Piano Teaching Idea Share #2 – How Teachers are Lightening Their Load

Our Piano Teaching Idea Share #1 was such a success that we did it again at our recent Lighten Your Load webinar. Teachers who attended kept saying how very helpful this new set of ideas was and after compiling them, I couldn’t agree more!

The questions and ideas were all about lightening your load and I think you are going to love these!

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Here are the 3 questions that we tackled:

1. What’s one thing you’ve changed that’s lightened your load?

While teachers shared their thoughts in the chat, I asked Diane to give us some ideas about how she’s lightened her load. Here is a video snippet from the webinar of what she said:

2. How are you getting students to practice right now?

If students were practicing, that would lighten your load, wouldn’t it? Well, Amanda Slyter, from our ComposeCreate® team, shared how she is going to be adapting the 30/40 Piece Challenge for her students this summer She’s going to be pairing two students together during the summer months to complete the challenge. She will be pairing students together base on their levels and will have a pre-prepared repertoire list of studio licensed music from which to work. Since she can use the studio licensed music over and over again, she can easily pull other pieces from other levels in that might be more or less difficult to make sure that students have music at their level, below their level, and at a challenge level. But the students will work together to accomplish this challenge and she’s hopeful that this will help also renew and develop relationships since this has been so challenging during this pandemic.

In the chat, teachers shared all kinds of great ideas for how they are currently getting their students to practice which is helping lighten their load. Download the Idea Share #2 for a list of all these ideas – there are 153 of them!

3. What are your doing to lighten the load of parents?

Now at first, this might not seem directly related to lightening your load as a piano teacher. But I can assure, as both a piano teacher and a parent, that paying attention to this will lighten your load because parents are then less likely to quit, complain, or go crazy on you! I say that in all seriousness. Parents are on the brink of collapse these days, especially if they are schooling their children at home. And even if they are not, the added stress of keeping their family safe, their kids healthy, and all the other anxieties and fears of the pandemic, are enough to tax even the most sane parent.

Some of the things I shared at the webinar included:

• Show them you see their pain. Empathize. Write to them and acknowledge that what parents are doing right now is hard. I can’t tell you how meaningful it is to me when a teacher reaches out to me and says,

“I just wanted to tell you that I really respect how hard you are working right now and how difficult parenting must be right now. I know this is especially challenging for you as you work and manage schooling right now. I can’t imagine how you are doing it, but it looks like you are doing a great job, even if it is hard.

Feel free to send parents a link to this wonderful post by Christine Zerendowski which is the article I had Diane read at the webinar. These kinds of posts are just what parents who are schooling at home need to hear right now. And there are other authors out there writing about the general stress of parents right now. Articles like this can be very encouraging to parents.

• Make things easy. Some examples of this I gave are:
  1. Email music well in advance of lessons or package the music in convenient ways.
  2. Keep communication concise and easy.
  3. Be understanding. Relax expectations.
  4. Communicate. But don’t ask too much or more than is absolutely necessary.

The Bonuses

I sent brand new Time Signature Giant Flashcards and Music Symbol Flashcards to anyone who attended alive and those who attended the replay. We may make these available to other teachers in the future, but for now, they just went to live and replay attendees only (not to those who signed up but did not attend). Hopefully this will help lighten your load!

Download the entire Piano Teaching Idea Share # 2 below. And stay tuned for other webinars where we’ll do more of these!

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And if you’ve unsubscribed, this resubscribes you.