Lecture about Suzuki and Montessori

Thursday March 20th. Today I had a seminar called “Teaching Music 2” that is part of my piano studies. We discussed different musical pedagogy methods that are used around the world.

The Suzuki pedagogy from Japan is a method to teach music to young children only through listening. In this method the parents role is emphasized even more than usual, and the parent should practise TOGETHER with the child. So that means also the parent has to learn the same instrument simultaneously as the child.

Nowadays you can study Suzuki pedagogy in Finland, it is a education divided into five steps. It is actually recommended that the teachers teaching Suzuki should be educated both as music teachers as well as in Suzuki pedagogy, but if you as a parent want to put your child into Suzuki school, you have to be quite exact in which particular Suzuki school you put your child, because there are many “Suzuki” teacher who have no idea about the method but just use the word “Suzuki” for getting more pupils.

The Montessori method emphasizes helping the child to “do things on it’s own” which interests it. Montessori pedagogy is more known for it’s schools and is not so emphasized on music (as for instance Suzuki pedagogy).

The lecture was very interesting and if you don’t know anything about the music pedagogy of Suzuki, Montessori, Kodaly or Orff, I recommend you to read about it! It’s interesting!