Field Notes on Music
Teaching & Learning Podcast

I started using Piano Safari in my studio five years ago. There are a lot of things I like about the curriculum and pedagogical approach—the emphasis on rote teaching and pattern-based learning, creative exploration and improvisation, an intervallic approach to reading, and repertoire that is expressive and captivating for young learners—but one of my favorite resources is their correlated sight-reading cards.

In this episode, I’ll share my 7-step teaching process for using these cards in lessons with elementary and early-intermediate students, and 24 creative ways to incorporate them into your teaching.

Assessment is a process of measuring, evaluating, and documenting learning.

This informs our teaching, curriculum planning, and repertoire choices. In turn, it also helps students develop a diverse set of musicianship skills, including technique, performance, aural skills, sight-reading, and musical creativity.

In this episode, we’ll talk about how to plan an assessment for your studio, including defining assessment criteria and choosing measurement tools, and how to use this data to motivate your students and inform your teaching.

I love doing listening projects in my studio classes. These leveled, small-group, hour-long classes are offered 5-6 times per year, with 3-5 students per group. I always include a performance element and plan several themed activities spanning technique, sight-reading, rhythm, improvisation and composition, and listening.

In a recent class with three intermediate students (8th-11th grade), we compared the music of Franz Schubert and Max Richter.

What does it look like to be a musician who is also an inventor—someone whose curiosity about how things work shapes the way he approaches his instrument? Pianist Josef Hofmann spent his entire career exploring that, and his story is worth knowing.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of Hofmann's birth. He was a Polish-American pianist, born in 1876, and considered by many—including Sergei Rachmaninoff—to be the greatest pianist of the 20th century. And yet, despite his many musical achievements, including a fifty-year performing career, 100 compositions, commercial recordings, a signature tone, and enviable technical precision, he doesn't have the same name recognition as his contemporaries.

March in my studio means one thing: informance season. We spend 10 to 12 weeks getting ready—learning and analyzing music, practicing demonstrations, preparing to talk to the audience. And this year, I knew from the start that the theme was going to require a little more planning than usual.

If you’re new around here, I define a musical informance as an informal, informational performance that integrates education and experience. It’s an opportunity for students to share what and how they’re learning and invite parents and audience members into the music-making process.

At the end of January, we lost a wonderful musician, teacher, and pedagogue, Marvin Blickenstaff. You’ve probably heard me talk about Marvin on the podcast before—he had a profound impact on my teaching through the years.

With a career spanning over six decades, Marvin dedicated himself to serving piano students and teachers worldwide. He valued deep emotional expression at the keyboard and a human connection through the music. He once said, “The only reason that music exists is to express who we are and how we feel.”

February is Black History Month—a time to honor and celebrate the contributions of African Americans. As a music teacher, this prompts me to pause and evaluate what I’m teaching, but also why. I ask questions like:

• How much diversity is present in my students’ method books and repertoire?

• Which pieces should we skip due to their complicated history?

• How can I make more thoughtful, informed choices about the music I put in front of my students—choices that are pedagogically sound and historically responsible?

As we prepare for the Spring semester and look forward to lessons resuming in January, I want to share nine collections I’ve been using with my students this year. Some are etudes based on specific technical patterns, others are solo repertoire books. Most of these are available through Piano Safari, though they can be used alongside any method book.

For reference, my elementary and early intermediate students are in Piano Safari Levels 1-3 and range from 2nd-7th grade.

If you're looking to refresh your teaching materials for January or add some variety to your studio library, I hope you'll find a few gems here that spark your interest.

One of the things I love about teaching is that we can draw on many disciplines to make our work better—art, psychology, learning theories, and even neuroscience. Recently, I’ve been reading about what brain research can tell us about practicing and how we learn, and it’s fascinating.

Welcome back to our 2-part series on practicing.

In part 1, we talked about the art of practicing. I shared what I’m learning from Madeline Bruser’s book, The Art of Practicing, and how I’m carrying these concepts and strategies into my practice sessions and studio.

This fall, I read two books about practicing: The first is Madeline Bruser’s, The Art of Practicing: A Guide to Making Music from the Heart. The second is Molly Gebrian’s 2024 release, Learn Faster, Perform Better: A Musician's Guide to the Neuroscience of Practicing.

Art and science. Because practicing requires both.

This is part 1 of a 2-part series about practicing and what I’m learning and applying from both books.

In this episode, part 1, we’ll talk about the art of practicing. I’ll share what I’m learning from Madeline Bruser’s book and how I’m carrying these concepts and strategies into my practice sessions and studio.

It was about this time last year when I got a panicked email from a parent: “Jack broke his left wrist this week. What does this mean for piano? He’s in a cast.”

Has this ever happened to you? Some parents may assume that lessons need to be paused during this time. I mean, they can’t play with only one hand… or can they?

The answer is yes, and there’s more and more one-handed repertoire available. With a broken foot, we can focus on repertoire that doesn’t use the pedal, or they can learn to pedal with their left foot for a few weeks.

But more importantly, what I want to convey to parents (and students) is that playing is only one facet of musicianship. There are so many other things we do in lessons, so many other skills we’re working to develop. It reminds me of something Frances Clark once said, “Teach the student first, the music second, and the piano third.”

Learning to play the piano isn’t just about learning repertoire pieces. It’s about developing a set of keyboard skills that lets you make music anywhere, with anyone, in any style. Technique, performance, and sight-reading are part of it, but so are harmonization, transposition, chord knowledge, and voice-leading. It’s more than the ability to perform what’s on the page; it’s understanding how the music is made.

In this episode, I’ll share why keyboard skills matter for students of all ages and a few strategies I’m using in my studio to build them into lessons from the very first year of study.