When D. came to visit last July, he watched me teach a violin lesson. Afterwards he told me that the questions I ask my students surprised him. It's true, I do sometimes ask my students weird, open-ended questions about what they're doing.
When taking teacher training for Suzuki violin, one of the things that's stressed is the importance of asking very detailed questions that you know the student can always answer correctly. "Creating a 'no-fail' environment" is how it's worded, I think. I agree, it's very important to concoct the right question in order to get the answer that you want. Sometimes, though, I know the question I want but I don't actually know the answer I want. For a long time I agonized over this. What I've recently realized is that sometimes it really is the question that's important because it starts a thought process in a student. I don't necessarily care if they give me the "right" answer.
I often ask violin students questions like, "OK, on a scale of 1 to 10, how loose was your left thumb when you played that?" I really don't care whether the student thinks it was an 8 and I think it was a 2. If the student thinks it's a 9 then I say, "can you take it to 11?" "I thought you said 1 to 10!" (these kids haven't seen Spinal Tap...) And then we start getting goofy and into 3 decimal places and all heck breaks loose, but that student has focused his mind on being aware of a specific technical point and assigning a rating to it. After getting to a 10 on the student's scale, I'll ask a student to take that 10 and pretend it's a 4 on a new scale.
This week I reached a new level of "the answer doesn't matter" when I asked a student "which side of you is more relaxed? The left or the right?" He said, "the right". I was thinking the left. But I thought, huh, actually it might not matter whether his answer was "correct", because I'm only asking him to get him to think about it. I then said, "OK, now as you play that again, can you let your left side be as relaxed as your right side is?" And you know what? Both sides became more relaxed. His mind was on it.
The longer I teach violin, the more time I spend on creating self-awareness and teaching students how to listen to all kinds of different parts of their bodies, not just their fingers, because the day will come when they don't have a teacher to do the analysis for them. I spent so many years as a violinist trying to get my fingers to do the right things when I could have done it more quickly by concentrating on my shoulder, or my back, or my knees. It occurs to me that I'd also like to create this kind of awareness of process with my high school students, and it's something we talked about today, briefly, when I attended a conference on strategies for improving literacy. Watching yourself learn can make you learn more quickly and easily. And sometimes being aware will help you more in the long run than being "right" the first time.