Helping Students Find The Joy

This article all about helping students find the joy is the transcript for Episode 42 of the Time to Practice Podcast, essentially the podcast in written form. The words may be edited slightly for ease in reading. 

This mini episode I wanted to reflect on one of the themes that has come up in each of the interviews that you have already heard on the podcast this season, and in upcoming episodes that I have already recorded, but are still in the editing process. 

If you’d prefer to listen to this episode, you can do so through your favorite podcast streaming service or through the link below: 

It is interesting that certain topics keep coming up with all of my guests so far and they’re not anything I’m asking specifically about or prompting anyone to discuss. They are just organically being said with slightly different perspectives during each conversation. 

One theme that I keep hearing about over and over is the theme of finding joy in our music practice or music performance… In our music journey somewhere.

Crystal Boyack (you can find her episode HERE) talked about – Susanna Klein (found HERE) also brought it up, and it’s going to come up in future episodes as well.

Practicing and learning, a musical instrument is hard work, there’s no doubt about that.

It involves discipline, repetition, mastery, and doing the work, even when we’re not always in the mood for it –  as we discussed in our last mini-episode about strengthening our perseverance muscle.

BUT… What keeps coming up in the conversations about practice that I’ve been having for this podcast and just thinking about my own musical life and the students I work with is that if all of it is hard work and drudgery and perseverance building, why would we want to do it day and day out? What are we doing this for?

Most of us can relate to wanting our students our own children or even our own selves to be more intrinsically or internally motivated to practice music and make music but where does that come from?

I think what Susanna Klein said in her episode about how she got into sports psychology and especially positive psychology with practice because she was wanting to use it to pursue excellence and what she actually found out is that it made her experience more joy and love what she was doing and helped her students do the same, which led to more progress in the practice room without having to put in extra hours.

• How are we balancing the hard work with finding joy?
• How are we helping our children or students cultivate joy?
• If we are professional musicians ourselves or a music educator or both: What is it about music that brings us joy and hooks us in with that feeling of “oh I want to do this for the rest of my life?
• How can we expect students to feel motivated or excited to be in the practice room if they never get to experience that side of things?

I don’t think there’s one magic answer to that that fits every student and every person about what brings them joy in music, but I do know after having these conversations and reflecting on my own experiences that if we don’t see that happening, it’s worthwhile to search it out and try different things and see how we can make that happen for the young people in our lives who are learning music.

There’s a great Oscar-nominated documentary on YouTube – The Last Repair Shop,  that I shared in a recent newsletter that features a series of people, in music-related careers and young people learning music, and what those young people featured are learning life lessons and developing character qualities through their instruments. 

What they shared, and what gave me goosebumps when I watched and listened to them speaking with how the music made them feel, maybe many things in life felt tough, but when they were performing or playing or making music with others, it changed how they felt about themselves, how they saw themselves, and maybe how they saw life.

So I think what I wanted to reflect on with you this week, and invite you to reflect on, is how we can tap into that special kind of magic that making music offers us.

If it’s all about hard work and perseverance and grit developing, that sounds a little exhausting to be honest, even though I very much value helping young people develop all that.

There’s a lot of stress, anxiety, and pressure on all of us, but especially on young people these days

When we give them a vehicle to experience beauty, and deep feelings, and belonging, and community through learning their instrument, that is the kind of thing that changes the world.

It gets me choked up to even think about it to be honest. But that’s why I do what I do and I encourages with all our striving to improve and develop character skills to make sure we don’t lose that in the process.