My second long-form blog post for the Colourful Keys blog is based on the Pros and Cons of Music Memorization. I grew up in traditional piano lessons where a fair amount of your repertoire was not only expected, but required to be memorized. After working a number of years as a piano instructor, my view has changed quite a bit.
Continue reading “Pros and Cons of Music Memorization”This a slim-down of my original online lesson guide that I wrote during the early days of Covid isolation in the spring of 2020. Please read the original article if you want more information on optimizing your connection or to see a variety of equipment you can buy to make online lessons a better experience.
Continue reading “Quick Start Guide for Online Lessons”What is terrific technique? It’s an aspiration for any pianist at any level because it makes playing easier. What’s not easy is talking about it. I realized there must be a reason that I hadn’t covered this topic previously in my Practice Corner articles. Is it because technique is a given, and doesn’t merit discussion? Or is it just a harder topic to flesh out? I think it’s both!
Continue reading “Terrific Technique”Many prospective piano parents ask me how I teach. I prefer to answer with what a lesson looks like since that removes a lot of the variables that go into this very loaded question. Just to simplify this a bit, I’m going to describe here what a lesson looks like for a beginner. I teach intermediate and advanced students as well, but they tend to be much more customized since they involve older students.
Continue reading “What A Lesson Looks Like”I was asked by Sarah Folkerts to write a long-form blog post that became Music Reading Through Rote Teaching. She works with Nicola Cantan on the Colourful Keys Website and the membership site Vibrant Music Teaching. It all started as a result of my trying to reconcile how something sounds with the musical notation. Perhaps that was bolstered by spending hours of listening to orchestras play and reading along with the score during my formative years. I chose the opening motive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as an example. This point was peripheral to the article I ended up writing. However, since it’s where the idea originated, I wanted to briefly explain it here.
Continue reading “Music Reading Through Rote Teaching”I’m sure that you’ve heard the classic cliché: The definition of insanity is repeating the same actions over and over again and expecting different results. How does this relate to adult piano lessons? I’ve come to the conclusion that most adults are not able to sustain a long-term commitment to the piano. There are some success stories, but in general, it ends sooner rather than later. All of a sudden it hit me – what if the problem is the interval? Enter the adult piano lesson experiment!
The reason for wanting to try something different is that I feel I connect well with adults. I’m willing to take the risk of making much less per student since I believe less frequent lessons will give that adult the opportunity to succeed. I’ve rarely found that adult students don’t have the talent (oh, that word!) to succeed. Adult students can sometimes cover material at several times the rate of a young child. It’s almost always a matter of practice time. Adult students often don’t protect their practice time. They ultimately succumb to the many by demands for their time. School-aged children don’t have this worry – their practice time is often protected by these same adults!
Monthly lessons! Let me explain. My experiment would begin with a 50-60 minute lesson. We would talk about goals and then make a plan to reach those goals. Although I will would want to include some traditional teaching – note reading and sight reading in each lesson – I would also like to cover chord progressions, playing from lead sheets, and even playing by ear. There would be follow-up 30-minute lessons each month for the next five months, and there would be an option to schedule additional lessons at the same rate as the other lessons in the package.
There will be a financial incentive to prepay for each six-month cycle, with the opportunity to cancel given a minimum of 30 days notice. Any remaining money paid-in would be refunded. A month-to-month option will also be offered at a significantly higher rate since there is a higher cancellation risk for me.
As a way to help bridge the gap between lessons, I will offer email support. I want to offer encouragement and answer questions. Getting off track for a week or two won’t sabotage the entire plan like it would in weekly lessons. I also plan to create a series of blog posts specifically targeted to my adult students as well. My ultimate goal would be to build a community of adult students that includes a twice-a-year adult piano party just for them.
Does this sound like an idea worth trying? I’m willing to give it a try, for six months to a year. I already have some adult students who might be interested to enroll. I expect there may be some bumps in the road, and the need to tweak the program. However, at some point, I have to see whether it’s a viable long-term option. I hope it provides an affordable, low-commitment chance to gain a new skill or reconnect with an old one. If it works, great! I would spread that idea to my fellow colleagues and their studios. If not, I want to say that I gave it my best shot!
I just completed my first full year of teaching at Shepherd Music School. When I last taught in a similar setting, the school closed over the summer. Students could study privately as long as it wasn’t onsite. In that case, my summer students were a subset of the ones that I had from the school year, and tended to be the more serious ones. I wasn’t recruiting or adding any students. And, as expected, most of them came back to the school in the fall.
At Shepherd, we teach year round, adding students at any point, though we do tend to add most new students in August, January, and June, at the start of our fall, spring, and summer sessions, respectively. The summer session is really designed to be flexible. You can take just a couple of lessons, or you can take as many as you can fit in, which typically is eight.
There was one parent who was very clear about trying out the short summer session to see if her five-year-old was ready for lessons. Unfortunately, he wasn’t. But with others, the expectations were not set at the beginning: Students who I thought were starting a long journey were just like summer campers. This was not only a common theme at Shepherd, but something I read quite a bit about on piano teacher community Facebook pages.
I don’t have anything against a student studying just in the summer, per se. However, it’s one thing to teach a summer student who is at least a few years into their journey. You can work on some repertoire, and offer some artistic and technical suggestions along the way. It’s another thing to teach short-term a student who doesn’t read music, hasn’t learned how to keep a steady beat, doesn’t know how to hold their hands, nor play in a relaxed yet focused way.
Perhaps there is a way to offer a short curriculum that offers some type of closure, which I think could be helpful in two ways: 1) It provides the student a sense of accomplishment, and 2) It shows the parents clear progress in a brief amount of time, which may encourage further lessons.
This all sounds good, but the caution is that some serious shortcuts to the long-term learning process might have to occur. The biggest gating factor to a young learner playing recognizable pieces is her reading level. In order to learn these pieces, he might have to be taught by ear to guarantee a result. There’s nothing wrong with playing by ear as long as the parent understands that learning to read will take longer if it’s not made the top goal for the student.
So, my goal for next summer is offering more customized lessons, based upon stated up-front goals. I’m hoping that this not only adds a little music into the lives of my new students, but might convince the parents that this really should be a year-round activity, not just a summer camp experience.
This post, Summer Project – Playing by Ear, is the third in a three-part series under the category of Piano Teaching. I honestly had enough on my plate with my other two projects: researching iPad apps and learning how to offer online lessons. Obviously, I was wrong since I immediately attached to the charisma of Ruth Power when I saw her on a Webinar. As a result, I completed her free Ear Bootcamp and then enrolled in her formal course Songs by Ear.
Playing by ear is important for a musician, though it’s not a skill that many piano teachers, me included, find time to include in lessons. I find it a nice sideline to include when discussing harmony, which comes up both in the Arkansas state music curriculum and in method books. It’s nice to show how simple chord progressions such as I-IV-I-V-I serve not only as the basis for many childhood songs but also for popular music. Some of my piano students will see this in action sooner rather than later.
I’ll expand on this topic as my experience with learning how to teach playing by ear expands, but I just wanted to share some of what I’ve been up to in preparation for teaching this fall!
This post, Summer Project – Online Lesson Academy, is the second in a three-part series under the category of Piano Teaching. I invested in a reasonably priced online course given by the Upbeat Piano Teachers, a team of two – Sara Campbell and Tracy Selle. Sara was mentioned in a Webinar given by the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA). As a result, I listed her as a piano teaching resource in this post, which speaks about her own site and blog, Sara’s Music Studio.
So far, so good! All of the information was helpful and well put together. Now it’s time to do the homework assignments during the short window of time the course instructors are available to facilitate. There are two Q&A sessions, after which we are on our own.
What is the point? Technology has made online lessons possible. There are just several pieces of equipment needed to get started, including a laptop and a Webcam, or just a tablet with its built-in camera. Add high-speed Internet and you’re ready to go! It’s not much more complicated than that.
So why use it? The most obvious reason is to eliminate the need for makeup lessons when the problem is getting to the lesson. It could be inclement weather, a transportation issue, or even minor illness. Makeup lessons are the bane of music teachers everywhere, so why not try online lessons to teach during the allocated teaching time? There are some instructors who extend this technology to provide distance learning. This can occur if either the student or the teacher moves away, but both parties want to continue lessons. It also allows a teacher with special skills to teach outside of her geography.
One of the surprises of the seminar was the idea of video learning. This is offered where the student can’t show up for his lesson and isn’t available for an online lesson. The teacher can use the lesson time to create a customized video with specific instructions for the student. The student then has to watch the video within a short window and perform the assignments to be ready for the next lesson. It’s also possible to create a series of generic video lessons ahead of time to be offered to a student when it’s not possible to create a customized video.
That’s it so far! I’m excited to do all of this work, and then engage with parents and students to get started!
