I've spent the last 12 weeks teaching solely online: innovating and adapting and learning new technologies, meeting my students in their homes, navigating this new virtual world together, and finding ways to keep making music through it all. Today, I want to share my observations and reflections on this season, this new paradigm in music education, and the benefits I've discovered.
Your curriculum is a basic framework for all the teaching and learning you hope will take place this year. It’s important to be just as intentional with the overall plans and goals for your year as you are with your week-to-week interactions with your students. Today, I’m going to show you how to write your very own curriculum, tailor-made to fit your students.
Musicianship is the skills you have as a musician: things like listening, singing, playing, creating, performing. It’s also the ability to “think in sound,” or audiate. But how do you teach these skills? Here are 10 practical things you can do to develop musicianship in those you teach, week by week, all throughout the year.
This year, I had planned to teach five studio classes specifically for 3rd-6th graders, two studio classes for 7th-12th graders, and monthly buddy lessons for my K-2nd grade students. But what to do when the world shuts down and everything moves online? Host a Zoom studio class, of course. Here is a collection of virtual games, teaching strategies, and best practices for online learning.
What a crazy few weeks in the world, right? Who would have thought that we’d be facing widespread school closures and the sudden need to move everything online in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic? This is my third week of teaching solely online, so I thought I’d share the top six things I’ve learned (so far) about teaching online.
Today, I want to tell you a story about one of my piano teachers. She wasn’t my first teacher—in fact, she was one of my last teachers—but she was the woman who taught me how to overcome my fears, play with power and control, develop my own interpretation, and understand music and artistry at the piano in a whole new way. And in some ways, that meant starting at the very beginning...
