It's a semantics debate all around, but the article's main point is that "show" suggests a mere demonstration, whereas "engage" implies active participation by the learner in the process of learning.
But the reason they are a student is because they can't play the music. Showing them the notations and demonstrating how to play it are steps towards them playing it themselves.
Sure, you can have them learn by ear or learn by sheet, both possible. According to the analogy you can't do engage without doing either show or tell. Which one doesn't matter.
High barrier to entry skills like playing a piano don't conduct themselves well to random unguided exploration. And in music there is often a warning that doing so may ultimately restrict your potential in the field.
Internal martial arts has the same warning. Across pretty much all disciplines in the field, the message is that you can only learn these skills kinesthetically. Not talking, not seeing, but feeling instructor corrections with your own body.
Im not sure why that’s a common sentiment but I disagree that unguided exploration in music is not conducive to productive learning. Or maybe you’re just talking specifically about classical piano which I guess sure that makes sense but the piano is way more versatile than that and I encourage anybody to pick up a keyboard and just explore. You’ll be shocked how much you can accomplish and theory is always there to learn later once it becomes relevant to you.
I think you hit a interesting point. If you define a very specific set of criteria to judge skills by, e.g. "classical piano", then unguided exploration might be a worse starting point than no exploration.
But, if we accept a less restrictive/strict outcome, then unguided exploration is very likely a net positive. I think many well known "unorthodox" musicians did this, and also attributed it to exactly that. Though I cannot recall specific examples. So take it with a grain of salt. I'll look up who I suspect.
Edit: Searching for examples of largely self taught musicians, there are lots of examples. What this implies, probably varies wildly. So feel free to correct the examples I encountered: Chopin, Hendrix, Schubert, Uematsu, Bowie.
Um... I don't know why I am this way but I have uh... talent in both of these areas and I certainly did seek out training but... this reads to me like someone who could enjoy being an amateur. If we are talking about "skill" I would stay away from the music industry and getting into any fights. Martial arts can be a wonderful activity regardless of their actual impact on self-defense (and drilling combatives certainly can help). Likewise, music can be enjoyed by someone or even an audience regardless of skill level. But again, if we are talking about skill... I'm talking about kicking a* and getting paid and I figured out a lot of that from random unguided exploration. Whether in jazz or combat, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Learn the few rules and break them. Your opponent will.
> Showing is usually engaging otherwise they wouldn't be there in the first place.
The problem is, e.g. if you as a teacher show music notation and show low, high, short, long notes on a blackboard, the student will forget what is shown if it does not fulfill a rather short term goal.
Engaging would be playing the piano together while watching and listening. The feedback loop of gratification is much shorter and we animals are programmed to learn well from short positive/negative feedback loops.
But that definition of engaging is already what showing means in “show, don’t tell”. There’s no reason to give it a new term and thus again muddying the waters of understanding
Different students respond differently to such methods.
Personally, I dislike, and don't learn well with, the kind of teaching where I'm given a small piece of information, expected to do a task, and repeat over and over again until something clicks.
Yes, in theory it's supposed to be engaging, and encouraging further learning with all the dopamine hits, but in reality, you don't know what constitute a "reward" for an arbitrary human being. Sometimes, these well-crafted steps are just noisy to me.
What works well for me is to get the big picture first. Give me the map first, and then let's talk about how to get from A to B.
For example the author talks about how his daughter's focus instantly improved when the approach was changed to be more hands on.
I had the opposite experience learning the violin. Most of my teachers were very keen on students immediately start trying it out, after one demonstration, or even no demonstration, and I often felt it difficult to grasp what the hell I was doing. The most effective teacher I had was one who's more willing to talk about things before hand, and answer my questions with seriousness, and at length. To me this is the more engaging and effective approach.
I try to do this as much as possible. Unfortunately some people are not actually interested in knowledge transfer. Those people are just interested in unblocking themselves for the ultimate short dopamine hit. For those people doing this is like nails on a chalkboard.
> explaining things in context as they become relevant is infinitely better for retention and comprehension than explaining them upfront
At one point in my life "explaining things as they become relevant" was equivalent to not really giving a crap and letting them presumably mess it all up after I showed/told them the bare minimum.
What I found was that they learned on their own quicker than I assumed, didn't really mess up as bad as I thought, and loved me for the simple explanation. That's when I decided this is the way.
I don't know why I'm adding this in, but this strategy is also relevant to other topics such as relationships. Don't rush or get too excited. Don't ever offer more than what they're giving you. Expect people to bail when they got what they wanted. Embrace and reward them for sticking around. You become more than a means to an end when the fear of missing out is a factor. You also automatically filter out people who didn't respect you anyway.
Indeed learning from experience, with just a few hints to fall back on, tends to stick better. I think it might be so because the feedback loops introduced are positive as well as negative. You can't learn how to hold your fork without learning in which ways your food tumbles off.
That is common in several occupations. It is worth asking yourself an important question when you are deciding to become something that you are not. “Do you want to write or to be a writer?”, ”Do you want to develop software or be a software developer employee?”
Often the role/title is desired for its status and/or money. I think that’s a fair enough motivation actually, except it should not _solely_ be that. You have to want to learn and practice. Or else, counterproductively, you will have less chance to get the role/title.
I think the more important thing is that some people build up confidence upfront by reading up on theory, and embarking on a problem next; and others want to try building things and only once they hit the wall, figure out the background. And there's all sorts of middle ground. And as we develop, we move left and right on that continuum (and it also depends on the topic).
So I don't even think what the article claims is universally true: I've seen people who simply get frustrated if you don't give them enough time to read up on a bunch of (to you) irrelevant documentation, and struggle to get anything done otherwise.
The real take away for me is that people learn and synthesise knowledge in a myriad of ways, and we should strive to figure out which person prefers which way, and failing that, offer all of these ways so we can observe and learn.
> ” others want to try building things and only once they hit the wall, figure out the background”
I am exactly this type as a software developer. I am ok that I won’t be a computer scientist, nor a very senior engineer working for a state of the art company. Still, I enjoy developing software. I like the daily activity of writing code. Be it a personal project to learn stuff or learning new things at work.
It is kind of limiting in a way (I will never expand the body of human knowledge in software development), but that’s ok for me. It’s liberating in other dimensions too (I am always creating new, if simple, stuff).
>> I mentioned to her teacher that kids that age struggle to learn theory for that long without practicing it. He agreed, and said that many kids are motivated to get through the theory because they’ve heard their teacher play nice music and want to get there too.
Few people are open to advice. Usually results in defensive/justification response.
I don't care for the attempt to find a new catchy phrase.
But I do care about the phenomena being described. This is very common with teachers, and especially so with those teaching small kids. When violin and piano teachers couldn't keep attention of my (and other) kids long enough to teach them to learn musical notation at 4 years old, they just gave up and started handing out stickers for kids to put into them even after they turned 6 (these where part of the optional pre-school classes). Now, my kid has a good musical ear (unlike me or his younger sister :) and always had a knack for learning symbols (it intrigued him, so he could read all the digits before he could count; similarly for letters), but persistence is not his strong suit. All the stuff my kid learned to play on the piano was really the stuff he learned at home, and not in the class (and he loved the stickers and mucking around on the violin and piano).
Now, there was one student that really persevered through the messy, unmotivating teaching, started practicing at home, and this seem to have validated these teachers' approaches (when we complained they are not learning anything, they kept pointing at this kid — he was indeed great).
So basically, they filter out for those who are persistent by nature regardless of their motivation to achieve a particular goal, and they start to believe this means their approach is good — but they lose out on those who might invest enough, might even have more talent, but are not properly motivated.
This is what we talk about when we talk about adapting teaching to every individual, and that's freaking hard in a classroom setting — but must be the default in individual classes, yet so many of those classroom-teachers can't figure a single kid out.
This also happens in sports and any other learning/upskilling.
I try my best to recognize among engineers in my teams who learns best by being thrown at the problem, who needs to be paired up to have someone to bounce their ideas off, who needs to be given some upfront material so they would build up confidence before attacking a problem, or maybe build a toy example first, etc — and I also ask directly, because we are adults and we should have an idea about what works for us by the time we get a job. All of these are valid approaches to learning, and each one of us has an approach that usually works best for them. I do try experimenting with asking people to approach problem in an "unusual" (for them) way too, to see what they gain (if anything) from the approach compared to the stress they end up feeling.
What do we need to do (as a society) to ensure that anyone doing any teaching anywhere is at least aware that there is no single-approach-works-every-time solution, and that you at least let your students do a couple of different things. I feel like we should be putting students through a number of approaches and look for signals which has worked best. But how do we get there?
"Tell" implies some form of structured information such as music notation. "Show" implies action(s) such as actually playing the piano.
Showing is usually engaging otherwise they wouldn't be there in the first place.