Teaching an adult piano student has unique challenges. I know many piano teachers will avoid taking on adults because they’ve had bad experiences in the past with commitment or expectations. But teaching adults has great advantages too. If you can learn the skills needed to teach this demographic they can be a valuable part of…
Practice & Performance
Effective piano practice is one of my passions as a piano teacher. Make the most out of your students' practice time with these freebies, ideas and insights.
VMT062: The Five Foundations of Successful Preschool Piano Teaching
This is the podcast version of a talk that I gave at NCKP in July 2019 titled ‘The Five Foundations of Successful Preschool Piano Teaching’. Listen to learn about the building blocks of teaching 3-5 year olds and how to do it effectively. Relevant Resources Why every preschool lesson should include improvisation First year goals…
3 Useful Styles of Lesson Plans for Piano Teachers
Here’s the thing. You read my blog and others full of these creative piano teaching ideas and resources and they all look fantastically stupendous. But then you go to fit these things into your lessons and your brain just sort of…freezes. How can you do all the stuff you want to do without your head…
The Best Evenly-Levelled Piano Duets for Piano Students
Evenly-levelled piano duets are not always the easiest thing to find…especially for beginner piano students. But they can be a fantastic way to bring students together and get them to learn skills like steady pulse and active listening. Almost all my students are in buddy lessons so they have a built-in duet partner each week….
How to create a music teaching studio budget (part 1)
Do you want to make more money? Then you need a music teaching studio budget. You can’t expect to earn more without a plan. In some cases, the throwing-stuff-at-a-wall plan is a good one…in most cases, it’s not. Many music teachers can be reticent to talk about money. It makes them feel icky. They feel…
How to Use Improvisation to Teach Rhythm Patterns
Some students will always find rhythm to be the most challenging part of piano lessons. It’s also the most important part of music so it’s vital that we find lots of ways to teach rhythm patterns to our students. By having lots of tricks up your sleeve (like those found in my book Rhythm in…
What piano students can learn from scat singing
One of the activities in my Meet the Blues workshop (which is coming out tomorrow for Vibrant Music Teaching members!) is a quick lesson in scat singing. I love this part of the workshop because it’s silly and fun; and because it teaches my students some valuable skills. If you’re not familiar with the term…
Chord Level Challenges – Systemised Piano Chord Goals
Piano chords are extremely useful for understanding the structure of music and for playing from lead sheets and improvising. But they’re not the easiest thing to learn. For a student, it can seem like there are too many types of piano chords to keep track. It can be overwhelming. That’s where these chord challenges come…
What I did differently for my recital this year
A recital is an important event in most piano teaching studio calendars. Every year I try something a little bit different to mix things up and keep it fresh. This was our second year at this recital venue…but it doesn’t mean everything stayed the same. Two Chances In previous years, I have had students play…
Why every preschool piano lesson should include improvisation
If there’s one thing all preschoolers have in common it’s that they’re curious. And it’s the curiosity that makes improvisation the most natural fit for preschool piano lessons. Improvisation allows for exploration and makes space for preschoolers to learn through play. Preschoolers are built to play. They need to play to understand the world and to take…