Judging a Good Teacher — and a Good Student

In a trial lesson, listen not to how well they play but to whether they can diagnose you

Related

How to PractiseRecording and Self-Assessment

"Is this teacher good?" is hard to answer, because a good teacher's value does not lie in performing well but in diagnosing well.

One criterion

During a trial lesson, watch which of these the teacher is doing:

• Demonstrating — playing for you, explaining how the piece should go;
• Diagnosing — making you play a passage, then saying "here you used the wrist; here it is the fingers".

The diagnosing teacher is the more valuable one. The reason is simple: demonstration only tells you the target; diagnosis tells you the distance. Most people do not lack a target — they lack an accurate estimate of the distance.

The first example makes this concrete: with a student concerto on the stand, the first job of a good teacher is not explaining how hard the piece is, but working out where this student actually is.

What a healthy lesson looks like

A healthy teaching segment usually contains:

1. Listen to you play (all the way through, without interruption); 2. Name a small number of problems (one or two per lesson, not eight); 3. Demonstrate that one spot (to let you hear the difference, not to admire the playing); 4. Have you change it, then listen again (this step is the watershed).

Step 4 is the key. A teacher who only talks and never has you change something has delivered no closed loop.

The "good student" also gets judged

The teacher–student relationship is usually described as one-way delivery, but there is a neglected judgement on the student side:

Are you doing the thing that makes the teacher's diagnosis possible?

Concretely:

• Asking the same vague question every lesson, "what am I doing wrong", gives the teacher nothing to work with;
• Never recording, never listening back — a diagnosis without a feedback source is a guess;
• Practising only what the teacher pointed out, never what you wanted to work on — progress gets narrowed.

The piece from a primary teacher's manual in the third example points at the other face of this: a teacher's professionalism includes knowing when not to teach — when a student needs time alone, the teacher should give time alone.

Concrete things to watch

Directly observable during a trial lesson:

• Does the teacher let you finish before speaking? Constant interruption means they never hear the whole thing;
• Are the problems specific about place and action? "Not enough feeling" is not a diagnosis; "wrist too tense at beat 3 of bar 4" is;
• Is there room to make mistakes? A student afraid to play wrong has nobody willing to correct them;
• Is the teacher's own demonstration steady? An unsteady demonstration makes you doubt the method;
• Do you leave with a specific practice list? Without one, the lesson probably did not close.

Signals it is time to change teachers

Not subjective feelings like "they don't like me", but observable things:

• For three or four weeks running, none of your problems has been named specifically;
• When you ask "why should it be played that way", the answer is always "feel it";
• You keep making the same mistake and it has never come up in a lesson;
• You become increasingly unwilling to play wrong in that lesson — that is the signal that the chance to be diagnosed is disappearing.

Listen: a mistake you can diagnose yourself

Below, the fifth note is the only semitone in the passage. If it sounds the same as its neighbours when you play it, your ear is not monitoring — which is exactly the kind of problem a teacher should name.

Next

• What follows a diagnosis: Practice method.
• Diagnosing yourself: Recording and self-assessment.
• What the student side should practise: Ear training.
• Where a teacher's professionalism rests: Posture and relaxation.

Sources

• 本文为择师与师生关系的通识性讨论；不针对具体教师或机构作评价
• 涉及的曲目均标注来源与许可档位，可在线试听

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.