Yoga Ball Revolution - Helping Piano Students Thrive
This article is a sharing of personal experiences related to learning the piano and teaching the piano. It may be useful for other piano teachers who sometimes find their time with students to be not enjoyable, perhaps when students are not making much progress and might seem to be always sleepy, not engaging their thinking brains, distracted, disinterested, disconnected or oppositional. Hopefully it would also be helpful for parents and students in understanding the dynamics of a piano lesson and the cause of these behaviours. Through gaining such understanding, the article seeks to offer a path for us to consider in these difficult situations: that compassion is the key to re-establish a functional learning environment - not only compassion for the teachers and parents, but also for the students, because when the piano lesson is not working well, all three parties suffer.
“This is the way we were brought up”
The trigger point for writing this article was a chance encounter with some old footage of me as a kid having a piano lesson preparing for Grade 8. I have forgotten much about those early years of piano learning, and watching it brought me quite the shock. Firstly, seeing how I was struggling with the scales (which I did eventually fail in the exam), I don’t think anyone would have anticipated me becoming a professional pianist; however, the more disturbing part was the general sense of frustration, discouragement and silent suffering permeating through this 30-minute clip that make the adult me cringe and cower. Everything that my teacher said and did was well-intentioned and we were out of time, so it was natural that my teacher’s annoyance at my uncooperative behaviour began to grow; I don’t remember what thoughts had gone through my mind back then, and my body language didn’t express much aside from some level of discomfort, but looking back now I feel being blamed and being helpless, and whatever I felt at the time was evidently unpleasant enough that I stopped piano after passing the Grade 8 exam with 118 marks.
Having been reminded of what happened to myself when I was learning the piano, I began to recall regretfully the instances where I have similarly caused my students to feel helpless or other kinds of discomfort. These days, even though I try consciously to not repeat the mistakes, I still often end up falling into the pattern of fixing things, giving solutions and subconsciously expecting the student to conform and comply, expecting my methods to work because those methods do work on me while overlooking the fact that the methods often leave the students stranded in confusion. This model of finding faults and fixing things is how I was brought up and how I’ve always known piano teaching was supposed to work. You might well ask, what is the point of having a lesson if we don’t fix things? So, here comes the revolution part of the picture.
We are fixating on narrow definitions of creativity, intelligence and education
It was already 17 years ago when Sir Ken Robinson did his first TED Talk Do Schools Kill Creativity (76 million views on TED and and 23 million on YouTube) and demanded a revolution in the education system. I have only just got to watch this talk recently and much of what he said 17 years ago is still applicable now. Our education model and our idea of intelligence is focused solely on academic achievements when intelligence is actually much more diverse. The ones who thrive in this academic system are those who end up being in academia as university professors, which are just one kind of people in our world, a lovely bunch who “view their bodies as only a vehicle for bringing their heads to meetings.” Likewise, our model of piano learning seems geared towards producing competition winners, a specialist group of musicians among a much wider possibility of music-making. Education from kindergarten to high school and university has become a gradual process of shifting our attention from the limbs up to the heads, and then increasingly to just the left side of our brains, our logical and rational side, neglecting the development of healthy connections to our emotions, our bodies and the people around us. As children we start from a place of curiosity and creativity, which is gradually educated out of us by the need to fix things, get things right, score good marks in exams and tests. We are being told “whatever you do, don’t do it wrong” but we cannot be creative if we don’t allow ourselves to be wrong. Our society constantly evaluates us on how creative and how intelligent we and our kids are, as if there is a universal measurement of creativity and intelligence. Instead, we should be asking how we are creative and intelligent in our own way. Take this experiment for example (YouTube link) where the participants have to extract a peanut from the tube. The children and adults in the video have all failed but a chimpanzee could do it - it doesn’t mean that the chimpanzee is more intelligent than those people, but rather, even a chimpanzee can be intelligent in ways that humans might not necessarily be. So the question is, how much of our own intelligence and creativity have we overlooked when trying to conform to society?
Another influential educator, Jukka Sinnemäki from Finland, has a motto of “see the unseen”, whose classroom is a thing of wonder (link). He tells a story of how when he was a principal at a school, he had a student who struggled through the years, and on the last day of school the student came into the principal’s office carrying a beautiful oil painting, saying that she wanted to leave behind at least one good memory for the school after all the trouble she had caused. Mr Sinnemäki asked her if she painted it herself, the student answered “yes.” “This is beautiful! How did you become such an amazing painter?” “By watching a 9 minute YouTube tutorial.”
Even at a school led by an innovator such as Jukka Sinnemäki, we can have a student spending years struggling on the fringes when she could have used that time to do more with her unique talents. In this world with increasing deference to automated production lines and artificial intelligence, surely we have even less of a need to mass-produce kids that possess the same skill sets, no matter how foundational those skill sets may seem to us now, and certainly not at the expense of their talents.
What are we seeing in the student?
Going back to that old footage of my piano lesson, I was startled by something I heard while the little me was being lectured on how to manage my remaining time to get the scales sorted - at that moment I had no capacity to listen to my teacher, and was instead doodling around with Fauré’s E minor fugue from the Pieces Breves. That was one of the pieces in the exam book, and even though it wasn’t my exam piece, I remember having always been drawn to that music, and it didn’t matter if I could only get through the first few lines. Just playing the fugue subject would give me an incredible sense of purpose. This is one of the few things that I do remember from that period of piano study, and it was a part of me that went unseen for years; I now recognise it as my innate fondness of how fugues are layered, they captivate me on an intellectual level. At that time, it was seen as distracted behaviour, and I never felt comfortable enough to ask if I could learn that piece, let alone to seek help in getting beyond those first few lines. The first fugue that I did learn was 4 years after that.
When we approach lessons with an agenda, it is difficult to see what our students are bringing to us. Being responsible adults, we will inevitably have some agenda about how we nurture the kids’ talents, but we need to have constant awareness of the risk we are taking, because we may be projecting what we want to see in them instead of seeing who they really are. When we are under pressure, we run greater risks of mistaking behaviours like inattentiveness or distractedness as willful disobedience because we need them to do as we say in order to meet the deadline. But the deadline is not the student. In my own example, I shut off my teacher’s voice to doodle with Fauré’s fugue because I didn’t get the concept of harmonic minor scales in 3rds and 6ths and saw no viable way to understand them; in those conditions, any plans laid out to practise the scales just equate to more suffering, and who wouldn’t try to turn away from suffering when it is so overwhelming? On the other side, my teacher probably saw my doodling as irrelevant and felt the need to focus on the task at hand, which was getting me to pass the exam. It was not any particular person’s fault that my fondness for fugue was missed; we all did what we could with what we had at the time. Therefore what I wish to accomplish with this article is to give us more options in the ‘what we have’ part, so that we might be able to do more than what we received in our own childhood.
Neuroscience developments
The yoga ball comes into this as a symbol to shift away from traditional mindsets of learning that require the student to sit still, concentrate, conform and comply. Recent developments in neuroscience are indicating that combining movements with learning is always more effective than having the student sitting still. (And it’s not just for the student: can you imagine what it’ll be like for a classroom teacher to conduct a lesson while being seated all the way through?) The number one obstacle to effective learning is disconnection; disconnection between the teacher and the student, disconnection between the student and the activity, and disconnection between the student’s mind and the body. This is often shown through a collapsed posture, and sometimes the children aren’t even aware of their body collapsing because they are living the majority of their lives in the left sides of their brains and may have dissociated from their bodies. I myself am a very left-brained rational person and have trudged through most of adolescence and early adulthood with a hunched back. By sitting on the yoga ball, we are helping to reconnect with our sense of balance and with our lower trunk (the core muscles). If we extend our use of the yoga ball and have the students bounce in synchrony with some simple playing, we are further engaging their vestibular system (the system that detects how we move through space); and the vestibular system has a direct link to the neural pathway that controls our facial expressions (the ventral pathway of the vagus nerve) and our social engagement system. In other words, exciting our motion sensing system encourages the nervous system to engage in social connection. I have been using the yoga ball for a few months now and have generally seen more engagement from the students, especially for those who arrive with a lower energy level and would otherwise have started to get sleepy and doze off. Several students have remarked that the yoga ball is my most effective teaching tool yet! (I have tried many other tools…)
Our body’s quest for safety is the main driver in our behaviours
Going back to the ventral pathway of the vagus nerve, it is a nerve that belongs to something called the autonomic nervous system (ANS, please see this video for an animated illustration), which determines our physiological states such as alertness or calmness. Students of biology or medicine may come to know the ANS as having two opposing sides: the sympathetic nervous system that is responsible for mobilisation of stress responses (the ‘fight or flight’ response); and the parasympathetic nervous system that is responsible for calmness and restoration. A new model called the polyvagal theory that is now widely adopted in therapeutic circles gives an additional side to the ANS: we still have the sympathetic nervous system, but the parasympathetic nervous system is now divided into the dorsal vagal pathway and the ventral vagal pathway. The polyvagal theory is a theory of how our physiology changes in relation to its quest for safety. The term used in this detection of safety is ‘neuroception’, and we deliberately avoid using the word ‘perception’ in order to emphasise that our body’s quest for safety works beneath the level of consciousness. Safety is felt through the senses and not conceptualised by thoughts, and safety is different for each individual body. From the perspective of law and order, we may consider something safe when no physical harm has been inflicted, but in the body of my childhood self, not knowing how to play those harmonic minor scales in 3rds and 6ths was a sign of danger, not having enough time to prepare for the exam was another sign of danger, and not having developed the organisational power to dedicate myself to practising was yet another sign of danger (our brains don’t fully develop until our mid-20s if you are female, or 30 if you are male); in such an environment of piano learning, the last thing I needed was to be blamed for not practising enough and be told that I wasn’t good enough (and that my brother was better and I needed to catch up), and hence I needed to block out my teacher’s lecturing through the behaviour of distractedness. This behaviour resulted in a disconnection between me and my teacher and may be defined as destructive to our connection but protective for my own sense of safety. A more constructive behaviour that maintains the teacher-student connection would be to voice out my discomfort (e.g. I don’t understand how the harmonic scales work, or I can’t get myself to practise) and ask for help, but that level of maturity was not available to me, and is not available to most kids and adolescents. I probably did not even know I needed to understand how the harmonic scales work; perhaps all I knew was that they were much harder than the major scales and they didn’t seem to improve after trying to practise. Therefore, in an ideal situation the adults would step in and give compassion in seeing that I wasn’t comfortable and reassure me that they would go through this dangerous environment with me and keep me safe, that they would maintain connection with me instead of rejecting me for not being able to do those things.
Shutting down
The fact that I chose to distract myself with a fragment of the Fauré fugue is perhaps proof that somewhere inside me I really have a deep connection to music. For students whose true interest lie elsewhere, if they feel chronically unsafe in piano learning, in order to get through childhood and fulfil the adults’ expectations, their body may adapt a strategy of compliance; they may follow all of our instructions but they seem never to engage their thinking brain, in other words they disconnect their mind from their body so that the perpetual feeling of danger doesn’t enter and overwhelm their consciousness, just as I have forgotten whether I did feel anything at all in those piano lessons. Once they get to adulthood, if they are fortunate, they might find other routes such as yoga or dancing to reconnect with their bodies, but piano will likely play no further part in their lives. This shutdown adaptation is a result of a shift to the dorsal vagal pathway of the parasympathetic system and is something our bodies will turn towards when we feel there is a life-threatening danger. ‘Life-threatening’ may sound laughably exaggerated; afterall we are only talking about piano lessons, it’s not like anybody will actually die from learning the piano. However, in the body of a child, life-threatening danger often means the risk of abandonment and rejection by their carers, because children don’t have all the means to care for themselves yet. They might get this cue of abandonment from phrases such as “If you fail the exam then we will take away your phone” or “if you don’t practise then you are not a good child”. While these comments may seem entirely sensible to adults, from the child’s point of view they might be interpreted as “if I fail the exam then I would be flawed and nobody will want me” or “I am not lovable if I don’t practise”. In the short term, we may see that the children will take action (practise more) to try and avoid those life-threatening implications, but the practice will often be robotic because the mind has been disengaged to protect it from being overwhelmed by fear, and the body moves on its own, following instructions where possible but without much reflection. In the long term, the children may become very anxious when playing the piano, always worrying about making mistakes, drastically diminishing the capacity to actually enjoy the music while playing it.
If what you are reading here causes you distress or guilt, please know that you are not alone; I have made the same mistakes and I feel great sadness for the suffering I have unintentionally inflicted on people. Throughout my reading of these neuroscience material, one refrain that different authors would emphasise is that we had all been doing the best with what we had. We never willfully wish for the children to suffer. We always have the best intentions to help them grow, and we could only do it in a way we know, which was the way we were brought up. Sometimes what we see in our children really gets on our nerves; in those moments, we have to recognise our anger, own our anger, and give compassion to ourselves, because being angry doesn’t make us feel good and we need to take care of that anger first. When we pause and give compassion to ourselves, we have a better chance to see the children for who they are.
Overwhelmed and fight/flight behaviours
All children want to connect with us and they will not willfully do something to destroy that connection - if they appear to do that, then it is a signal that they are being overwhelmed with some sort of danger and are in need of safety. While the shutdown mechanism activated by the dorsal vagal pathway is characterised by a collapsed posture and a blank expression due to low muscle tone, a stress overload might prompt other kids to shift to the sympathetic nervous system and display fight/flight behaviour. In a piano classroom, that might be constant arguing, grumpiness, chattiness, freaking out, and other avoidance behaviours that would mean not playing the piano. In those situations, it might be helpful to remember that the cause of those behaviours is some sort of stress overload, so the last thing they need is anything that might create even more stress.
Play (not necessarily playing the piano but genuine play) while being connected to each other is one of the quickest ways to (re-)establish safety. I have two yoga balls in my piano classroom, so that when the students bounce on their ball, I also bounce with them on my ball. That usually lifts the atmosphere immediately and helps us to be more attuned in our movements and our energy level. We can also try to incorporate other forms of vigorous movements such as skipping and stomping to stimulate our bodily sensations, but if the child is already over-activated, then perhaps some quiet play with puzzles or word games could help. Singing provides another pathway to activate the ventral vagal pathway of social interaction but it usually requires an even greater degree of safety for the students to willingly participate.
Resilience and regulation
Readers may wonder - if we are always being so kind and fluffy to our kids, always emphasising on safety, how will they survive in the real world? Indeed that is a difficult balance to manage. We want kids to be resilient, to be able to move through difficult situations. Some researchers define resilience as the ease to shift between the different physiological states of social interaction, stress and shutdown, but before our brains reach maturity in our 20s and 30s, we cannot reliably shift these states by ourselves. This shifting of physiological states is called regulation, and we need someone to co-regulate with us enough times before we can internalise that experience into self-regulation. To co-regulate with a kid, we have to first get a feel of which physiological state we are in, and find ways to get ourselves back in the social engagement state such as deep belly breathing or taking a walk (or bouncing on the yoga ball); we cannot help them shift back to social engagement when we ourselves are triggered into stress responses by their behaviours. By taking a moment to regulate ourselves, we would also be setting a great example to the kids on the importance of regulation. Moreover, if someone is in a danger zone, we have to find something to say or do that helps us land in their safety zone; otherwise we will not establish connection.
Things to be careful of: pointing out mistakes
I have found it very difficult to know how to land in a new student’s safety zone, and have failed several times when meeting a teenage student for the first time and ended up saying things that made them even more uncomfortable. Some would persevere and we eventually gained each other’s trust and the lessons became effective; others dropped out after a few months or a few lessons. That is one reason why I buy into the idea of not unilaterally fixing things, because fixing things just means pointing out mistakes and if the teacher-student relationship hasn’t built enough trust, repeatedly pointing out mistakes will be interpreted as a signal of rejection. One 12 year-old student actually shared this advice with me a year or two ago, “Didn’t you know? You can only say nice things to a new student in the first 3 months, or even the first year. Afterwards, you can start pointing out the mistakes.” Now I am even questioning the necessity to point out mistakes at all, because if we have patience, the students will usually notice the mistakes by themselves; if not, then I would try to approach it sideways, to make sure they have the tools to be aware of what they are playing. I have become quite comfortable at not pointing out the wrong notes and wrong rhythms, but at the higher levels I still struggle with not pointing out what I perceive as problems in balance, phrasing, and technical issues. That doesn’t mean we leave them as they are - in my understanding, what we can do is to help them be aware of what they are doing and check that it is what they want to do with the music. If they want to play the notes that the composer had written, that’s fine and we can help them do that; if they don’t want to play the notes that the composer had written, that’s also fine, even if the underlying reason may be a refusal to admit to mistakes; in which case we would need to be curious to find the further underlying reason behind that refusal to own up to mistakes. Uncooperative behaviours are always indicative of the presence of some form of danger.
Things to be careful of: frowning
While constantly pointing out mistakes could easily be misinterpreted as rejection, another social cue that we need to be very careful with is the frown. Biologically, we are ultra-sensitive to frowns, especially the intense kind, because they imply disgust, and in a social setting, if a child is given a disgusted look by a carer, they could easily misinterpret that as “I am disgusting”, “I am not lovable”. I am fortunate to have some students who were sensitive enough and trusting enough to tell me that I frowned a lot, because I wasn’t aware of it myself. After hearing that feedback, I try to consciously lift my eyebrows when I start to feel them burrowing, which probably looked a bit weird, but it is still important for the kids to see that I am trying to be better for them and their feedback matters. The more effective but also more difficult method would be to learn to see the kids as who they are and appreciate them as who they are. Our frowns are usually not actually directed at them, but at our pasts. They remind us of something we didn’t want in ourselves: it could be that time when I got a big-lettered comment from the professor that I played SO LOUD for SO LONG, or it could be a reminder of how bad certain kinds of mistakes sounded in our recordings. Our past traumas belong to us - we don’t need to pass it on to our kids.
Acknowledge and redirect
The kids have enough stress to deal with in their everyday lives. When the stress hormone cortisol is chronically high, it actually damages our brains, and the natural way for our brains to counter cortisol is through oxytocin, which is released when we are connected with our carers through compassion and empathy. This does not mean we let the kids do anything they want. We still establish boundaries but we do that with kindness and clarity. I have a student who finds it difficult to obey rules, and these are fundamental house-keeping rules we are talking about, and I am learning how to convey the message that rules and boundaries are not for controlling people (lack of control probably being his main source of danger) but for maintaining connection by not triggering each other. One useful way I learned from a play therapist is “acknowledge and redirect” (video here). What that means is, when we see a behaviour that we are not comfortable with (e.g. the student doodles something on the piano while we are trying to say something), we make a guess at what they are trying to express in that behaviour and acknowledge their need to express: “I see that you may not want to hear what I have to say”; and then we ask if there is another way for them to do it so that we keep a connection: “Is there another way for you to let me know that? Perhaps you can tell me directly that you need some time to cool down or maybe we can make you a card to raise up when you would like me to pause the talking at that moment?”
This “acknowledge and redirect” tool is also useful for students who struggle with perfectionism, which is especially difficult when it comes to making recordings in this age of digital exams, as they might stop in the middle of the recording being dissatisfied with their performance so far, and start again only to stop on another mistake, and start again until time runs out and the anxiety level has reached sky-high. In such cases, appealing to their thinking brain is likely to be futile; the thinking brain will not be available when anxiety is in the front seat, we will not succeed at convincing them that exam marks are not as significant as they think. Instead, we may try to first acknowledge that they have a great need to get a good mark in the exam. This acknowledgement would at least remove the “nobody understands me” part of the anxiety, and the compassion that comes with it will help to soothe the anxiety. Then we may try to redirect their intention to get a good mark towards focusing on finishing as many recordings as possible.
I feel strongly that piano learning in the long term is only possible when we feel safe. Having the safety to make mistakes is a prerequisite for creativity. If they can find creativity in music, which is a truly wonderful thing, they may also find creativity in all things in life, and ultimately find wonder in our brief stay on the Earth. In this sense, the piano teacher, or other instrumental teachers, can play a unique role in a child’s growth as it is a one-to-one relationship that may last 5-10 years. If that relationship is safe and secure, if the student knows that there are other adults outside of the family who can always be there for them, it can be a source of strength and resilience to brave what’s to come in life.
All of this takes practice and it’s easier said than done. Even in the process of writing this article I have yet again made a mistake of intending to fix some student’s phrasing - I remembered to listen to her playing attentively and didn’t feel much negativity towards her playing, but I focused too much on her music and overlooked her as a person. I forgot to pay attention to her energy level, as she had been ill only a few days before. After the lesson, the parent reported that she went home and developed a high fever. It is difficult to change our mindset, and I am not suggesting that everyone have to do it my way. However, if you happen to be struggling with lessons as I have, I hope some of this would be helpful to bring more positivity and optimism to your lessons.
Stephen Hung is a pianist graduated from the Royal Academy of Music and has been teaching in Hong Kong for 10 years. Much of the therapeutic knowhow in the article are developed from conversations with his mother, who is a psychotherapist certified in EFT and received training in AEDP and Bodynamics, and now runs the therapy clinic Sunshine Counselling Service (Facebook link).