An interesting conversation yesterday with Trevor Jones bought back to me issues which have become common trends in my observances of my students. 

“I’ve been noticing more and more that our students don’t know how to fail! We don’t teach them how to fail.”

How true this is. I’m not a psychologist but I see over and over again the paralysing effects of this fear of failure. Especially when it comes to music dictation. My students are often high achievers and there is a lot of competition in class but I will set up a lesson as follows:

I will prepare for melodic dictation by doing clever echo in solfa. This means I will sing a melody to ‘loo’, students will sing it back to me and track the contour of the melody in the air with their finger. Then they will sing this in solfa. 

Once I have done this as a class, I will give each student a turn. I will sing a phrase, the whole class will echo it, one student will give the solfa solution and the whole class will echo this showing hand signs before moving on. 

The melodic dictation will influence the kinds of patterns I choose for clever echo. The sounds are fresh in students’ heads and I ask them to sing me ‘do’ and ‘so’ and to keep those sounds in their heads as anchor points.

Here’s where the rails come off.  As soon as I give a dictation it’s as if the previous 10 minutes never happened. Students will write on the staff and some will get three notes in three hearings when they were getting whole phrases right in the clever echo section of the lesson using the same melodic patterns. This is incredibly frustrating!

So yesterday I told them they were not allowed to use the staff. They had to just do solfa and stick notation and the results were much better. One student in particular got the whole melody in two hearings where they were unsuccessful at getting two bars in five hearings the previous week! This was then transferred onto the staff. There were still a few students paralysed by fear though.  When I walked past they were writing the dictation on the staff without success. They wouldn’t try this way at all because they were scared they’d be no good at it or get a worse result. 

I stopped the class and asked students if they were being assessed on this? No. Would it effect their mark? No. What was the harm in trying something new to see if it worked? What was the worst that could happen?

If you’re going to break through a door, charge into it with confidence! If you loose your nerve the door won’t open.  Even if students did try a new way they may be so scared that their fear causes them to fail anyway. 

It’s a constant issue. I haven’t worked out a solution and any solution needs to be individually tailored because each internal experience is different. In the meantime I will try to encourage my students to loudly and confidently make mistakes and not feel like it makes them less worthy or talented. We all must try things many times before we get them right so we may as well run full steam ahead into our failures, without fear.