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Sight reading is a complex and essential skill for pianists. Successful sight reading requires the coordination of multiple cognitive and motor processes, and eye movement plays a crucial role in this process. Effective use of different eye movements is critical for efficient and accurate sight reading. This session will explore five different types of eye movements, their role in sight reading, and exercises to build sight reading based on these eye movements.
Learning the skills to be a pianist requires an enormous amount of dedication and resilience—a long-term process that requires sustained motivation. Motivation plays a critical role in students’ ability to progress and achieve their musical goals over time. The Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is a theoretical framework that has been used to understand motivation in educational settings, and posits that three basic psychological needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—are essential for students to experience intrinsic motivation. This session will focus on the role of autonomy in intrinsic motivation and its potential to promote long-term engagement and success in piano study. Autonomy, or the sense of being in control of one’s own actions and decisions, is a fundamental human need that plays a crucial role in fostering intrinsic motivation and optimal learning outcomes. When students feel they have control over their learning, they are more likely to engage and persist in the face of challenges and experience satisfaction from their achievements.
After dramatically changing new normals, the traditional value proposition of the undergraduate piano major no longer applies. This research-based session will equip educators with compelling reasons Gen Zers should major in piano including developing recession-proof soft skills, career durability and sustainability, personalized mentorship, creative solopreneurship possibilities, and financial stability and success. With compelling and relevant arguments we can communicate the modern value proposition of the piano major that prepares students to innovate and succeed.
Our teaching favorites have earned their place in our pedagogical Rolodexes because we know precisely how time-tested pieces will improve a student and showcase their strengths for optimal performances. Yet this approach usually ignores minority composers and works. Implementing repertoire swaps—a repertoire selection device used to replace a popular piece or composer by a lesser-known piece or composer—will improve our teaching, ensure quality alternatives and create a more diverse and inclusive studio. To introduce repertoire swaps, the presenter will explore 10 examples of repertoire by women composers from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Join us in exploring the myths of women composers from the 18th through the early 20th century, reveling in their Her Stories of perseverance in spite of the historical favoritism toward male composers. In order to “break the glass ceiling,” we have to jump beyond the “sticky floor” created by decades of neglecting important women composers. We discuss the four myths surrounding women composers and approaches to dispel them: 1) Composition was considered immodest and thus incompatible with marriage; 2) Women were not capable of writing large-scale works; 3) Women's works are not as good as men's... Women were inferior as creative, intellectual composers; and 4) There are not that many works composed by women before the 20th century.
As piano teachers, we are uniquely positioned to cultivate self-efficacy beliefs—the belief we have in our ability to perform tasks successfully—in our piano students. Come join this session to explore self-efficacy, discover why it’s important in piano study, learn sources of information used to increase self-efficacy beliefs, and consider strategies based on established principles from self-efficacy research to help your piano students believe they can succeed when applying their acquired skills.
Music creation can occur in the face of a world health crisis when so many other areas of our lives are put on hold. Join me in this presentation to explore how to thoughtfully navigate critical conversations with our students to positively influence the next generation of musicians and promote the arts.
The early stages of teaching new repertoire to piano students are vital to successful student performances. In this session, we will explore how to present and teach five popular and standard repertoire in the teaching literature in the first few lessons with intermediate to advanced students. The focus of the talk will include a discussion of detailed musical and technical concepts for each piece and preparing students for performance from the very beginning.
Teaching improvisation is an integral component of providing a well-rounded musical education for students and is often key to keeping middle school and high school students engaged in piano lessons. This workshop will present technical and theoretical pre-requisites needed for teaching improvisation, teaching demonstrations on improvising on popular tunes, and a discussion of the curriculum of standard teaching literature to support the study of improvisation from the perspective of both a jazz and classical pianist.
Music theory can be one of the most engaging and interactive aspects of music lessons, especially when it is presented through discovery learning! In this session, we provide off-the-bench activities, studio projects, and inclusive games to bring theory to life for instrumentalists and vocalists. Join us to enhance or expand your music theory curriculum to gain useful ideas to immediately implement in your programs.
In this session, we will explore language in piano instruction as a tool for feedback that will have the greatest positive impact on students. Positive versus negative framing of our teaching language makes a world of difference to our students. Immediately after a student plays a piece of music, what you say and how you say it will either have a positive or negative effect on that student. Teachers will walk away from this presentation with a checklist of positively-framed teaching phrases and ideas they can implement into their everyday teaching
What can you add to a method book to ensure your student learns the technical and musical concepts desired by the end of three years of piano study? In this workshop, I will present technical and musical concepts to teach to beginning piano students ages seven to ten using a variety of popular teaching method books suitable for the average-age beginning student. Recommendations of creative and effective teaching strategies will be made for the beginning to the elementary piano student.
In this session, I discuss a brief history on memorization for pianists, why memorizing repertoire is so important to intermediate and advanced pianists, and a wide variety of strategies to memorizing repertoire including overlearning, mental practice, and testing your memory based on foundational research, current trends, and experience in working with broad range of students.