Demonstrate and imitate. That’s the time honored method of teaching and learning lots of performance or athletic skills. Sometimes it works, and most times not, in my opinion.
But for sure imitation is not going to work for someone who actually lacks physical capacity to perform the movement being demonstrated. If you don’t have arms, it’s impossible to imitate raising your arm.
Only the brain doesn’t really work that way, at least according to a just-released research study. What happens instead has to do with goals rather than just duplicating a given movement.
The researchers ask people without hands or arms to mimic video of various hand movements, as they watched scanned images of what was happening in the aplasic brains. The aplasic brains lit up with activity all right, but it was in areas associated with their feet instead of hands.
The results underscore that the mirror neuron system isn’t mindlessly imitating, but working toward a goal, he says. The two people without hands or arms recognized they could lift a cup with their feet—and their brain lit up accordingly.
That’s pretty interesting, and maybe even a bit amazing. But it go me wondering about using demonstration and imitation in learning skills more complex than such simple movements.
I’ve never been a real big fan of the demonstration and imitation approach to learning performance or athletic skills. And especially if you’re paying big bucks by the hour to have some expert show you how it done.
Maybe I’m not alone here.
Music professor Robert Duke offers a kinder, gentler approach:
In teaching, often a student will do something, then the teacher tries to fix it by simplifying it a little, then having the student try again, Duke said. If that doesn’t work, we make it a little more simple, and try again. This can keep going: simplify, try, simplify try. Maybe we do it eight times before it’s simple enough for the student to accomplish. Then once they get it, we go back to the passage and have them try again.
During this process, with each failed attempt, “the learner is thinking: wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong….,” Duke said. “Rather than inch back and then leap forward, we should leap back, and then inch forward,” Duke said. “Leap back to a task that is very accomplishable.” This doesn’t always mean to play something slower. It can mean to play it in rhythms, or to work on the fundamentals of the technique involved. Either way, the student needs to be able to achieve success, there in the lesson. “How is a student going to do, ALONE, what you can’t get them to do in your studio in 20 minutes?” Duke said. “This principle goes across all levels: set them up in a way that they can do the thing we demonstrate.”
From: http://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20076/7046/
So how does this tie into the research study talked about earlier? I’m not really sure if there is any kind of direct tie here. It might be interesting to look at brain scans of students using Duke’s approach. But, hey, it’d probably be hard to get the piano into a scanner.
Probably similar brain patterns are at work, though.
What’s most interesting is the piano students are imitating to learn. Only they are imitating themselves in earlier successful situations.
As Yogi Berra says, “you can observe a lot just by watching.” And you can learn a lot from yourself, if you know what to pay attention to.