I’ve been taking group button accordion lessons at Comhaltas Celtoiri Eireann boston Music School for 5 years and have made little progress after the first year. My 7 year old daughter who just started playing the fiddle in September is making more progress than I did in my first year. Why? Aside from the plasticity of her brain, the fact that she has been irish step dancing from age 3 thus has a good feel for the music and good timing, her instructor has scaffolded the learning experience for her.

To scaffolded the learning process you have to break a complex set of skills that are required to demonstrate mastery of a subject into a sequence of steps.

In my case my accordion teacher played a tune he wanted me to learn and then sent me home with the music to not only to play perfectly but to play without the music in one week. My daughter’s teaching in contrast, fist had my daughter memorize the tune by lilting it. One week later he taught her the first part of the tune and showed her how to do this without the music, she practice the tune all week and the third week she played it with her group of 3 other students while the teacher snapped his fingers to keep them in time. After they played the tune together several times, he critiqued each player gave them some tip, corrected some errors and then taught them the second part by ear. He told my daughter to practice the whole tune and to that she could end her practice session when she had played the new tune perfectly 3 times.

Meanwhile, I’ve been getting worse and worse because my learning hasn’t been scaffolded, so I can’t even play in group sessions because I can’t play without looking at the music!!! All my effort has really been wasted because my instructor didn’t know enough to break down the skills involved in playing a traditional irish tune at a session.