the passion of first love.