Reflections on MTNA 2022
When MTNA announced that the 2022 conference was moving online, I was really bummed. I was planning to attend in person for the first time. (Well, I had also planned to attend in person in Chicago 2020, but we all know what happened that year.)
Thankfully, my piano-teacher-friend, Christina Whitlock of the Beyond Measure Podcast, had previously told me about a "retreat” she’d been on for NCKP during the summer of 2021 with some other piano-teacher-friends. While I wasn’t part of that amazingness, I did jump at the chance to join Christina and Joy Morin of the Color In My Piano blog at the home of our gracious host, Amy Chaplin of Piano Pantry. We watched many of the online sessions and chatted and shared teaching resources.
More importantly, WE ATE REALLY DELICIOUS FOOD. Amy’s blog and podcast are called Piano Pantry, and she loves to cook. She actually seemed to enjoy feeding us meal after meal. If you’d like to see what we ate, she catalogued all of the recipes in this blog post.
Amy and her husband also recently built their beautiful home which includes Amy’s studio. I actually had the pleasure of sleeping very close to the grand piano! 😆 I would be lying if I said I was not envious of her dedicated studio space, as well as an entire ROOM of filing cabinets and organizational tools.
Drool.
We all happened to be presenters for the conference. If you registered but missed these particular sessions, I recommend that you go back and find them while the conference is still available (until December 15, 2022).
Christina offered great food for thought on how we relate to our students (as she always does on this topic) in her full-length session titled Anxious Students/Anxious Teachers: How to Cope with Anxiety in the Studio. I had multiple particular students in mind to whom this topic applies.
Amy inspired us all to maintain good studio and self care through her short session on March 28 titled Reset and Refresh: Tidying Tips for Studio Teachers. This session had several practical and immediately usable ideas that I hope will help keep my studio organized.
Thanks to Joy, I was asked to participate in a panel discussion with her as well as Lynette Barny, Becki Laurent, and Sarah McCaffrey Ritchie titled Teaching Students to Fish: Developing Independent Learners from the First Lesson. It was a lovely conversation.
Watching yourself present a pre-recorded conference session on a screen is a very odd 21st-century experience and I know we all can’t wait to do this in person in the future. But being with other teachers in the flesh made the whole conference much more enjoyable.
Added bonus: when you spend several hours with experienced colleagues, they show you lots of cool things. Joy introduced me to Notion - perhaps soon I’ll be so organized that you won’t even recognize the blog and YouTube channel. (I doubt it!) And Joy and Amy shared a lot of wisdom on the topic of Music Learning Theory. If you want to know more about that, contact one of them!
A few other sessions that I enjoyed include, in no particular order (keeping in mind that I have not been able to listen to ALL of the sessions):
Adrian Anantawan’s performance in the opening session and recital. (I was not able to view any Pedagogy Saturday sessions prior to publishing this post, but I hope to go back later to view many of them.)
Sara Ernst’s Elementary Piano Master Class (which was actually several short recordings of teaching demonstrations rather than a traditional master class)
Benjamin Steinhardt’s Playing Deliciously: The Legacy and Teachings of Dorothy Taubman
Kate Boyd’s Rhythm and Meter in the Keyboard Music of J.S. Bach
Juliet Preston’s Developing Collaborative Skills in Young Pianists: Simple Lesson Activities that Prepare the Next Generation of Working Musicians
The RCM showcase presenting the new 2022 edition of the Celebration Series highlighted that the newest editions contain many pieces at all different levels by lesser known composers, including women and composers of color. I really look forward to reviewing these books.
Teachers, if you attended the Virtual Conference, what were some of your favorite sessions? Let me know in the comments.
