Michael Stiles

            As a music educator, I hope to share my love of music with every one of my students. I understand that each student’s interests and abilities vary, so I make a point to meet each student where they are at, while challenging them to improve their knowledge and understanding. This is at the heart of one of the most important concepts that guides my teachings: inclusivity. No one likes feeling excluded in any way, and I do my best to bring each student into the learning environment and regularly check in to make sure that they are staying invested in their learning.

            I hope that my teaching in any context encourages excitement and curiosity. I thoroughly believe that, generally speaking, curiosity is more important than any sort of “innate” intelligence. Someone can posses a high I.Q. and still be intellectually lazy. Meanwhile, possessing and nurturing a bright flame of curiosity, someone curious about the world can gain a much higher level of knowledge and wisdom. Curiosity has always been a defining personality trait of mine, and I believe it can be infectious. Indeed, one of the best ways that I have been motivated myself as a student is to witness a teacher’s curiosity and passion for the material that they are teaching.

            Another intellectual quality and mindset that I think should be at the heart of everyone’s teaching philosophy is critical thinking. Teachers, regardless of subject area or level of instruction, ultimately should be fostering within each and every one of their students the ability to think critically. The ability to think critically allows one to sort through extraneous information and get to the matter at the heart of their inquiry. This ability is one of the fundamental building blocks in the process of creating learners. Many young musicians, regardless of intelligence, often struggle in this regard when it concerns improvement of aptitude on their instrument. They often simply drill over and over the music that they wish to learn, hoping that it will eventually get better by sheer virtue of repetition. It does, but not nearly as efficiently as if you are using critical thinking to engage with the music that you are producing, understanding what is preventing you from improving, and identifying the most thorough and efficient way to go about this improvement.