20/20 Vision for Piano Teachers
On Thursday, I’ll give a presentation to the West Suburban Music Teachers Association titled 20/20 Vision for Piano Teachers: Building a Foundation for Expressive Performance. Anyone can join us over Zoom! Click here for more info. For those of you who can’t join, here’s a tiny taste of what my presentation is all about.
Any good company, organization, church, business, or entrepreneur is going to have thoughts about why they do what they do and what they want to accomplish. Perhaps you know an individual who oozes vision and regularly gets people to rally behind his or her cause. In preparing for this talk, I consulted my husband, who is the pastor of our church. He regularly deals with explaining the vision of the church and strategically thinking through how to allocate budget and staff resources to meet those goals. The questions he deals with for essentially all of his leadership are:
Where are we going? This is the vision.
How are we going to get there? This is the strategy.
These questions can and should be asked by leaders of any good organization, and piano teachers who want to be financially successful and make an impact on their students cannot afford to be any different in this regard.
So let’s discuss vision. Most of us probably came to teaching because we love music, we love playing the piano, and we enjoy sharing that love with others. But what are some of the specific things that you consider your goals or visions for your piano students? Where do you want your students to go?
Let me give you a few of mine as examples:
Lifelong love of music
Technical facility and ease at the piano
Ability to perform in front of others with poise
Mastery of intermediate/advanced historical repertoire
Ability to sight read or read a chord chart or harmonize a basic melody
Deep understanding of the workings of music (theory, etc.)
Ability to use their skill at the piano outside of lessons (accompanying, playing a piano part in band/orchestra/jazz band, playing in a pop band, playing in a religious context)
These are all worthy goals, and an unlimited number of presentations or blog posts could be formed on the strategy of how to reach each of them.
Once I have a goal in mind, I able to craft a viable strategy. Many times we as teachers are tempted to begin with strategy without adequately considering the vision. We fixate on which pieces to teach or which books to use without fully fleshing out what goal they will help our students achieve.
In this talk, I’ll focus on how the vision of advanced-level performance informs my strategy in how I train my less experienced students to play expressively.
What goal or vision is currently at the forefront of your mind for your students? Have you stopped to think about why it is important for you that your students meet that goal? What strategies are you implementing that allow your students to move towards that goal?
