052 - What Does Creative Music Teaching Look Like?

052 - What Does Creative Music Teaching Look Like?

There's been a lot of talk in recent years about creative teaching strategies and being a creative teacher. But what does that really mean? What does it look like in practice?

Of course, there's a certain amount of creativity naturally embedded in the work of making music together. Music is a creative art! But what does creative teaching mean? Is it inherent or is it something we need to develop? Is it something we bring into our teaching space or is it something we co-construct with our students?

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051 - The Pokémon Piano Lesson

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051 - The Pokémon Piano Lesson

I have a new 1st-grade student this fall, a younger sibling of another student. Their temperaments and personalities could not be more different and I feel like I'm still learning how best to relate to the younger brother in lessons.

Aaron is very smart and artistic but also has a rebellious streak. Sometimes he'll come into his lesson and say he doesn't want to play the piano or he'll resist reviewing a concept or piece from the previous week and give me only a half-hearted attempt.

After one particularly challenging lesson, I made a plan to incorporate a few more fun activities the following week—movement, creativity prompts, and musical discovery. Little did I know that Aaron would bring all the creative inspiration we needed for a 30-minute lesson: a binder of Pokémon cards.

050 - Simplified Organization for the New School Year

050 - Simplified Organization for the New School Year

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.

The start of a new school year is a great opportunity to reset, refocus, and try new things. I talked about this back in Ep. 006 - Four Things I'm Doing Differently in My Studio. It's interesting to look back and see how much has changed and what I've learned in two-and-a-half years!

Today, I'm sharing an inside look at three big studio projects I worked on this summer—repertoire planning, technique organization, and an aural skills video library—and how I'm implementing them into my studio this fall.

049 - What Every Music Teacher Should Know About Mindsets: Insights from Carol Dweck's Book

049 - What Every Music Teacher Should Know About Mindsets: Insights from Carol Dweck's Book

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 few years), but I finally read it last year.

Today, I want to share my four biggest takeaways from Mindset: The New Psychology of Success to give you an idea of what it's about and how we can learn from it as musicians, teachers, and leaders.

048 - Buddy Lesson Activities Based on Piano Safari Friends

048 - Buddy Lesson Activities Based on Piano Safari Friends

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 minutes with one student, 10 minutes with both, and then 25 minutes with the other student.

Today, I'm sharing a behind-the-scenes look at how I organized our buddy lesson activities and sequenced them from week to week.

047 - An Inside Look at My Lesson-Planning Process

047 - An Inside Look at My Lesson-Planning Process

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 another week reviewing concepts in a review piece?

Today, I'm sharing my lesson-planning workflow: the steps I take every day before teaching to plan individual lessons for my students. Plus, at the end, I'll answer a few questions I received on Instagram that are related to this topic.

046 - 6 Practical Tips for Designing Your Music Teaching Career

046 - 6 Practical Tips for Designing Your Music Teaching Career

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 while but you're looking for ways to evolve and further develop or shape your career.

Wherever you are in your career, we’re all aspiring to be better musicians, teachers, and artists. In this episode, I'll share seven practical tips for designing and developing your music teaching career.

Music careers in the 21st century are flexible and diverse and they often include more than one thing. Many of you are freelancers or self-employed, curating opportunities and crafting a creative career based on your varied skillsets and interests.

Today, I want to focus on music education and ways to incorporate that into the work you do. Because whether or not you pursued or are pursuing a degree in music education, teaching will invariably be part of your career, if it isn’t already. I’ll explain more about what that might look like in this episode.

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045 - The Blues Composition Project

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045 - The Blues Composition Project

Do you incorporate composition into your teaching?

If you didn't grow up improvising or composing, you may feel intimidated by the prospect of nurturing these skills in your students. But it's never too late to stretch those creative muscles!

Today, I'm sharing a behind-the-scenes look at how I organized a blues composition project in my studio, how I structured and guided the composition process each week, some blues examples we studied from the repertoire, and a few of my students' final compositions.

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044 - What Do You See? The Power of Observation in Music Lessons

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044 - What Do You See? The Power of Observation in Music Lessons

I was in grad school at the time.

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 notebook with the leather spine, flipped to the next clean page, and began to write.

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043 - Rediscovering the Joy of Scavenger Hunts

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043 - Rediscovering the Joy of Scavenger Hunts

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 imitation and clapbacks. I was looking for a way this week to introduce the written notation.

Follow along with my creative work and daily adventures: @ashleydanyew

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