"It feels almost like if we don't document it, did it happen? And I need proof that it did."

I was listening to an interview with Erin Napier of Hometown on Southern Living's Biscuits and Jam podcast recently and this statement stayed with me.

"A major part of my personality is documenting," she said, and I nodded to myself.

In this episode, I'm sharing what I've learned about the art and practice of documentation, six things I'm documenting in the studio lately, practical resources I use to track and organize this data, and suggestions for developing this practice in your music studio.

Do you improvise with your students?

If you have a classical background like I do, you may not consider yourself an improviser, but researchers and educators Christopher Azzara and Richard Grunow remind us that "we are [all] born improvisers, as evidenced by our behavior in early childhood." (source)

In their series, Developing Musicianship Through Improvisation, they define improvisation as "the spontaneous expression of meaningful musical ideas." It doesn't mean making things up in the moment; it means making meaningful choices, sequencing patterns, snippets, and ideas from a vast vocabulary of musical material, as I talked about in the last episode, Ep. 065.

In this episode, I'm sharing a simple improvisation prompt I use with my elementary students this time of year.

Last week, I posted a reel on Instagram of my annual planning process for my studio. At the end of the summer, I pull out all my books, curriculum charts, and other planning notes and spend several hours making repertoire plans for each of my students.

One teacher commented that they're very curious about other teacher's approaches to long-term planning because, like many of us, they're not sure if what they're doing is the best/most effective/most efficient way to do things. Can you relate to that? I know I can.

Let me tell you a secret: I still feel this way about my own process.

The truth is it's taken me many years to get to the version of long-term planning you see in the reel and that I'll talk through in more detail today and I tweak it a little each year.

There are lots of ways to go about this—I think it just takes some time to try things and hone in on a process that makes sense to you, helps you feel organized and prepared, and works for your studio.

Today, I'll share a little more insight into my long-term planning process (the reel was a 21-second time-lapse video, but I actually spent about three hours at the piano).

Earlier this year, I read The Perfect Wrong Note: Learning to Trust Your Musical Self by prize-winning pianist and pedagogue William Westney. (I mentioned it back in Ep. 055 as I was reading it.)

I enjoyed it so much that I made it our Musician & Co. Book Club pick for this quarter. I just published a book review on the Musician & Co. blog, sharing four practical insights for musicians and teachers and a few of my favorite quotes.

In this episode, I want to share some of these practical takeaways: how I'm integrating some of the ideas from Westney's book into my teaching, the questions I'm asking my students these days, and a reflection on how we approach mistakes in the music teaching and learning process.

We've been working a lot on rhythm in the studio this spring.

I've always made an effort to incorporate a rhythm activity into each lesson, but I've found myself being more intentional about this in recent months and becoming more aware of how I teach rhythm and how students develop these skills.

From the Music Learning Theory, we know that students develop audiation skills, or the ability to hear music in their head without any sound being present, through singing, rhythmic movement, and building a vocabulary of tonal and rhythm patterns.

I was talking with one of my high school students a few weeks ago about music by women composers.

We were studying "Canoeing" by Amy Beach in the Celebration Series Level 7 Piano Repertoire book, the third piece in her Op. 119 collection, From Six to Twelve for Piano written in 1927. "Amy Beach was the first American woman to achieve widespread recognition as a composer of large-scale works," I read from my iPad.

My student, in addition to piano and double bass, her primary instrument, is also a composer.

This is how the idea began for studying and learning music by women composers during the month of March, International Women's Month.

In this episode, I'll talk about the composers and scores we'll study over the next four weeks and share a resource list of elementary and intermediate piano music written by women composers that you can reference in your teaching.