Starting out as a music teacher with only a handful of students, I thought it would be smart to reward the hardest working students to attract more of those students. In my first year, I gave out rewards all the time – student of the month and other prizes that showed them how much I care for their hard work.
More often then not, the student would instantly lose that drive once they got the reward and the learning momentum would disappear. Why?
A hundred hours of research later I found a trem...
One of the best conversations in the education world at the moment is whether teachers should lead student development or if students should lead. The US public education system had its last systemic overhaul during the reign of Horace Mann back in the 1840’s. Yep, almost 200 years ago.
Since then we have had thousands of incremental changes along the way, but the system looks more or less the same.
Teachers lead – students follow.
Teachers know – students wonder.
Teachers explain – students ...
I love performing. I spent so many years focusing on crafting my ability and now I’m passing on that educational experience to my students. When I first started, I was shocked to know that students were used to performing 1 or 2 times a year.
What if basketball teams trained all year and had one game against an opponent?
How can you improve if you only perform one time per year?
It’s ridiculous.
One of the first cultural shifts I made was to have students perform 1-2 times per month. Let’s we...
Shifting my career from a concert pianist to a music educator conditioned me with several counter-intuitive insights. When I began teaching, I read everything I could possibly read on music education and followed with experiments to see what worked and what didn’t work. Most of what I had learned as a touring concert pianist was contrary to what music teachers and educators were doing and writing. So I decided to first test their ideas and see how it worked with my students. These were seven ...
Summer is a time when schedules open up for music educators. If you run an independent studio, it usually means that you have a few time slots open in your weekly schedule. Why not use it for a studio activity or culture-building event?
Here are 3 projects that your students will love and will get them and their parents talking about you:
Project Soundscape – What does your town sound like?
I think most of your kids these days have smart phones or iPads on hand. You can prompt them to go arou...
When I prepare a concert program, I spend the majority of my time on transitions. It’s the most challenging part of performance and if you can make transitions look effortless, you win. Just like performance, learning to play an instrument also has transitions and they are just as difficult.
Now that I teach, I see my students challenged in the same battles that I once fought:
Starting off
Problem: Getting a rocket off the ground takes more energy than propelling it upward once it’s going.
Ho...
Now that video is the dominant form of media on mobile, how will music education use it? Listening algorithms, music theory apps and note naming games have ruled strong for most of this decade, but how do we build upon these outdated tools that isolate students and teachers? Learning an instrument is already solitary. Can technology be designed to combat this problem instead of support it?
The next step for music education will involve a myriad of these now obsolete tools, wrapped into a plat...
When a music student first begins, improvements are clear to see. One week they don’t know what a treble clef is and the next week they know the names of several notes. Forward progress is motivation for any student. It helps them to make music a part of their identity.
How can we help them realize their progress once they get out of that early beginner stage?
One of my students, Hayley, is constantly improving each week, but if you ask her about it, she thinks otherwise. She’s an early inter...
The spring recital is often the time when music teachers give out rewards, honors and special prizes to make an example of their best students. While most parents and students see winning something as the positive outcome, I have a different perspective.
Do talented students who procrastinate, expect prizes or coast through lessons really benefit from a reward?
This brings me to the work of Carol Dweck, the Stanford Professor of Psychology who wrote an awesome book called Mindset. If we rewar...
This weekend we had our Spring Recital. Even though our studio performs monthly, we still have two major recitals a year where students play an extended program. The longer program makes preparation difficult.
I normally take a seat front and center. This time I randomly decided to sit stage left to switch up my view.
What did I see?
I saw a mother closing her eyes and praying as her daughter performed, a father nervously checking his video recorder as his son walked toward the stage, and gra...
Looking at the cadenza of Rachmaninov’s third piano concerto I’m searching for patterns. Layers upon layers of music are added as I attempt to resurrect this masterpiece. I’ve done this thousands of times before and every time it feels like I’m a beginner with tunnel vision. A mantra echoes in my head: Improve the Music. More often than not, if I find the right headspace, the music unfolds and plays itself.
This is deliberate practice.
It is a concept that is the lifework of Dr. K Anders Eric...
I love music. I spend most of my day in and around music. For as long as I can remember I have always dreamed in music. It has brought me all over the world and has taught me more than any other single thing. Music is the lens that I see the world through.
I see the value in music, but what about the parent who knows little about it. What compels parents to spend thousands of dollars a year on their children to learn music?
Is it the confidence children gain from performing in front of an aud...
I sent a survey out to my studio this past week. Among a pile of great feedback and static, I found an obvious, but really helpful insight. Parents want personalization for their children.
As with any premium service or luxury product, customization is not only desired, it’s expected. If only I could spend hours each week thinking about each of my students and how to take them to the next level. The more I offer highly personalized services, events or opportunities to curate their child’s pat...
"His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy”
Eminem opens Lose Yourself with the image of someone battling ‘Fight or Flight’. I think this is a battle that we all face. Speeches, performances, interviews or sports are all events where the mind and body undergoes the flooding of hormones.
As a concert pianist performing four concerts a week over a six month season, I was exposed to this regularly. Now that I teach piano and build Oclef, performing is something I only create for my kids. ...
Balance is a powerful, yet simple force in our world that often goes unnoticed. It’s incredibly beautiful when observed and it hit me this week when teaching.
I have a retired student that I teach every week – for privacy let’s call him Dan. Dan is 74 years old, has Parkinsons and several other challenging health conditions. Dan is very active for a retired person: hiking, cycling, motor biking and piano. He also takes care of his wife who has her own set of health conditions to battle. The o...
About two weeks ago in my beginning music theory class, I decided to have students assign their own homework. Previously, I would tell them they had to get to a certain point, I’d draw a stop sign and hope they’d finish. This never worked.
So two weeks ago I decided to make a change and allow students to pick their own homework as an experiment.
Coincidentally, at the same time, I began to read Charles Duhigg’s new book – Smarter, Better, Faster. In chapter one, he discusses fascinating studi...
A parent who doesn’t normally attend her child’s lesson came into the studio the other day. There is always an awkward air in the room when this happens. Obviously the parent is in the lesson for a purpose. The few times in the past that this happened with other parents, the outcome was always one of the following:
“I think we will take a break from piano.”
“Piano lessons are a bit too expensive.”
“We are moving away and can no longer come.”
The entire lesson was one of most uncomfortable I h...
When I first started teaching, I took over a studio of eight students that was left by someone who moved away. From day one, I was shocked that students in my new studio would walk into their lesson as the other student walked out and had no awareness of the other student. It was like the other student in the studio did not exist. These are students who have seen each other for months or years on a weekly basis and didn’t even have an idea of the other student’s name.
Fast-forward to today an...
In the education world, we teachers are so focused on results and I just wanted to share a message I recently sent to my studio:
Early on in my music education, I believed that doing well in recitals and competitions mattered most. Great performances made my mother proud, my teacher proud and it felt amazing to hear from other parents or judges that I was a ‘promising musician’. “The pursuit of perfection” – this was the maxim that I held as a child, but as I approached the professional level...
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