You know those moments when something just *clicks*? When something suddenly makes sense to you that was confusing before or you make a new connection or you realize you're able to do something you didn't know you could do.
Sometimes we call these a-ha moments or breakthroughs. These are some of my favorite things to observe in my studio: when a student recognizes a new musical concept, makes a new connection, or can do something independently that they couldn't do without help before.
Summer is a great time to rest, recharge, and work on professional development. This is often when we as music educators attend conferences and workshops, participate in training and certification programs, take summer classes at a local university, and catch up on all the reading we intended to do during the year.
Today, I'm sharing a curated list of 11 pedagogy-related books for music teachers. Some I've read, and some are on my reading list, but all offer a fresh perspective on the teaching and learning process that I hope will inspire and inform your teaching practice in the year to come.
Earlier this year, I read The Perfect Wrong Note: Learning to Trust Your Musical Self by prize-winning pianist and pedagogue William Westney. (I mentioned it back in Ep. 055 as I was reading it.)
I enjoyed it so much that I made it our Musician & Co. Book Club pick for this quarter. I just published a book review on the Musician & Co. blog, sharing four practical insights for musicians and teachers and a few of my favorite quotes.
In this episode, I want to share some of these practical takeaways: how I'm integrating some of the ideas from Westney's book into my teaching, the questions I'm asking my students these days, and a reflection on how we approach mistakes in the music teaching and learning process.
We've been working a lot on rhythm in the studio this spring.
I've always made an effort to incorporate a rhythm activity into each lesson, but I've found myself being more intentional about this in recent months and becoming more aware of how I teach rhythm and how students develop these skills.
From the Music Learning Theory, we know that students develop audiation skills, or the ability to hear music in their head without any sound being present, through singing, rhythmic movement, and building a vocabulary of tonal and rhythm patterns.
What makes learning formal or informal?
Often they’re presented as a dichotomy: Formal learning is learning that happens with a teacher in a structured environment and informal learning is learning that takes place out in the world, between peers, or things the student learns on their own.
In music, genre is often wrapped up in these distinctions. To generalize, classical music and sometimes jazz are taught and experienced in formal situations (like schools, lessons, and community ensembles), and pop, rock, and everything else are experienced in informal contexts (at home, in the car, with friends, in the garage band).
But can music learning be both formal and informal? What does that look like?
That's what we're going to talk about today.
I was talking with one of my high school students a few weeks ago about music by women composers.
We were studying "Canoeing" by Amy Beach in the Celebration Series Level 7 Piano Repertoire book, the third piece in her Op. 119 collection, From Six to Twelve for Piano written in 1927. "Amy Beach was the first American woman to achieve widespread recognition as a composer of large-scale works," I read from my iPad.
My student, in addition to piano and double bass, her primary instrument, is also a composer.
This is how the idea began for studying and learning music by women composers during the month of March, International Women's Month.
In this episode, I'll talk about the composers and scores we'll study over the next four weeks and share a resource list of elementary and intermediate piano music written by women composers that you can reference in your teaching.
It was 1997.
My piano teacher had just shown us a picture of Belle, Bonne, Sage, a rondeau about love written in the shape of a heart by 15th-century French composer, Baude Cordier. I studied the top two staves, curved to create the top of the heart, the illuminated letter B at the beginning of the first word, Belle, and the unique black-and-red notation.
This signaled the beginning of the annual studio-wide Valentine composition project.
Happy New Year!
The change in the calendar year reminds us that there are things in life that ebb and flow. There's comfort in that familiar rhythm, the cyclical nature of our seasons, our routines. What does the beginning of a New Year signify for you? What kind of season do you find yourself in these days?
I recognized recently that I am in a season of learning.
Of course, I am still actively teaching five days a week, but at the same time, I'm reflecting, jotting down stories and realizations at the end of the teaching day—things I'd like to do differently next time or things I didn't plan but observed or participated in that ended up teaching me something as well as my student.
Welcome, December: A month of parties and pageants, decorations and delight, twine-wrapped packages and twinkling lights.
In the midst of all the end-of-year festivities, I like to steal a few quiet moments for reflection:
I make a list of all the books I read this year and what I want to read next year (look for the link to that in the show notes, if you're curious),
I make an end-of-year summary for my business and send a spring calendar to my studio families,
I write a year-in-review blog post, and
I reflect on what I've learned as a teacher.
Taking time to reflect on our teaching practice is an important and necessary part of the teaching-and-learning equation. So today, I'm looking back on all the moments I documented on the podcast this year and sharing seven things I've learned as a music educator.
Researchers suggest that twenty to thirty percent of teachers in America have moderately high to high levels of burnout (source). Maybe you know the feeling:
Tired, mentally and emotionally.
Distracted and uninspired.
Going through the motions.
Trouble making decisions.
These are warning signs.
Why does this happen? Why do we get burnt out and is there anything we can do about it? Today, I'm sharing five practical things you can do when you feel stressed or burnt out plus a few of my go-to resources.
