Open reflection on the 12 Touchstones

Goodwin and Hubble’s 12 Touchstones is a modern guide to teaching the whole student in the 21st century. One of the topics that is continually recalled at professional development meetings, year after year, revolves around the notion that students are different, in 2021, than they have been in previous years. While it seems like a drum being constantly beaten, the same old tune, I don’t feel as though it is correct. I don’t feel as though students are inherently different and I think that teachers use this as a crutch to lean on when they feel like they are failing their students and themselves.

In my personal experience, student’s personalities are essentially the product of their surroundings. In the digital world, there is little left to be discovered by a curious mind. The upside to being an instrumental music teacher is that the class I teach isn’t generally something that students have access to via google. I feel that if a student grows in a supportive environment that allows them to experiment with music, they will be curious, they will learn to have a growth mindset, and they will be resilient. This is, however, not the usual case. It is not common for students to grow up around a musically supportive environment at home and it is pretty hard to find a successful life employed in the music industry. Teachers in academic classes may have more difficulty fostering a sense of curiosity in their students, but the innate motivation may be easier to come by since there obviously more opportunities for students to see pathways toward employment. There are more obvious benefits to toughing out difficulties and finding success in the hard sciences.

Most resources about education that are not specifically about music lead me to find ways to repurpose the lessons into a different context. The 12 Touchstones does a good job of being general enough that I didn’t feel as though it was too difficult to do this. The lessons about ways to improve time management gave suggestions to help students in any class. Time management is an issue for every teacher. Even teachers with a good sense of time management can benefit from hearing another way to be more productive.

While there is a good deal of anecdotal material in each chapter, the authors attempted make use of a good deal of hard statistical knowledge from time to time which was generally relevant and supportive of their lessons. For example, in item 8 they cite a study where a school was surveyed showing that while 66 percent of the students felt the school was welcoming, 51 percent of the students felt like they enjoyed coming to school. Those two statistics seemed not to agree with each other so I looked up that study. What I found wasn’t congruent with the numbers they reported. I try to look up the studies that educational authors reference so I can have a better understanding of the data. This was a little confusing.

The “6 C’s” are a great synthesis of most of the main lessons available in the book. If I had one main criticism of Goodwin and Hubble’s text it would be simply that there seemed to be a little bit of redundancy between the items they examined. I felt that it became harder to write about without treading on familiar ground. Perhaps it is also beneficial to think about the same topic from many different angles? Fostering curiosity and keeping class moving are difficult tasks to perform if you don’t also have good time management and fostering motivation is hard to do if you don’t let students see examples of ways that they will be able to use the knowledge and skills you are teaching them.

The text is always well written. The individual items stand alone with valuable lessons but they do overlap in their messages. To work within the contexts of this class, responding on a weekly basis, seemed to keep me coming back to a familiar well. I found the lessons applicable for my purposes, which speaks to the versatility of the messages and writing. The anecdotal stories were helpful in connecting to the material while the hard data angle left a little to be desired. Overall, the book is not so singular in it’s message. There is nothing in this book that I felt was a “game changer” but it was a good, reasonably light text to share with other educators or someone who is just getting started in their education.