I bought a new digital piano! It’s a Kawai CN29.

The backstory: My grand piano has ivory keys I don’t want to use sanitizers on, so I’ve been using my digital pianos since transitioning my Michigan students to in-person lessons. (Fortunately, I can still use my grand for online lessons!) My current digital pianos are old and in need of update, so I started researching and looking at models at a couple of local stores.

By chance, I happened to see one of the same models I was considering listed on eBay located just 1.5 hours from me. For the seller, it was a Covid purchase right before work got extra busy. So, I got a great deal on it (over 50% off the new price)!

As far as digitals go, it has a decent action and fairly realistic grand piano sounds.

And as you can see, it’s Aria-approved!

I’m happy to have really nice digital to use for my in-person lessons!

Your turn: Do you have a digital piano you really enjoy playing?

In the past, I’ve shared about my easy, ongoing incentive program for my piano students. You can read a more complete blog post from 2009 about it here.

Basically, the summary is that for every 30 pages of music students learn (or theory pages completed), a prize is earned from the prize box. My goal was to have a simple program that was easy to track and that rewarded the kinds of things my students should be doing anyway. A simple incentive program can make things fun and help reinforce the kinds of things you wish students to be focused on. My students know that a given piece needs to reach a certain level of mastery before they can “pass” it and go on to the next.

I have maintained this simple incentive program consistently for years (although, I’ll admit I’ve taken a little time off from it recently due to pandemic online teaching and relocating to Michigan). However, I recently came up with a slight improvement to this method that I think will make it EVEN EASIER to maintain.

Previously, I would track of the number of pages students mastered using stickers on an index card, like this:

This worked well, but my new idea is to award students a prize whenever they reach the halfway point through their book (the point where you can see the staples!) and again at the end of the book. No more worrying about tracking how many pages students have completed!

Now, you might be thinking: what about spiral bound books? And what about pieces that are individually printed solos? My plan is that students and I can do the math with the page numbers to find the halfway point in any spiral bound books. Individually printed solos don’t need to count for anything in the incentive program, unless it’s a special, lengthy piece where they’ve really worked hard.

This is a flexible incentive program. As students become more advanced, many students tend to become less interested in prizes and the incentive program tends to naturally phase out. Other students remain interested for a long time. I can allow students to choose from the prize box at any point it seems logical to celebrate: such as completing an RCM exam, participating in a local ribbon festival or special recital, etc.

I just restocked my prize box with more Iwako Japanese puzzle erasers I ordered from Amazon (see the package I ordered here). These puzzle erasers are always a hit with students! They are also great as game pieces on or away from the keyboard.

(Please note that this post contains Amazon affiliate links to support my blog. To check out more of my Amazon favs, visit amazon.com/shop/joymorinpiano. Thanks for your support!)

I keep lots of other fun things in my prize box, too, besides the Japanese puzzle erasers. When out shopping, I always keep an eye out for fun pencils, highlighters, small notepads, bouncy balls, plastic bracelets, keychains, etc. (See here or here for more photos of prize box items.)

Anyway, I just thought I’d share about my small tweak I made to my incentive program! It’s nothing big, but having this simple incentive program in place helps my students learn to have the same priorities as me: progress and expressive music making.

Your turn: I would love to hear from you! What kind of incentive program have you found to work for your studio? Please leave a comment.

Just a quick post today! 

I just finished updating one of the studio business forms from my Printables page for the 2021-22 school year.  It is called the Record of Lesson Attendance & Payment PDF.  I do not currently use this form myself anymore, but every year I receive multiple requests from teachers asking if I would please update it for the upcoming school year! 

In case you haven’t seen this from before, here is how it works: Write your students’ names in the first column.  Each week, write the lesson date (in a month / date format) in the column for that week.  This is how you can track attendance.  The small circles in each cell are where you can write checkmarks indicating tuition payments.  Whether you charge by-the-week or by-the-month, you can place a checkmark by each paid lesson date.

Download it below or on the Printables > Studio Business page.

P.S.: Here is a link to where I explain an alternative system for tracking payments received. But nowadays, I enter everything into a Google Sheet! I explain my system and share the spreadsheet in my online course for piano teachers, Excellence for Piano Teachers. If you’re interested, you can learn more and join the email list to be notified when the next session is offered (usually in January).

Hope you are having a great week, everyone!

Congratulations to our two randomly-selected winners: Chloe and Lydia! Winners, please watch your inbox for an email from Wendy arriving very soon.

Thank you all for joining in on the fun and entering the giveaway! It was so much fun to team up with Wendy and see all your comments come through. I hope you’ll consider browsing Wendy’s beautiful teaching resources if you haven’t already. She’s offering my readers a special SALE. Here’s the details:

Promo code CIMP15 will give you 15% off any order. Or, use CIMP20 for 20% off for orders of $75 or more. All orders above $49 will ship free within US and Canada.

Click here to visit her shop now. This sale ends August 31, 2021, so don’t delay if you plan to order!

Happy teaching, everyone!

Just a quick reminder today…

It’s not too late to enter the giveaway for a teaching resource from Wendy Chan’s Music Escapades Shoppe! TWO winners residing in the US or Canada will be randomly chosen on Tuesday, August 10, 2021. To enter, visit THIS POST and leave a comment there about Wendy’s wonderful Grand Staff Magnetic Dry-Erase board.

Have a great weekend, everyone! ??? ?

About a year ago (August 2020), I wrote a review and giveaway post about Wendy Chan’s wonderful Grand Staff Magnetic Dry-Erase board and a few other of her wonderful teaching resources. Well, today, I’m happy to share an update about her materials and offer a GIVEAWAY (keep reading)!

Wendy’s Grand Staff Magnetic Dry-Erase Board has been such a great resource in my teaching over the past year. I keep it within arm’s reach when I teach and find myself using it on a near-daily basis in my lessons, both online and in-person.

During her most recent restock, Wendy made a couple of improvements to her whiteboard and she generously mailed me one to review.

In the updated version, Wendy increased the thickness of both the magnet and the foam for the circle “note” magnets. In the picture below, you can see the comparison of the previous magnets compared to the new ones.

The new magnets stick well to the board and are a little bit easier to pick up. I love that Wendy is always interested in feedback and improving her products!

Learn more about Wendy’s Grand Staff Magnetic Dry-Erase Board by reading my previous review here or visiting Wendy’s website here.

Before I talk about the giveaway, I wanted to briefly mention that Wendy released a brand new product earlier this year: Rhythm Stories Music Rhythm Stick Notation Magnets. It’s a set of 38 rhythm stick notation magnetic cutouts, including dots and numbers to build 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4 time signatures. These durable foam magnets can stick to any steel/magnetic board and be used for a variety of rhythmic activities including rhythm dictation, composing activities, rhythm clapping, games, and more. In particular, Wendy says the rhythm/rest values introduced in “Rhythm Story” activities for all levels of the Music For Young Children (MYC) program. Learn more here.

Wendy is running a special sale for my readers. If you’d like to order any items from her shoppe, use the promo code CIMP15 for 15% off all orders. Or, use CIMP20 for 20% off for orders of $75 or more. All orders above $49 will ship free within US and Canada. This sale ends August 31, 2021. Be sure to visit Wendy’s shoppe here to check these items out for yourself!

Giveaway

And now it’s time for the giveaway! Wendy has generously offered to give away TWO products from the Music Escapades Shoppe for readers residing in the US and Canada! To enter the giveaway, leave a comment on this blog post before August 9, 2021 at midnight (Eastern time) sharing what you love about Wendy’s resources and why.

Two winners will be randomly chosen and notified by email the day following the giveaway. Good luck, and I look forward to reading your comments!

“But children are not railroad trains. They don’t learn at an even rate. They learn in spurts, and the more interested they are in what they are learning, the faster these spurts are likely to be.”

John Holt, in How Children Learn

Food for thought: Have you observed students’ learning occur in spurts rather than at an even rate? How do YOU foster interest and motivation in what students are learning?

Recently, I received the following question from a reader:

“Hi Joy, Can you see doing your “Music of the World” camp as an online camp? Thanks!”

–C.M. from New York

Great question! I haven’t tried it myself, but after thinking it through my answer is yes, I do think this camp would work very effectively offered in an online format. What follows are a few thoughts about how to do this.

The goal of the “Music of the World” camp is to increase the students’ awareness of and appreciation for cultures that are different from their own through experiencing the music and studying the instruments of other countries.  Students will have a blast hearing the music from other cultures and learning about each counties’ musical instruments, landmarks, and animals.

Each day of camp focuses on a different country. The curriculum includes a set of slides and YouTube playlists for the teacher to use each day. In an online format, the teacher can screenshare the slides and music during a Zoom meeting. Easy!

This camp also includes a variety of arts and crafts activities. The key to facilitating this in an online camp format, I think, would be to provide students with the printed materials in advance. I suggest creating a “goodie bag” that can be dropped off at students’ homes or a “camp packet” that can sent through the mail. The printouts can be organized by day using paper clips, with each stack labeled using sticky notes (e.g., “Day 1”).

There are four craft projects included in the camp lesson plan for students to create their own musical instruments. Some of these materials can be included in the goodie bag, while others can be gathered by the parent/student ahead of time. I suggest giving parents a shortlist of any materials students should have on hand during online camp. For example: pencils, scissors, crayons, glue stick, craft materials, and a snack for snack break.

Another activity included in the camp involves a “passport”. I suggest assembling each students’ passport in advance and including it in the goodie bag. Ask parents for a photo of each student so you can print and glue it inside the passport. During camp, students can fill in their personal information and glue each day’s visa stamp inside the booklet.

The only other modification to the camp I might suggest would be to modify the age range slightly from what is suggested in the original lesson plan. Rather than offering the online camp to ages 5-12, I would suggest ages 6-12 or even 7-12. It’s possible younger ages might have a harder time focusing online and completing some of the writing and crafting in this camp, so it might be smart to adjust the age range accordingly unless you personally know the students’ attention spans.

I hope you can see how the Music of the World camp curriculum can both fun and extremely effective in both an in-person and online format! Either way, the camp experience (as with any curriculum) just requires a little forethought and planning.

Learn more about the Music of the World camp curriculum here.

Your turn: Have you ever offered a camp to your students online? Please tell us about it in the comments below!

Thanks for reading! Have your own question to ask? Submit it here, and your question could be featured in a future blog post!

In my last post, I mentioned I am delivering a presentation for NCKP 2021’s Virtual Conference tomorrow. My presentation shares about a personal research project conducting early childhood music (ECM) activities with my daughter throughout her first year of life. It’s been fun and rewarding to see Aria’s musical development up close, and I am learning so much from the process. I have hundreds of videos I’ve been collecting, logging, and analyzing!

I thought it might be fun to share a video of Aria here on my blog, for my readers as well as for any NCKP conference attendees interested in seeing a more recent video clip. The video below was taken a few days ago, with Aria at 17 months old.

The ECM activities I do with Aria are based on Edwin E. Gordon’s Music Learning Theory (MLT). I took a two-week summer certification training Early Childhood Music Level 1 offered through the Gordon Institute for Music Learning (see GIML.org) back in 2017, and have been putting my training to good use since Aria was born in February of 2020. I took the Piano Level 1 certification the summer prior to that, which I blogged about here.

Here is the video, as well as a short description of what you’ll observe in the video.

• 0:00 I perform a rhythm chant called “Stretch and Bounce” from the Music Play curriculum. You’ll see Aria sign for “more” during the chant, anticipating the next part. Babies and young children don’t need a ton of props, but using a few simple items sparingly can be extremely effective. My favorite prop is scarves (here’s some similar to the ones I have). Aria loves having scarves on her toy shelf. They seem to inspire her to move expressively and dance, both spontaneously as well as during our music sessions.
• 0:50 After the chant, I wait a moment and Aria offers some rhythm babble. I echo her babble back to her to encourage more responses, and then offer my own rhythm pattern. As you can hear, her babbles make musical sense, but are sometimes in her “personal tempo” and sometimes in a tempo matching the chant. In Gordon’s MLT, he makes specific recommendations for certain patterns to use at certain stages of Preparatory Audiation. I don’t always do things perfectly correct while in-the-moment with Aria (I still need more practice!), but I hope you get the general idea. It’s tough to get a perfect teaching example on video, but it’s valuable to see real-life learning and teaching in action.
• 2:15 I return to the “Stretch and Bounce” rhythm chant again. This time, I’m holding Aria and moving with her in my arms. Especially during early childhood, the emphasis is on flow, space, and weight movements (exploring Laban movement elements) rather than on “time” or beat-based movements. We can’t feel beats without being able to feel space between beats!
• 3:00 We engage in more patterns and babble conversation. Aria discovers more scarves and brings them over. We keep music time playful and fun, while being rooted in a solid educational basis.
• 5:00 I return to the chant one more time. MLT practitioners frequently use this “whole-part-whole” structure to provide musical context (meter and tonality) as well as musical content (rhythm patterns or tonal patterns) experiences for students. In the video, you’ll see that I use a small bluetooth remote (such as this) to stop and start the video recording on my phone from across the room.

I hope you enjoyed this window peek into MLT-based early childhood music!

A few months ago, I mentioned this summer’s 2021 National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy (NCKP) virtual conference. The pre-conference sessions officially began TODAY (yay!). I’ve been happily enjoying some wonderful virtual sessions already this afternoon, and am so excited about the programming over the next few weeks. The NCKP planners have chosen a wonderful app that allows for connecting with other attendees while enjoying the virtual presentations. It’s the next best thing besides being in-person with my teacher friends and colleagues.

In this year’s NCKP, I am involved with two different sessions. The first is a presentation about a personal project with my young daughter, Aria, and our first year of Early Childhood Music sessions at home together. (I’ve been putting my ECM certification through the Gordon Institute for Music Learning (see GIML.org) to good use recently!) This session will take place during the pre-conference this Friday the 16th from 1:05-2:00pm EDT. Here’s the full description:

Music is Child’s Play: Lessons Learned from My Youngest Student
This session has it all: storytelling, lessons learned, pedagogical insights, and baby videos! Piano teacher Joy Morin shares videos and research documenting her daughter’s first year of developing “preparatory audiation” according to the stages outlined in Edwin E. Gordon’s Music Learning Theory (MLT). Come hear the lessons babies can teach music teachers everywhere and gain insights that can transform our pedagogy of young learners.

The second session I am involved with is a panel discussion along with four wonderful colleagues: Lynnette Barney, Christopher Oill, Tony Parlapiano, and Clinton Pratt. This session will take place during the main conference on Saturday, July 31, 2021 from 4:00-4:50pm. Here is the full description:

Teaching Students to Fish: Developing Independent Learners From the First Lesson.
“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Our long-term goal is to teach our way out of a job, right? We want our students to be independent learners from the start. This session features five experienced teachers who offer engaging, practical, and out-of-the-box teaching strategies so your students cast their own lines!

If you are attending NCKP this year, I hope you will look for these two sessions in the schedule! I would love to see you there virtually and connect with you via the NCKP app!

If you haven’t registered for NCKP but would like to, you’ll find info about it here.

PS: It’s that time of year! I’ve started receiving inquiries from a few piano teacher associations about speaking on their 2021-22 program. So far, I am booked to speak in Livonia, MI, Columbus, OH, and Holland, MI. If you’re in any of those areas and would like to attend, let me know and I can send you the details. If YOUR local association is working on programming, please feel free to pass my name along. I have a list of presentation topics available here and am available for in-person or Zoom presentations. I would love to speak for your piano teachers association this year! Thanks for considering me.

In yesterday’s post, I talked about my gradual transition from online lessons to in-person for my Michigan-based students (my Ohio-based students from before my move will remain online). As promised, in today’s post I am sharing a free printable poster you can use to welcome students and help remind them of your protocols when they first arrive.

Any time students come for their first lesson at my studio, I find it’s important to “train” them, so to speak, with my expectations such as removing shoes, washing hands, etc.. After welcoming students at the door, this involves stating something like: “Whenever you arrive in the future, I’d like you to remove your shoes here, wash your hands here, and then head to the piano!”

I thought it might be useful to post a friendly poster with these reminders, in case it helps students remember what to do the first few times they arrive until it becomes a habit. I laminated it and use poster putty to hang it where it will be easily seen.

I created a few different variations of the poster, in case you might like to use it! I’ve included versions with and without masks (for pandemic times and non-pandemic times). And there are versions included for using hand sanitizer versus washing hands in a sink.

To download this PDF, visit the Printables > Studio Business page and scroll down to “Welcome Poster for Piano Studio.” Enjoy!

Hello readers!

I hope you all are well. Here in Michigan, we are in the midst of BEAUTIFUL summer weather and it feels as if the worst of the pandemic is behind us (which I would certainly like to believe is true!). The current full vaccination rate in the state of Michigan is 46%, which is also the current rate in the U.S. as a whole (as of June 2021). In my local county, the full vaccination rate is even higher at 60% and the rate of reported Covid-19 cases per day is down to low single digits.

With these facts in mind, I have started transitioning a few of my students from online lessons to in-person lessons at my home studio. (You might recall — 75% of my students are in Ohio from before I moved and they will remain online.) I am taking a number of precautions, because I would much prefer to err on the side of caution and keep everyone healthy if I can help it!

In case you happen to be in the same position and might find this useful, below is the wording I used to communicate my precautions and expectations to parents via email.

Hello students, 

I just wanted to send a note to let you know what to expect when it comes to precautions for our in-person lessons. Even though the Covid-19 rates are low in Michigan right now, I'd still like to play it safe and err on the side of caution. I am excited to be able to be back together in-person with my students, and I hope you are too! 

Just so you know: My husband and I have both been vaccinated, and so has my mother-in-law who sometimes watches our 16-month-old daughter. 

And here are the precautions we will take here at my in-home piano studio:
 
- Please ask your student to use the bathroom at home before leaving home. But if needed, the bathroom here will be available to students. 
- Anytime 5 minutes prior to the lesson start time, students may be sent to the front door where I will welcome them. I prefer parents don't come indoors unless necessary, but we can chat on the porch before the lesson time starts if you'd like! During the lesson, parents are welcome to wait in the car or run errands. 
- An air purifier will run during the lesson time. Surfaces will be cleaned with antibacterial wipes between students. 
- When students enter, they should be wearing their mask (and I will be, too). Students will be asked to remove their shoes and wash their hands using hand sanitizer. We will use hand sanitizer again at the end of the lesson before I send them out to your vehicle. 
- Should the student (or anyone in the family) get sick or learn they were exposed to someone with Covid-19, please notify me. I would prefer to err on the side of caution and keep everyone as healthy as we can! And I am happy to accomodate an online lesson as needed for any weeks we decide not to meet in-person. 

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns as we go along. 

Thanks so much! 
Joy

For any and all studio communication, I think it’s important to use a friendly yet professional tone and use clear, concise language — and that’s what I tried to do in my email above!

In case you haven’t seen it, there is a helpful resource from MTNA (Music Teachers National Association) you might be interested in checking out as well: Legal FAQs for Reopening Music Studios.

PS: Stay tuned because tomorrow I will share a free printable poster for reminding students to remove their shoes, wash their hands, etc. when they arrive at your studio!

Your turn: How are lessons going in YOUR neck of the woods? Are you teaching online, in person, or both? I would love to hear from you! I’m sure we all have plenty we could share about our experiences over the past year or so.

Hello, everyone! Today, I have a fun freebie to share with you: 15 FREE printable music posters. If you are looking for a simple and affordable way to add some music-themed artwork to YOUR space, look no further!

How did this project come about? Recently inspired by some images I saw in Pinterest, I started looking around online for some printable artwork for my daughter’s play space. On a couple of public domain image websites (such as commons.wikimedia.org), I found some lovely nature-themed images that were exactly what I was looking for.

Soon, I started to wonder what music- or piano-themed options I might find. Thus began a trip down a rabbit hole as I searched the internet and began compiling some of the nicer options I found!

In the free PDF download at the end of this post, you’ll find 15 music-themed printable posters as well as 4 BONUS nature-themed posters.

Here is a peek at a few of the vintage piano images I found.

Aren’t they charming?!

I also found some vintage piano advertisements.

This pair of colorful cassette tapes posters are also perfect as artwork on the wall.

There are more music posters not shown here (15 total), but you get the idea.

BONUS: Here’s a peek at couple of the nature prints included as a bonus at the end of the PDF. These are the images for my daughter’s play area that sparked the idea for this entire project!

A Few Printing and Assembly Tips

For the best quality print, I recommend printing the posters out using a laser printer instead of an inkjet printer — especially if the artwork you’ve selected is in full color. If you don’t own a laser printer, you can always have the printing done at a print shop. (If you are a member of MTNA, you can use your Office Max/Office Depot discount card!) 

I also suggest printing on slightly heavy paper, such as cardstock. You could also consider laminating the page, as long as you don’t mind a glossy look! 

As far as framing options go, you’ve got two main options. A regular picture frame is the first option. You can use size 8.5’’x11’’ or 8’’x10’’, but you’ll need to trim the paper slightly to fit the latter.

But personally, I love the look of the 8-inch Magnetic Poster Frame Hanger (which is what you see pictured in all the images above), so that’s what I chose. Magnets embedded in the wood pieces are used to clamp to the top and bottom of the poster, and then the artwork is hung using the string (I used these clear plastic hooks). It’s an affordable and attractive way to hang your artwork, plus it’s easy to trade out the artwork whenever desired. I trimmed a quarter inch off the left and right edges of the paper to make the width exactly eight inches to match the frame.

Disclosure: Please note that the Amazon links in this blog post are affiliate links, which means I will earn a small percentage when you make a purchase using my links. Thanks for supporting my blog! 

To download the PDF of my FREE Printable Music Posters (plus the 4 bonus nature posters), visit the Printable > Other Resources page and click on “15 FREE Printable Music Posters.” I hope you enjoy!

“Children’s need to make sense of the world and to be skillful in it is as deep and strong as their need for food or rest or sleep.”

John Holt, in How Children Learn

Thoughts for today: Young children have a strong drive to learn and make sense of the world around them! How can we as teachers harness this natural curiosity? How can we as adults maintain this youthful approach to the world around us?

“Most of us are tactful enough with other adults not to point out their errors, but not many of us are ready to extend this courtesy (or any other courtesy, for that matter) to children.”

–John Holt (in How Children Learn)

When students make errors, how do YOU respond? Do you quickly and thoughtlessly point out errors, or do you skillfully allow time and opportunity for students to notice and correct errors themselves?

I’m sure we all find ourselves occasionally jumping in too quickly with the “right answer” in our teaching. (When I find myself doing it, it tends to be when I am feeling the pressure of the clock at the end of the lesson time!) In our best teaching, though, we play the “long game” and invest in helping our students become independent. We give students the appropriate amount of challenge (not too much, not too little) according to what they are ready for. We concoct skillful teaching questions that prompt students to learn to hear musical differences on their own. We give them skills and strategies that will increasingly allow them to learn for themselves. And we allow students TIME to think! This creates valuable learning opportunities for our students. Over time, students become increasingly independent and able to teach themselves.

As an aside: It’s not that we are to see errors as inherently “bad.” They aren’t. While we might not want mistakes hanging around for a long time, we must acknowledge they are a natural part of the learning process. To the skillful teacher or learner, errors are incredibly helpful information.

One final point: The above quote from John Holt reminds us of the importance of respecting children. Perhaps this seems obvious or comes easily to you — or perhaps not. I think it’s a good reminder for us all. We ALL — not just children — learn best when our basic needs are met and when we feel respected and valued. Respecting our students means using kindness, truly listening to them, giving age-appropriate choices and responsibilities, and more. (If you’re interested, you can read about what the Montessori approach has to say about respecting children here.)

Happy Wednesday, friends! Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

In today’s post, please enjoy an interesting and insightful interview with pianist and teacher Chad Twedt (pronounced “tweed”). I’ve known Chad for a number years, having connected online thanks to blogging. Chad’s blog, Cerebroom, is where he posts occasional in-depth articles about topics relating to music and more. Below, I ask him to share about his recently released online course called The Art of Rubato, his teaching philosophy, and his compositions, among other things.

Hi, Chad! Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview. Would you begin by telling us a little bit about you and how you got into teaching?

Thanks Joy, I’m honored!  

I have a master’s degree in piano performance and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. I love composing, performing, teaching, thinking/researching, watching movies, writing, coding, and playing tennis.

In high school, people used to ask me the dreaded question that almost no high schooler can answer: “What do you think you’ll be doing 10 years from now?”  I used to answer, “I don’t know… the only thing I know for sure is that I’m not going to be a teacher.”  I said this because the only people I saw teaching were public school teachers who, in my view, had a difficult job – sometimes horrifically difficult, dealing with kids in every class who didn’t really want to be there.  I also hadn’t met any male private piano teachers. Becoming a piano teacher wasn’t even on my radar.

I started teaching in 1997 reluctantly when a 10-year-old kid who sat in the front row in my undergraduate junior recital begged to take lessons from me.  I told his parents that I was a performer, not a teacher.  He apparently really wanted to study with me, because they called me back the next day and pleaded with me again to give it a try.  I agreed, and I was nervous I’d run out of things to say after the first 10 minutes.  The opposite happened – I felt like each 30-minute lesson was way too short.  Unfortunately, the kid never practiced.  His parents later told me he idolized me and just wanted to be around me, so he only lasted a month as a student, but it was enough for me to realize that teaching piano was something I was good at and deeply interested in.  I felt I owed it to myself to explore it some more.  Fast forward 20+ years, and here I am!

As a piano teacher, what are your goals for your students? 

In each lesson, I am obsessively focused on preparing students to practice effectively at home.  This obsession increased tenfold after I did a ton of research into metacognition, which is the idea of “thinking about thinking.”  It is what allows students to plan a practice/study strategy, monitor that strategy, and evaluate the success of that strategy, rather than just mindlessly seeking pleasure, producing minimal results.  Students of all ages, especially adults, naturally exhibit metacognitive knowledge and skill when they study for academic tests, but they tend to be far less mindful when practicing piano.

I also strive to make sure that my students are comfortable performing for others from memory.  I think this is one of my biggest strengths as a teacher.  To some teachers this might sound like a pretty standard teaching goal to have, but over the past decade or so, the trend has been to push more and more for emphasis on sight-reading rather than memorization. This is a subject that I’ve looked into a lot, both in terms of psychology as well as benefits/drawbacks of memorization-oriented learning vs. sight-reading learning in my preparation threshold and memorization vs sight-reading articles (not to mention the practical side of it which I discuss here).  The pedagogical arguments I’ve seen in articles, presentations and forum discussions advocating for more emphasis on sight-reading and less emphasis on memorization are not convincing to me.

What is unique about your teaching approach? 

Probably most unique is my obsession in getting students to understand the “why” behind everything I’m having them do, down to the smallest detail.  Why put a dynamic peak in this or that spot?  Why choose one articulation pattern over another in some piece of Bach?  Why is one fingering objectively better than another?  Why put rubato here or there?  Why float the wrists between phrases?  Why, why, why?  I know that some students are emotionally content to just carry out orders without knowing why, but emotional satisfaction and intellectual preparedness are two different things.  Even students who are content to “play without understanding” will remember what they’re doing better when the “why” is generously shared with them, not to mention this knowledge will transfer far more effectively to pieces they learn in the future when they learn the “why” behind everything they do. 

As a student, I wasn’t disrespectful, but it really bothered me internally if I was ever asked to do something without knowing why… or even worse, when I was asked to do something that went against my internal senses.  Trying to get myself to follow instructions I didn’t fully understand felt to me like trying to run fast in one of those nightmares that takes place in slow motion.  Try as I might, my mind and body fight me.  I feel this obsession with “why” has been advantageous in teaching, because I know it causes me to break things down more than most do.

You recently released your first online course, called The Art of Rubato. Could you tell us about it?

Yes!  It is a six-hour video course that I published on Udemy (use this special link to get a $10 off — good until May 28, 2021!), and it’s the only course in the world that exclusively teaches rubato at all, let alone in an organized, fully comprehensive manner.  In the course I identify four properties of rubato, four general purposes of rubato, five types (with many sub-types) of rubato, and three types of compound rubato.  I use over 140 audio excerpts of polished performances of standard repertoire – everything from intermediate to virtuoso repertoire, covering all eras of music from Bach to Barber.  I designed the course to be useful for any musician, from the intermediate piano student to the college music professor.  It’s also a course that any musician can take, not just pianists.  Rubato is rubato, no matter what instrument is performing it.

What led to your desire to delve into the art of rubato? 

Early in my teaching career when my first students started advancing to a level where rubato became more relevant, I became deeply frustrated by how little I explicitly understood about rubato.  I did some digging and was disappointed by what little I found in books and articles.  It was clear to me that even the experts were just winging it when they talked about rubato.  Everyone had their tips, tricks and bits of understanding about rubato that all made sense, but I couldn’t find any comprehensive framework that could be used to teach rubato to students (or to just wield as a performer).

Much like what I did with the Matrix movies and my crazy Matrix ReSolutions website (one of my contributions to humanity), this became a puzzle that I just had to solve.  I already listened to the 1200 piano CDs in my music collection all the time, but at that point I started listening specifically for rubato.  After a couple years of obsessing about it, I had formulated a system of analyzing, notating and teaching rubato that I started using with my students.

I thought that surely I couldn’t possibly be the first person over the course of the past couple hundred years to do what I had done.  I finally broke down and purchased a $100, 450-page textbook on the history of rubato called Stolen Time by Richard Hudson that I had been eyeballing for a while.  According to Hudson, some had tried but failed to develop a system of detailing the various properties, purposes, behaviors, etc. of rubato.  One pedagogue concluded it’s too personal for any “system” to be developed.  Having accomplished exactly this, I didn’t know whether to feel proud or confused!  Maybe a little of both!

How is your course useful to pianists and piano teachers? 

The course presents a system of analyzing, notating and teaching rubato that eludes us until we see it, after which it seems very intuitive and natural.  After taking the course, performers and teachers will feel extremely confident as they know why they use all the rubato they use.  It does not give them any kind of “formula” to “calculate” where to put rubato.  But it does give them a set of concepts, rules and guidelines (just like we have in traditional music theory and performance practice) so that they know “how to think” in the realm of rubato.  If you don’t have concrete, well-defined vocabulary and concepts to describe the various aspects of a musical phenomenon, then that phenomenon will forever remain in the realm of musical spiritualism and mystery rather than being assimilated into the realm of science and pedagogy.

Many teachers have told me that learning about rubato changed the way they hear music.  One teacher went to a symphony performance a while after hearing my presentation, and they told me that they found themselves listening to all of the music through this new “rubato lens” during the whole concert, calling the experience “enlightening.”

To quote myself from the course:  “Rubato that is felt is expressive, but rubato that is both felt and understood is more expressive.”

What was it like to create and publish your own video course through Udemy? 

It was a lot more work than I thought it would be!  The audio editing and photoshopping sheet music excerpts alone was a solid month of work.  Writing the script, creating the visuals, and then actually recording it and getting it right were all a huge undertaking.  But in the end, it was worth it.  I produced a high-quality course, not only in terms of the content but also in terms of presentation.

As for Udemy itself, I feel like Udemy does a great job trying to give instructors what they truly deserve as compensation for their work.  Udemy is run the way I’d probably want to run an online education business if I were to run one myself.  If someone buys my course by searching on Udemy, I keep 50%.  If someone buys my course through a link I provide, I keep 97%.  The 3% Udemy is making on that still works out to be a lot when you have 35 million users, so this business model is a win-win for everyone.  Clearly Udemy is not out to exploit those who provide content on their site.

In addition to performing and teaching, you are also a composer! Would you tell us about the compositions and other resources you offer on your blog? 

Sure!  My most recent composition was actually a commission from a very talented four-piano ensemble group called Piano 4te.  The piece is called Cosmosis, and you can hear it here, although the recording might be barely tolerable to some since it’s just a computer rendering from my music notation software.

Before that, I published Teacher Duets for Burgmuller’s 25 Easy and Progressive Studies, Op. 100 for a second piano, and that has been a popular item among teachers as it makes the Burgmüller pieces (a staple of our teaching repertoire) sound like sophisticated pieces of music for the concert stage. 

I also very recently published two Dragon Suites for solo piano (here and here), which are concert piano arrangements of video game music by Jordan Steven, similar to what has been done with the Final Fantasy video game soundtracks.  After I was asked to write the arrangements, I decided it would be a super interesting and exciting project since the original music is so far removed from typical piano music.  I think the pieces would be a super interesting contrast in a program full of Bach, Beethoven and Chopin.

My earliest compositions are the works from my Ostinato album:  Ostinato Suite No. 1, Ostinato Suite No. 2, 9/11 Portrait, and Life of a Rain Cloud.  You can hear audio samples of each of these on these pages.

Those who are interested in absurd arrangements might also be interested in my piece “Solfeggissimo.”  It is hardissimo to play.

I also offer a scale and arpeggio fingering card, which is a laminated, double-sided, 8.5×11 sheet that gives students fingerings of all 12 major scales and all 36 minor scales, all 24 major/minor arpeggios, dominant/diminished 7th arpeggios, several fingerings for the chromatic scale, and even chromatic thirds.  I grew tired of writing scale/arpeggio fingerings into students’ notebooks, and I believe scale/arpeggio “books” are a waste of money when I already give my students the theory background to figure out the notes of the scales I assign to them.  I also believe the scales are learned more quickly and retained more effectively when students figure out scales on their own.  Laminating of course isn’t cheap, so packs of 5 cards go for $20, but I’d rather have students get a $4 card with everything they need right there that will last their entire lives (and doubles as a handy sheet music bookmark) than have them buy a $10 book.

All of my stuff can be found at orangenote.io.

Do you have any other current projects?

Yes, in fact the majority of my “project time” over the past seven years has gone into the designing of MetaPractice, an app that will help teachers teach and help students practice based on a ton of research I did into metacognition.  I don’t want to say much about it at this point since it’s currently in private alpha testing while coders add the last remaining features, but I’ve been using it very successfully with my own kids for a couple months, and I’m extremely excited about its release.  It is designed for goal-oriented teachers who want their students to be goal-oriented when practicing.

At this very moment, now that I’ve completed my rubato video course (and while I wait for the coding of MetaPractice to be completed), I’m collaborating with the creator of mynoise.net to make a piano “soundscape,” which is fun as it involves a very different kind of musical writing, much more challenging than it would seem.

How can teachers learn more about your music, resources, and online course?

Anything of significance that I do in the future will be announced on my blog, Cerebroom, so that’s probably the best way to follow what’s going on.  Updates don’t go out very often (just when I have something very important to say), so Cerebroom subscriptions won’t flood anyone’s email boxes.  At my Udemy rubato course, there is a promotional video there as well as real sample videos from the course.

What else would you like us to know?

I’m the events coordinator for a local tennis club, running several different tennis events for men and women.  I can also create a large cavity between my hands and blow into a slit made by my thumbs to make the sound of a mourning dove.  

Thanks so much for chatting with us, Chad! It was great to hear about your new rubato course as well as your compositions and other projects!

Hello again, readers: Just wanted to tell you I completed Chad’s rubato course recently and I must echo what other teachers have said about it: I hear rubato in an all-new way and I’m pleased to have a more effective way to teach rubato to my students. I’d recommend The Art of Rubato course to any teacher interested in helping their intermediate and advancing students use rubato in a more deliberate and well-grounded manner in their playing. Check out this link to learn more and get $10 off (expires May 28, 2021)!

Hope you enjoyed reading this Teacher Feature!

Links: 

• Chad’s The Art of Rubato course
• Chad’s music blog:  Cerebroom
• Chad’s Matrix ReSolutions website
• Chad’s Piano Studio website
• Chad’s professional artist website
• Chad’s general blog, Read Twedt
• A Facebook video of Chad performing

“Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.”

John Holt (in How Children Learn)

This quote reminds us that learning does not automatically happen just because there is a teacher. Learning happens thanks to the activity of the learner. A healthy learning environment is learning-centered, not teaching-centered.

Points to ponder: As teachers, how can we facilitate and encourage environments that are conducive for learning? How can we help our learners be engaged in active learning during piano lessons? What can we do to set them up for success? And how can we support students with learning independently on their own during home practice?

“Little children love the world. That is why they are so good at learning about it. For it is love, not tricks and techniques of thought, that lies at the heart of all true learning.”

–John Holt, in How Children Learn

Who can’t help but enjoy the privilege of seeing the world through a little one’s eyes? Watch a little child, and it’s plain to see how much they love the world. John Holt says that love is what makes them such good learners. I think we have much we can learn from children.

“We don’t always have to be in such a big hurry to correct children’s mistakes. We can afford to give them time to notice and correct them themselves.”

–John Holt (in How Children Learn)

Today’s food for thought: What would happen if we weren’t so quick to make corrections of young children? What potential benefit is there to allowing others time to notice and correct their own mistakes? Does this apply only to young children, or for older students as well?

Share your thoughts in the comments below!