Be aware of just how much context you’re bringing when you begin a piece with your students.
I’m watching a “Technical Challenge” in the Great British Bake-Off, in which the contestant bakers are asked to bake a recipe sight-unseen. Sometimes, as in the one I’m watching now, it’s a type of cake or bread that no one has any context for. A Greek New Year’s cake, for example, that none of the bakers have heard of.
Without context, a baking challenge gets a lot more difficult. You can’t picture, smell, or taste it in your head.
Young choral singers may have little or no musical context when you pass out a new piece to read. They could have never sung in this language, but they also might not have strong reference points for music from the same period, or from the same country, or any number of other significant factors in the interpretation.
Meanwhile, experienced conductors can probably make a list of pieces that share things in common with that piece; so, even if they’ve never worked on that piece, they have lots of context.
The art is to share as much of that context as you can with the students, so they can interpret the piece effectively, and so that they can carry that piece forward as a context-builder for their future musical endeavors.