Field Notes on Music Teaching & Learning

It's back-to-school season, which means cups of hot tea in the mornings, new music to learn and explore, a new teaching schedule, and a few new organizational tools and strategies to test out, per usual. Of course, there are certain parts of my routine that I enjoy coming back to—things I look forward to picking up again—but there are always a few things I’m ready to change or alter in my teaching...

I first heard about this book from one of my grad school professors. We were sitting around a long table one snowy January evening at our annual dinner for current and prospective doctoral students. I asked my professor about books he was reading lately and he named several including Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and Carol Dweck's Mindset . It's been on my list since then (let's just say it's been a...

This summer, I've been teaching buddy lessons to two rising 1st graders. One started lessons with me in January and the other just started last month. They are both using the method book, Piano Safari Friends , which I have really enjoyed teaching this year. Both students have had 30-minute lessons with me almost weekly this summer and since I was able to schedule them back to back, I'm doing 25 m...

Do you pre-plan lessons in your studio? The truth is, I haven't always done this. As a young teacher, I loved planning and sequencing activities for every individual lesson, but it was challenging to predict what we'd realistically get through and so much was dependent on a student's preparation and practicing during the week. Would they be ready to begin this new piece or would we need to spend a...

We talk a lot about the teaching and learning process on this podcast and what that looks like in practical, real-life experiences. But today, I want to take a step back and talk about what it looks like in the beginning, when you're just getting started. Maybe you're just beginning your teaching career or you’re pivoting to teaching after doing something else. Maybe you've been teaching for a whi...

In February of this year, I organized a month-long, studio-wide composition project based on the 12-bar blues. I got the idea for this project from a session I attended at NCKP last summer, led by Leila Viss and Bradley Sowash. Leila shared how she's structured a blues composition project for her students and I thought it would be a good way to acknowledge and celebrate Black History Month and inc...

I remember the warm, wood-paneled walls of the recital hall where we gathered; the blue theater chairs and parquet floors; the tall windows along one wall and narrow stage at the front, large enough for only a Steinway grand piano and a few chairs and music stands. I liked to sit toward the back because, since the hall was small, it gave me a good visual perspective. I pulled out my wooden noteboo...

It all started when I was writing a lesson plan for a 2nd-grade student. She’s in her second month of lessons. I was planning to introduce a new piece and I thought we'd start by exploring the rhythm since three of the four patterns were the same in this particular piece. Let me preface this by saying these were rhythm patterns the student had experienced aurally in previous weeks through imitatio...

In the book The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance , author Timothy Gallwey describes a one-on-one lesson he had once with an adult tennis student. The student was aware of a problem with his serve, as several other teachers had pointed it out to him, and he could describe it in great detail, and what he needed to do to fix it. So Timothy decided to try...

This month in my teaching, I'm making a conscious effort to focus on the music. I know that might sound obvious. You're a music teacher—what else would you focus on? But the truth is, as teachers, there's a lot we're thinking about: Are we managing our time well? Will we complete everything on the lesson plan? Are we keeping a good pace and keeping our students engaged? Is there enough variety in...

The scene opens in an empty room with blank, white walls. A woman steps into the space, alone. "The blank space can be humbling," she writes. There's pressure to do something, to fill the emptiness, to create. But with practice and with the ritual of showing up, you grow accustomed to it. The author describes it as both her job and her calling. "Bottom line," she writes, "Filling this empty space...

So often in our teaching and learning experiences, music theory is taught as a standalone subject. We need to develop an understanding of theory and musical structure just like we need to develop an understanding of syntax and grammar in language. But I've been wondering lately if there's a better way to incorporate these learning experiences and theoretical conversations into our teaching. ...

If there's one thing we know it's that practicing is fundamental to developing skills as a musician. And as music teachers and educators, we're always looking for new ways to encourage and inspire our students to practice at home. Interleaving is an approach to learning and practice that involves mixing up the sequence of topics, skills, or strategies so they are woven together throughout a practi...

When was the last time you sat down at your instrument and played music for fun ? I mean, not music you had to practice or prepare, not the music you're teaching this week, but music you chose to play for yourself, for your own enjoyment? So often as professionals, we don’t make time for this. We assume that the music we’re being paid to learn and practice and teach will also count as the musical...

Improvising and musical creativity is something I value in my studio and something I want to encourage and foster in all of my students. This was not my experience growing up; in fact, I didn't learn how to approach improvising from an educational standpoint until I was in grad school. Today, I want to share a story from the early days of my studio when I was still a student myself. It's about a l...

According to church musician and educator, Helen Kemp, 17% of children need help finding their singing voices. These are the children who often sing with a very limited range, default to chanting low in the voice instead of singing, and/or have trouble matching pitch. Have you encountered this in your teaching? This does not indicate a lack of skill or potential, but simply a lack of experience an...

Perhaps you've heard the age-old adage: we teach how we were taught . Of course, we know this isn’t the full story: we all have unique backgrounds and a variety of experiences that inform the people we are today and the teachers we are becoming. Observing our own teachers is certainly a part of that, but this alone doesn’t define what type of teacher we are or will become. But it is worth con...

If you walk into an elementary classroom, you might notice that everything is color-coded: signs and charts on the wall to labels on bins to pieces of tape marking certain spots on the floor. This is because colors are easy for most young children to recognize and differentiate between. But in music, our baseline is black and white, the colors of standard notation. For this reason, color can be a...

Today's episode is a special one because for the first time on this podcast, you'll hear someone other than me talking. In fact, you'll hear 22 other voices — my students! But first, let me back up and give you a little context. In the Spring of 2020, I attended a webinar for piano teachers hosted by the Frances Clark Center. Anna Beth Rucker, a piano teacher, researcher, and arts administrator ba...

One thing I love about summer is picking out a new book (or three) to read. I love having a book with me when I travel, but also the everyday times like sitting by the lake on a hot summer day, relaxing on the porch with a glass of sweet tea, or curled up in the sunroom on a quiet Sunday afternoon. In the summer, I like to have at least one book that's an easy, light-hearted read — easy to pick up...

Welcome back to Music Education Basics! Today, we’re talking about musical phrasing, dynamics, and movement and why it’s important to incorporate these elements of musical expression into the teaching and learning process from the very beginning. Visuals and active experiences are a huge part of the learning process. In some cases, they are more important in our teaching than spoken dire...

Welcome back to Music Education Basics! Today, we’re talking about readiness for music-reading and developing proficiency. Just like learning to read language, music-reading follows listening and responding, developing a musical vocabulary, and active musical experiences in a natural progression, as we’ve been reviewing this week. If you’re a choir director or an elementary music teacher, I r...

Welcome back to Music Education Basics! Today, we’re talking about musical phrasing, dynamics, and movement and why it’s important to incorporate these elements of musical expression into the teaching and learning process from the very beginning. Visuals and active experiences are a huge part of the learning process. In some cases, they are more important in our teaching than spoken dire...

Welcome back to Music Education Basics! Today, we’re talking about what it means to develop language skills in music—namely, the importance of building a vocabulary of tonal and rhythm patterns, something you’ll hear me describe as the building blocks of music. Tonal patterns are short, 2- to 5-note groups or phrases. Think of them like words: instead of reading and focusing on the individual lett...

To begin Music Education Basics, we’re going to talk about a primary component of music teaching and learning and something you may not immediately think of as being the first step in the teaching process: listening and responding. In the introduction last week, I talked about the Music Learning Theory and the idea that learning music is a lot like learning how to speak a new language. When you le...