The teacher, the piano and modelling great behaviour

One of the honours in my life is to be a governor at my sons’ secondary school. Recently a fellow governor and I were invited to think about how we could accelerate the transfer of the successes being achieved by some teachers to others who were less successful.

We decided to try and set up a session where one of the superstar teachers could be “modelled” by one of the more junior teachers.

Using Anthony Robbins’ approach of “putting the cook in the kitchen” we facilitated a conversation after the lesson to try and figure out what were the “differences that made the difference”.

We got into a discussion about what made their class sessions feel so relaxed and smooth. We noticed that one section transitioned very easily to the next helping the students to move along at a good pace without any apparent change in gear (sorry – lots of mixed metaphors there)

We dug deeper into what was being felt, seen and heard by the teacher and during the conversation, an interesting observation emerged:

The senior teacher was always thinking 5 minutes ahead and had developed the ability to stand in a particular place in the class room and observe himself and his class in order to decide what should happen next.

This was clearly confusing for the new teacher (and us) so we pushed him a little more. Finally he said:

“It’s a bit like playing the piano from music. When you are reading music you are usually one or two bars ahead of what you are playing. So, for example, I may be playing bar 25 in a piece but I am reading bar 27. I read bar 25 while I was playing bar 23. If you then add into the mix the fact that I am observing the audience (the class) and changing the pace and tone of the music to suit their needs, you get a sense of what I am doing with my class.”

I immediately recognised that I have observed this behaviour in many of my favourite facilitators and trainers.

The learners are on task and the trainer moves to a special spot in the room and seems to go into a sort of trance. When asked what they were doing they said that they were visualising the next 10 minutes and deciding on what the most appropriate language, state, content and process would be for where the learners were right now.

We concluded that this was learned behaviour and probably a natural (albeit sub-conscious) extension of the teacher’s love of playing piano.

Could the newer teacher learn this?

At this moment we don’t know. They have agreed to give it a try for a few months and see so I’ll let you know.

As trainers we sometimes need to be flexible in our delivery, dropping things in, leaving things out until later and it may be that we are all doing what this teacher was doing.

So, if you have any experience of this, let us know. It could be a whole new approach to teacher training.

Paul and Ally are working on an exciting 6-part (online) course to help your learners fully engage with your training - sign up for the 'early bird' list for advanced notification and more info

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