The words theory and technique are often lumped together in the world of piano pedagogy, especially when in the context of elementary and intermediate students. There are often books that are labeled for developing theory and technique together, which could be fine. For many situations, though, it may be well to address these two aspects […]

I don’t know about each of you, but there are some key things that I had to work through when I first began teaching music. Helps for new music teachers can be so valuable because these teachers are new. They don’t have 10, 20, or 50 years of experience, trial, error, and success from which to […]

While attending a workshop on piano pedagogy recently presented by Dr. Susan Kindall, the students in the class were given the opportunity to describe in one word a good teacher by whom they had been positively impacted (these traits were not given exclusively as descriptions of music teachers). As each person in the class shared, […]

If you’ve ever heard elementary pianists play, you probably know what I’m talking about – that unmistakable beginner’s plunk (with which I was plagued myself as a young musician). For the first several months of my teaching experience, I thought primarily of achieving one thing in the training of my piano students, and that was […]