The following quote from “Excellence in Singing” by Robert Caldwell and Joan Wall explains beautifully the teaching dynamic I strive for:

The more you include your student in the teaching equation — the more you consider their needs, capabilities, personality, and dreams — the more dynamic your teaching becomes and the less you can predict how you will teach. Like dancing, even when you are leading, you cannot expect to follow a rigid pattern of steps. Throughout the dance, you must adapt to your partner — their balance, pace, rhythms, and movements — and you won’t know exactly where or how you will take the next step. You won’t know where on the dance floor the two of you will end up.

Unpredictability is a special feature of excellent teachers. While they know precisely what they want to accomplish, they don’t know exactly how they will do it. Ask them how they will teach minute by minute and they honestly answer, “I don’t know. It depends on the student.”These teachers are a long way from presenting the same routine to every student.

Instead of plowing over their students, excellent teachers touch just the right problems with just the right solutions. They seem to offer an endless variety of responses to their students, with no two responses the same. And though their methods appear haphazard to an outside observer, their students steadily and reliably improve.