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.

Researchers suggest that twenty to thirty percent of teachers in America have moderately high to high levels of burnout (source). Maybe you know the feeling:

Tired, mentally and emotionally.
Distracted and uninspired.
Going through the motions.
Trouble making decisions.

These are warning signs.

Why does this happen? Why do we get burnt out and is there anything we can do about it? Today, I'm sharing five practical things you can do when you feel stressed or burnt out plus a few of my go-to resources.

There's been a lot of talk in recent years about creative teaching strategies and being a creative teacher. But what does that really mean? What does it look like in practice?

Of course, there's a certain amount of creativity naturally embedded in the work of making music together. Music is a creative art! But what does creative teaching mean? Is it inherent or is it something we need to develop? Is it something we bring into our teaching space or is it something we co-construct with our students?