I try to never assign a piece that has elements a student hasn't encountered before. Skill preparation is everything when it comes to student success.

Thanks for the comments. Blocked and broken chord inversions sound like what's needed. I looked at RCM guidelines and have a plan for moving forward.

Yes, I agree about skill preparation. And some need more preparation than others. I'll try to be more careful about this.

Problem: skill preparation MAY have nothing to do with reading.

But a student who has never played triad inversions will have more trouble simply because they aren't in the hand.

It's a catch 22 situation.

Some things have to be learned by rote, and in that reading plays a minimal role, at most.

But then the rote skills have to be recognized while reading, which is a tricky process.

I think it is all a balance, lot's of common sense involved.

Right, and it's a process for the teacher to really be able to assess what's going on. If there's a situation where the student is having trouble and it could be from a number of different sources, the best thing to do is process of elimination as to the culprit.

Ann, don't get discouraged by these comments because every teacher encounters them, even ones who have been teaching for a long time. You'll get to the heart of it as long as you're not afraid to totally change direction if need be (like doing more supplementary work in other books to work on music that is parallel to what you're doing in the method book). The method books are great for introducing new material usually, but they don't often have enough practice in applying new concepts as a student may need.

Thanks Morodiene. It also occurred to me that this student has not used the theory book that goes with the series, saying he already understands the concepts. He can probably identify, for example, what inversion a chord is in. But he likely has not had enough repetition for it to be easy. For a time, I used a theory book on hand to carefully go over concepts with him (and to keep track of what we'd covered).

So here's the plan:
Show him a pattern for practicing chord inversions (RCM pattern), and practice at lessons.
Get out the theory book and assess how readily he can identify inversions.
Suggest the sightreading book.
Hold off on going to the next level in method series.
Bring back out MWC 1-2 and work from it.
Continue with a developing artist Bk 1 that he has.

I'd really like to find a supplementary book that is a bit easier than the 2 I listed above (more along the lines of Faber 2B). But I don't care much for the Gold Star book at that level. Another adult student has enjoyed a certain hymn book. It is a perfect fit for him. So I could inquire as to what type of music he likes. I'd like to have a book from which he can play his assignment fluently within 1 week to give more reading practice especially if he does not go for the sight reading book idea.

In order to choose appropriate supplementary books that are not a part of a series (with corresponding levels), take a look at the things required of him now in 3B, and then look at the music in repertoire books and see if the skillets are similar. I think any book will do as long as the music is clean/easy to read and the skills match what he can currently do. Then it's just a matter of finding something he'd enjoy learning.

Right. It's a teacher's job to introduce these concepts and find them in the music. So, for example, we can teach arpeggios, inversions, and broken chords, then after the student has had some time to work on them, magically find a piece that utilizes those techniques.

When I work on sightreading with my students, I do more than one example. The first pass, I study the score with the student, even if it's only 4-8 measures. What time signature is it? What key signature is it? Which hand goes first? What's the fingering? What does the melodic line look like? What about the left hand, what kind of accompaniment does it have? Let's clap or speak through the rhythm a couple of times. Are there any recognizable figures? After we do this, the student has a much better chance of sightreading success.

I myself do a lot of sightreading in front of my students and they see that it's not always perfect. They see me stumble and sometimes break cardinal rules of sightreading (like fixing mistakes). They hear me counting out loud, and they also hear me say, "Whatever!" if I've just screwed something up.

Ann is right about pattern recognition being important to sightreading. But it's all kinds of pattern recognition - note recognition, aural recognition ("I bet I know where this progression goes"), rhythmic recognition, even formal recognition ("Hey wait a second, this is rounded binary form!"). It's recognition drawn from experience playing a lot of music. It's a lot of work prepping a student to sightread and anticipate correctly, and it can be so, so tricky.

The only other sightreading book I've used that I like just as much as Marlais is an old, old sightreading tome from like, the 1960s. I can't even remember the title of it, but one of my teachers lent it to me to see if I could get through it. Each unit started with a list of rhythms and melodic patterns for familiarization, and then followed it with 10-15 exercises or pieces with various combinations of those rhythms and melodies. Some of the pieces were "real" and some of them were just exercises. And every single one of them had a time limit. I had a lot of fun but the end of the book was a riot because I'd look at the page with all the black on it and say, "No way." And blunder through it anyway.

The Marlais is successful because (and I'm totally biased here) I think the eurhythmics built into it works. Introducing a strong rhythmic component and coupling it with five-finger patterns in different keys is a very good idea. There's a lot of prepwork before the last pieces in each unit and it's very similar to the kind of prepwork I'll do with my kids, like rhythm drills, intervallic drills, taking a 5-finger melody and transposing it, etc. And now I'm out of time so I will hit the post button.

(mostly student-side)
Our ability as adults to understand concepts can throw us a curve ball if we're not careful. In music it has to not only be in our mind as an idea, but in our hands, from the page to the piano, in our ears, back and forth. I was several years into studying my first instrument involving lessons, when we realized that I barely knew note names. I did a crash course in theory and got rather good at writing things out on paper and naming things. After passing my exams I had the nagging feeling that this wasn't good enough, so I went through every bit of theory I did, playing it in order to make a connection. Since then I've gone through it a third time, associating everything specifically to piano. I also try to name and recognize the chords in the music itself.

If your adult student was motivated enough to study theory on his own, I wonder if he'd be willing to try to make the connection in a practical sense now, so that it's real for him in the written music and over to piano. That could be any of the things suggested here, as well as knowing he has to get this part, and making it part of how he tackles pieces he works on at home. For example, you can study the score before working on learning to play it, try to recognize chords and their inversions, play them, play around with them physically instead of just "knowing" that G, G/B, and G/D are inversions of the same chord intellectually.

I'm thinking that as adults we are capable of working more independently than children, but the hangup is that we don't always know what we should be focusing on.

He already has Scales, Chords, Cadences and Arpeggios book and didn't want to buy another theory book. (But for me it's much easier to keep up with a graded theory series.) He felt like if he had any questions he could look it up in his book. I have a copy, but not that familiar with it. So this thread is motivating me to look it over.

And duh! It finally occurred to me that I have numerous graded repertoire series on hand. I need to look them over and offer him some choices. Plan to start with looking at Festival Collection Bk 2, Norton's Connections Bk 2, and a FJH Jazz, Rags and Blues series.

I bought all these as I was gathering info about materials available, and now I get to start using them.

At the next lesson I'll see how it's going with MWC 1-2. We left off using that book some time back, so I need to refresh my memory about what progress was made. Just know he wasn't motivated at the time, but I had brought it in too early and he may be ready for it now.

So I'll be playing through some of these books today and look forward to getting a better idea of what is in them. I love it when I discover things in the process of looking for suitable student materials.

Thank you all of you who have shared your thoughts on this thread.

SO true!!!

As my friend, a programmer, used to say, "You never kill the bugs. You just drive them further into the wall."

LOL about the bug quote. I used the above icon for fun, although I have no idea if the icon has any meaning.

Funny thing: in code that is : f :, but without spaces. But what does it mean?

Friendly alien?

A thought I wanted to add:

Years ago I mixed and matched at least five different methods with an adult student, who ended up being one of the best readers I've ever taught.

Having so many methods gave us the option of discussing each selection in each book, and it "blanketed" concepts. There was a tendency for method to catch something that the others missed, and I was able to throw all the common NON-method book pieces into the mix, only worrying about level of difficulty.

I used the same method myself to learn to read German fluently, getting high school textbooks from four different high school students, all of whom had different series.

Each "method" (series) taught the same concepts, but there were different idioms and unique vocabulary in each. Since sooner or later EVERY word commonly used in a language becomes important, using four times the materials allowed me to advance more quickly in ALL of them, and also to make the leap into real German literature.

I can now speed-read in German, and I started after that age of 30 from zero...

Your success with teaching yourself German is impressive.

This icon looks like someone using a snorkel. Perhaps it means "I'm in over my head".

Thanks for sharing your experience with using a variety of materials with an adult student.

I have a friend who did something like that with bowling, and he's bowled 13 perfect (300) games in his first two years.

He took lessons, bought videos, etc. But he was having trouble throwing as well in league as he did in practice. One of the pros explained to him that the oil was never the same twice, and it took 10 years to learn to read it and adjust.

So he joined ten leagues, and learned it in one year.

Yes, review and repetition are important.

As I recall, this student already has a Fun Time popular book, but only worked on one piece. And in reading an article about tips for teaching, I see that frequently the Fabers put students through one Fun Time book after another before progressing to the next level (depending on how easy it is for the students). Since I'm seeing some difficulties, I'll guide this student to do more work at the current level (or even a bit easier). And there are plenty of materials to choose from.

Thanks for all the discussion. I've learned that I need to add more guidance about triad inversions to my teaching. And I've checked out Marlais' sightreading books. And had not previously spent time with Book 2 of Norton's Connections (I really like Bk 3 and 4, but now have come to appreciate book 2 also.)

My plan a week ago had been to move to Level 4. Now I've taken a careful look at what is going on, and I have a much better plan. Thank you to all who shared your thoughts.