Music Teaching Tips

Extrinsic motivation refers to those influences that motivate a person from the outside. Intrinsic motivation refers to the motivation that comes from within.

Extrinsic motivation can take the form of awards, certificates, gifts, sweets, or other incentives. With little effort, teachers could find a multitude of items to choose from in catalogs or novelty stores that could easily spur on students temporarily. But is there any real value to the use of extrinsic motivation?

When students receive awards or certificates for jobs well done, the thrill only lasts a short period of time. If teachers offer students candies or other goodies when assignments are played correctly, they may achieve short-term results, but the problem of long-term motivation will remain ignored. Parents often make the mistake of offering their children money or special gifts in exchange for passing a test or for getting an “A” on their report card. They, too, soon find out that the use of extrinsic motivation simply does not work for the long-term.

To develop intrinsic motivation, teachers must find ways of getting students to want to achieve, from within. Intrinsic motivation is produced as students learn to persevere through the years of study to get to the point where playing piano, even at advanced levels, is more fun than work. Of course, learning should be fun from the start. But, if we were to be honest with ourselves, we would have to admit that it is much nicer to have already mastered the material than to learn it all over again.

A groundbreaking study published in the international research journal, Medical Science Monitor (February 2005), demonstrated for the first time that learning to play a keyboard instrument reversed multiple components of the human stress response on the genomic level. The study's principal investigator, Barry Bittman, M.D. of the Mind-Body Medical Center explained that these unique findings shed new light not only on the value of active music participation, but also extend our understanding of individualized human biological stress responses on an unprecedented level.