Assessment, Suzuki-style

When I'm seeking a pure solution to a difficult educational problem, I often turn to the Suzuki violin method. It's almost a case of "What Would Suzuki Do?" I have idealized his methods because I trust his heart. He did or said nothing that did not have love of children at its core. So when in doubt, I ask myself, WWSD?

I have the issue of the assessment of learning on my mind, and thinking about how the Suzuki method does it makes it clear what it should be.

About a year ago, at age ten, my daughter had her Suzuki Book One solo recital. It was more than just her demonstration of all she had learned about the violin since she was three. It was many things: a rite of passage, an exercise in endurance, an opportunity to build her self-respect, a day when all her hard work gave her a chance to shine (not to mention a chance for her parents to dissolve into a puddle of love and pride).

As she and I, along with her wonderful teacher, prepared for the recital, my appreciation of the process grew and grew. She had mastered all the songs in Book One, but now she was preparing them for the world. We hung a chart on the wall of all the songs, and put check-marks each time she practiced one, with a special indication when she decided that she had played it with "recital-quality."

As the weeks went by we both grew more and more aware of what she had accomplished. Best of all, she was able to put her personality into the recital, creating funny moments, opportunities for the audience to laugh with her. (She interrupted Allegro just before the final phrase by putting her bow on her head; all the Suzuki students in the audience took pencils we had distributed and put them on their heads, points to the ceiling, as they had done many times in group lesson, and the parents, bewildered, followed suit until the entire audience had pencils on their heads, waiting for Francie to finish the song.) It was her creation, and who she was came shining through.

You always hear people say how hard the violin is. It's true. The violin is very picky about what it needs in order to sound good. When playing the violin, you can't really get a pure tone if you are bowing all crooked or on the fingerboard; you can't get the ringing tones to ring if you don't have your left-hand fingers in precisely the right spot on the fingerboard. If you want to create beauty, you have to master technique.

So one song at a time, one skill at a time, Suzuki teaches technique. In the meantime, you are listening to the songs on your CD, you are attending group violin lessons, and you are tackling each song and each new baby-step of technique. If you are playing Go Tell Aunt Rhodie, Allegro seems very far away; when you get up to Allegro and you see the older students play the Minuets at group violin lesson, you think, "I'm going to play those songs someday -- but when?"

Each little song is an advancement from one technique to the next. You don't play with a complicated division of the bow of Oh Come Little Children until you have mastered the bowings of Lightly Row. But you have not forgotten Lightly Row; you review, review, review. Lightly Row sounds better and better as you advance through each song while continuing to review. And you put yourself into it more and more. (Whoever said to a beginning instrumental music student, "You can express yourself through music" has a lot to answer for. Self-expression doesn't really happen without technique. The first time a child picks up a trombone and blows into it, he thinks, "If this is self-expression, I want no truck with it!")

It is the ideal system of assessment. It grows naturally out of the process of learning. If a child is having trouble remembering to use a low second finger the first time it's called for, the process of learning it is built into the system. You take that measure and repeat, repeat, repeat until your brain is rewired to accommodate that low second finger. Then you go back to the song and repeat the phrase until your second finger knows exactly what to do. Suzuki is not afraid of the dreaded "rote learning." Rote learning, exercises, repetition, is what has to happen if you want to make beautiful music. Suzuki kids understand that.

Other techniques take longer. After her first solo recital, Francie moved very quickly into learning vibrato. It took weeks. First she practiced the muscle movements vibrato requires, without holding the violin. Then she held the violin while practicing those movements. Gradually she put it all together, and created the prettiest vibrato her proud Mom had ever seen: loose, relaxed, effective, and miles ahead of my own!

Now she is preparing for her smaller Book Two half-recital and as she goes back to the first song in the book, Chorus from Judas Maccabeus, a long-bow song that's all about beautiful, sustained, majestic tone. She practices her even vibrato through the entire length of the bow. It sings.

How do you know what a child has learned? How do you know your teaching has resulted in learning? It's hard to look at the public-school classroom through the lens of the Suzuki violin method. For all my understanding of the assessment of violin skills, assessment in the classroom remains a mystery. But my understanding of this method helps me to understand that learning is assessment, and vice-versa. Learning is the process of adding skill onto skill; you get one under your belt, and move on to the next, which requires mastery of all the skills before. When you achieve your goal, whether it is accomplishment of Suzuki Book One, the building of a boat, the completion of a short story, the rebuilding of an engine or the design of a green home, the assessment is the accomplishment.

For all my study of education, this is what I've learned about assessment. How does this view advance our thinking of what happens inside our public schools? We need to completely change how we think about it. How much of it benefits children, and how much just satisfies the need for adults to quantify something that can't be quantified? What's a good score for joyful learning? What's a measurable scale for satisfaction and development of self-respect? For more on these questions; watch this space!

The "Standards-Based" System

I want to talk a little bit about standards-based education, and the idea of basing the evaluation of a student's progress on whether or not they have achieved understanding or mastery of certain concepts and skills, rather than testing or seat-time. It's confusing at first because it seems so intuitive that one might say, "But isn't that what we do now?" It generally isn't what we do now. We teach in a certain way, at a certain time; kids either learn or they don't; they take tests or evaluate progress by whatever means; then they move on. If you fail a class, you don't get the credit, and you're behind. In our local high school, kids are struggling as they move ahead by grade, but carry a credit deficit that often drives them to drop out.

I have come to understand the standards-based system means in terms of the Suzuki method of education. In Suzuki, skills are mastered one small step at a time, and when one is learned, we add another, very small one, on top of that. We tell young children to do finger exercises to build their muscles and get the fingers used to the motions they will use on the violin. We call them Fairy Hops, Finger Wiggles and Bow Bunnies. You introduce them to the exercises and have them practice them and get used to them before you progress to the holding of the bow. At that point, their thumbs are over the frog, instead of inside it as adults do. When their hands are strong enough, you move the thumb to the inside of the frog. You master one before you move to the next.

That is how standards are supposed to work. I believe most states now have standards -- in Maine they're called the Learning Results. I've read a little bit of them; they seem logical and thoughtful. I'm happy, as I've said before, that I'm not the one who has to come up with these things, and equally happy that I don't have to read them through. But it does provide a decent framework for the introduction to concepts, covering of information, and mastery of skills.

Mostly what I like about a standards-based system is that it provides a legitimate context to start talking about a completely different way for kids to learn. In discussing a standards-based system we can make those happy who believe what children learn is important, and bring forward what we (I) regard as the real issue, which is how children learn.

(I do think the what is important. The difference between me and most educational professionals is that I want kids to be given a lot more choice. If we treat students' ideas with respect, give them space and time to learn what they want to know, master what they want to do, then they will give us the respect of agreeing to learn what we regard as important. The respect that kids need and deserve is rarely part of the debate, but that's one of the things I'd like to push the hardest, but more on that at another time.)

Progress by a student in any area is measured by whether the standard has been achieved. If it hasn't, the teacher has to figure out why, and discuss with the student how to proceed.

What this opens up to us is a completely different way to structure schools. Classrooms can be filled not with kids of the same age or grade level, but with those students working on certain standards. The way they learn becomes much more flexible. If an entire classroom is working on determining the definition of life, group discussions on characteristics of life take place, possible projects research directions can be discussed, out-of-school investigations open up.

This is the article that gave me a much clearer picture of how a standards-based system is linked to project-based learning. At first those of you who are, like me, allergic to tracking and "ability grouping" will look askance at this, but if the model for how kids learn is changed, then there is no need to resort to tracking in order to manage education and keep kids interested and engaged.


Some schools grouping students by skill, not grade level

Now, because I feel compelled to tie it all together, it's in the achievement of these standards that the potential for deep practice takes place. If our systems are based in the step-by-step building of skills and mastering of concepts, then just as a Suzuki student is taught to hold the bow, kids will move forward as they learn; each mastery giving them confidence and motivation for taking the next step.

Suzuki and the Talent Code

There should be dancing in the streets when an old idea is crushed under the weight of science and reason. If this old idea puts limitations on what we can achieve, what we can learn, what we can do, then let's laugh as it fizzles out under the brightness of a new one. Let's leave it behind us and not look back!

We have that new idea. It's about how we teach our kids.

There is a book that came out last year called The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle. The facts that he puts forward are simple: there is no such thing as inborn talent. Once you accept that the above is true, you see how liberating this idea is. Anyone can do it. But can we handle it? Can we shoulder the burden of responsibility once we know that the kids that go through our schools are all capable of great things?

All you need to develop great talent are for certain factors to be in place. You need a spark of ignition, something to light a child up with the desire to be able to be or do something. You need a master coach, a teacher who gets you, gets the thing you want to learn, and is able to bring the two of you together. And you need what Coyle calls deep practice.

Deep practice is the hard part. It's the act of pushing yourself against the limit of your abilities. By doing this you build a substance called myelin, which literally wraps itself around neurons like paper towels on a roll. The more you engage in deep practice, the more you wrap myelin, the faster the electrical circuits in your brain fire. To develop talent is simply to wrap myelin. Scratch the surface of anyone who appears impossibly talented and you will find someone who has spent most of his or her life wrapping myelin.

Deep practice can be broken into three components, ways to manage the struggle of dancing at the edge of your capacity. When we do music and we come upon a passage cannot even imagine ever mastering, we do three things: we chunk it up. We slow it down. And we repeat it.

There are many people who instinctively understand this process, but I want to talk about one particular group. We have been brought together by the ideas of a man who voiced the above surprising claim over 50 years ago, in another country. In the late 1940s, Shinichi Suzuki said that every single child can become a great violinist. Those of us influenced by him, those of us practicing his ideas, teaching kids in the method he has given us, have clamored about this book, devouring it in one gulp and handing it out like party favors.

Once we discard the idea that only those born with certain abilities can become hugely talented, where are we? Lots of people say, "any child can do whatever they set their mind to," but do we really believe it? Do we understand what it means?

I think sometimes that our world of conventional education teaches kids their limitations rather than their possibilities. It is, by its nature and execution, negative. Kids sit in class doing math not learning of the glories of numbers that lay before them, but squashed by the fact that they feel -- they know -- they can't do it. They sit drawing diagrams of cells waiting for the moment that they can stop and do something else. Even in our so-called "gifted and talented" programs, what do we teach but that those of us not invited are neither gifted nor talented? But here is well-documented research saying that we are all equal under the sun. We all have neurons, we all wrap myelin. Every one of us can follow our dreams and see them become real.

We can turn education on its head and start all over. Teach kids that struggle is only the beginning. Frustration with stuff we only half understand and are convinced we can't master leads to mastery and understanding. Sometimes when my daughter is practicing the violin, she is in tears because she can't master something. Then she masters it. But why the tears? Maybe we need to model and teach that struggle is good, struggle is what works -- and struggle is manageable. Push it! Keep going! And then move on to the next impossibly hard thing.

Suzuki didn't voice his ideas in terms of neuroscience. His method came from his study of how children learn their native language. He took apart that process and applied it to learning the violin. Listen to those around you. Repeat what you hear. Start slowly and build in baby steps. Enjoy yourself, celebrate each new word. Suzuki students chunk, slow and repeat every day. They've been managing deep practice since they were toddlers. Their struggle to learn is shared, praised and encouraged by parents.

Most of all, what Suzuki knew and what he taught came from love. Every child was dear to him. Every parent was taught to see the limitless ability of their children. How to teach with love. How to love with teaching. What is education but the belief in the hearts, minds, hands of every child? The Talent Code gives us nothing but the knowledge that we are right who teach with love and faith in all children.