Being an instrumental music teacher is a tricky job. If you teach beginners, you have the deep responsibility of nurturing a complex talent from its roots and making sure the ability of the child gets off to a good start and is growing the right way. And if you take on students who were started by other teachers, you are often faced with the need for remedial teaching, helping reshape bad habits from the students’ past. Even when working with one’s own students there can be the need for course correction. After all, as many music teachers have quipped, remedial teaching begins with the second lesson!
What makes teaching an instrument so tricky? The answer is that it’s not just one skill to play the violin, the piano, or the classical guitar. There are multiple interlocking layers of ability involved, including physical coordination, perceptual accuracy, artistic expressiveness, memory and sequencing, language skills, and more. And all of it is being brought to bear on a performance that can be quite public and nerve-wracking. Any imbalance can cause a performance to crash and burn, leaving the player wondering what went wrong. So, to get the student learning in all these areas at once, a teacher needs to keep track of many elements. This is a daunting task and can confuse even the best-intentioned instructors! Fortunately, Suzuki pedagogy and the example of how Dr. Suzuki taught gave us a clear and easy-to-explain way to solve this teaching conundrum: One Point Learning.
Basic Processes
One-point learning means that we focus on one thing at a time, deliberately ignoring things that will eventually need to be corrected and putting all our energy into changing one thing that is imperative to address now.
Imagine a five-year-old book one student playing Lightly Row. It is the newest learned piece, and this is the first time you are hearing it all the way through with no prompting. After two or three G major tonalizations, you ask to hear the new piece. As you observe the performance, you take in the details: the tone is sweet, but the posture is a bit slumped; the right hand looks good, but you notice alteration problems, the left-hand fingers are landing on the flat pads of the fingers instead of the tips, the tempo is not steady, and there is no sense of phrasing.
Most students and parent/home coaches are not ready to hear such a list of issues spelled out. Nor would they be ready to tackle such a set of problems without guidance. This is where a qualified and experienced instructor is required who can clarify and prioritize the competing factors at work in the child’s playing.
When such a set of competing factors vie for my attention, I look for posture or basic hand position problems to work on first. These issues go to students’ root habits, so they are foundational and need to be addressed before other things such as fingering and phrasing. With my imaginary Lightly Row player here, I would make the choice between correcting the posture and correcting the finger placement of the left hand. Since left-hand difficulties are often the root cause of posture issues I would choose left-hand finger placement as my one point of focus. My lesson for this child would consist of these left-hand-oriented activities:

Begin in rest position with excellent posture, then raise the left hand and place the third finger on D without looking at the hand. Ensure the finger is placed right on the tip and hand position is excellent.
Third finger is placed four times when playing any Twinkle, so my next activity will be a stop-prepare-play version of Theme or Variation A. Each time the third finger is placed, the music will stop and the teacher, parent, and student will verify that the finger looks and feels good.
Then, let the lesson breathe a bit with a role reversing activity in which I would play Lightly Row and have the student call me out if I place my third finger incorrectly. I would go three to four rounds of this to allow the child to learn to observe the desired technique in someone else’s playing.
For a final optional phase if the child still seems fresh, I would return to Lightly Row for a stop-prepare-play version. (Even if this doesn’t happen, it can be assigned as home practice.)
For practicing at home, I would recommend ten repetitions of the first activity, playing all the Twinkles with stop-prepare-play and five times through Lightly Row. When giving this practice assignment, it is critical that the teacher makes sure the student and home coach are perfectly clear on what they need to accomplish in their practicing.
A music student who is taught this way consistently through Books One and Two will learn by experience how to isolate and prioritize issues within his or her playing. As the pieces are reviewed day after day over the long term, the solutions and correct executions become familiar and habitual. With the advancement of the student through the books, more and more complex skill sets are brought to bear. And of course, the child is always growing, developing, and changing, something teachers and parents must never forget! With all of this progress and deepening involvement, the one-point learning idea needs somewhere to go, a way to adapt so that it enhances rather than limits the new learning and growing that the child is experiencing.
Three Tiers
I have used a three-tiered approach to conceptualize how the one-point learning model plays out across the three basic learning stages of beginner, intermediate, and advanced. The first tier is literally one idea at a time, even if it comes at the cost of allowing the student to do something that would normally be incorrect or unacceptable. With our Lightly Row guitar student above, we are allowing alternation problems in the right hand to exist as we focus on left-hand fingertip placement. The classic example confronts any violin student or teacher. If a student’s tone and intonation are both problematic, you can only focus on one or the other at first until enough skill is acquired to show improvement.
When a Suzuki guitar student has reached Book Three or Four, their lessons are usually longer and divided into three or four segments. This is the stage for the second tier of one-point learning. Let’s imagine a Book Three student whose newest completed piece is Ghiribizzo. Their lesson might begin on tonalization with scales, perhaps the one-octave A major scale that appears in Book One. Here, we might see a student who plays with good posture, but the right shoulder is tense and riding higher than the left, affecting the tone and making it a bit thin. The left hand is accurate but unbalanced, needing more supination of the wrist and a lower position of the left thumb behind the neck.
I would spend a few minutes coaching this student in playing this scale using hands-on coaching to help them achieve a correct balance in the hand. First, I would gently place their hand for them, then I would ask them to play the scale and keep the hand as I placed it. After two or three times I would ask them to place the hand themselves and see how close they could get it to the position I want. Two or three more reps would finish this tonalization session.
Next, I would listen to the new piece, Ghiribizzo. The tendency with this piece is that whatever right-hand problems exist in a student’s playing are exaggerated, and shoulder tension easily creeps in when playing this one! A simple exercise on the open strings would help with this. Begin with a chord played by p, i, and m on strings 5, 3 and 2 respectively, followed by two chords played by i and m on strings 3 and 2. Then repeat this pattern. Before playing the exercise, practice placing the right hand in proper position without raising the shoulder. Have the student do this with eyes open and closed and if possible, in front of a mirror. If the student can play the exercise four times in a row without tensing and raising the right shoulder, then they should try playing the piece slowly with the same focus on keeping the shoulder relaxed.
For a practice assignment on this lesson, I would stress that here we had two different points, one point applying to each piece. I like to focus one point for the left hand and a separate point for the right hand. In my experience students find success with this type of work if the goals are clearly defined and delineated. It is important to work with the parent/home coach to make sure the desired positions and motions were fully understood. I recommend the use of a phone to video each lesson segment and provide a visual record of the activities.
In the third and highest tier of this work, we can’t really use the phrase one point learning anymore. That is because at this stage in the learning process (Book Seven and above) there is so much going on and the need for polished performances has become more urgent. Now we need the proverbial violinist to play in tune and have beautiful tone simultaneously. And each of these parameters requires constant focus and micro-adjustment or else noticeable defects in the performance will become apparent to the listener. The basic concept by which this is achieved could be referred to as a “fusion” or layering of ideas and awarenesses.
To be successful, we need a student who has good basic habits including posture, hand position, correct rest and free strokes, and good left finger placement. Then, we need to understand a basic sequence of priorities to know in what order to build up simultaneous skills. One of my favorite approaches here is to focus on left-hand fingering and right-hand fingering at the same time. One must begin by making sure the left-hand fingering is quite secure. Correctly performing the passage seven times in a row is a good way to begin. In this stage, we can allow a wrong right-hand finger, but no other error is allowable. The focus on the left hand should be primarily visual while you begin to focus on correcting the right hand at the same time. Focus the visual attention on the left hand. Focus the tactile attention on the right hand. This type of sensory splitting is a very important tool in the musician’s learning toolkit. An ideal piece to use this approach on is Prelude from BWV 998 in Book Seven.
Multitask versus Multi-Focus
Another strategy for multi-focus practicing is based on the idea that we don’t ever really “multitask,” we just switch focus between tasks in a form of mental juggling. This strategy can be deployed effectively with a student who plays a challenging passage well but is lacking a fully polished performance because of multiple small defects. A piece that is often in this condition with students is variation one from Fernando Sor’s Theme and Variations in Book Nine. This variation features slurs, scale runs, barré chords, rapid position shifting, melody notes on inner strings, and more. Your student may habitually play the first eight measures and consistently have trouble at the following spots:

Pick up measure: 4th finger slur is not clear
Measure 1 beat one: buzz on chord due to inaccurate shift of finger 1
Measure 2: not all barre chord notes ring out clearly
Measure 2: i finger plays first note of scale not m
Measure 2: string crossing in scale is mistimed
Measure 4: timing of slurs must match arpeggio timing (slurs are rushing)
Measure 5 beats 1 and two: open E too loud, m finger g# too quiet
Measure 7 beat 2 and: tricky slur combination with stretching notes not clear
There are eight points which come at irregular intervals and utilize different skills and focuses. The procedure is to score yourself up to a perfect score of eight. When you can get all eight things right, it shows your ability to switch focus and execute the needed technique at the right time. Once this is accomplished at a slow tempo the familiar process of notch practicing applies.

In the end we are working with a mind-body system that can be compared to a computer CPU and the RAM it uses. Each part of the student can only operate if enough “RAM” is available. If the timekeeper part is using sixty percent of RAM, there won’t be enough left to have the left-hand position part, which also uses sixty percent, working at the same time. Our goal with one point learning is to make each part work easily and efficiently enough to fit into the available brainpower and to operate without causing an overload! So, if the areas listed above each use only twenty percent each, that leaves forty percent free for other skills. A teacher must observe the student very closely and make choices that help the student to understand this process and learn how to build skill in individual areas, and then to help the student combine and layer them. It is an inherently individual process and no two students will do things the exact same way. I have been teaching for many years now and I still work hard to understand a student’s needs and abilities. Each of us has a responsibility to figure this out both for our students and for ourselves.