When I was 12, I bought my first guitar for $40 from Costco (actually, it was Price Club, but that dates me!). Like all musicians, I learned my scales. I’ve played guitar for three decades now and, yep, I still practice my scales.
My cousins are professional musicians with master’s degrees and, yep, they still practice their scales every day.
If you watch professional athletes before a game, they practice the same skills as the kids in your local youth league. (Here’s Steph Curry practicing dribbling the basketball). You’ll see them stretching and doing the kinds of warmups that you’d do before any exercise.
I’m sure that jugglers and acrobats and F1 drivers have equivalent skills that they hone as well.
Professionals keep their core skills sharp with daily practice. And those core skills are the same things that a beginner works on.
So, as a teacher, what are the handful of core skills you should work on every day of your career?
Click to see my answers after you’ve thought of your own.
- asking questions
- scaffolding complex tasks
- giving feedback