Small Group Piano Lessons
Is there a Better way to teach piano?
If you could find a much more effective way to teach than traditional lessons, you would want to try it, wouldn’t you?
Our daily bread
I remember when bread machines first came out, my Grandma called me to say she’d just tried a delicious piece of bread from a machine that mixes the dough, raises it, then bakes the dough all in the same container. She was giddy as she spoke about it.
I wondered how that could be. Does it really work? I was delighted to see Grandma had purchased one, so I could also test it out. I’m glad Grandma was open-minded enough to try something new because it worked perfectly and I still use one decades later.
Piano lessons have been taught the same way for a long, long time. Teachers teach the same way they were taught with only small variations. This is understandable since we tend to think, “It worked for me so it should work for everyone else”. The truth is that traditional piano teaching methods don’t work very well. Most students progress very slowly and drop out before they can really play.
So if you could find a better teaching method that allowed your students to advance more quickly and stick with piano lessons much longer, you’d want to try it, right?
Teaching piano is far better now
After a decade of teaching piano lessons the same way I was taught, I found myself pretty bored lesson after lesson. I soon realized that if I was bored, it had to be boring for my students too. I started thinking about how I could improve lessons and make learning better for my students.
Piano Lessons that are life changing
What I found was life changing for me as a teacher but also for my students.
I adapted the way piano is taught to large groups in our colleges for a small group setting with children. That setting quickly grew to include teens and adults.
Progress exceeded private lessons
What surprised me was that, in this small group setting, students’ progress actually accelerated.
This is counter intuitive and you are probably thinking, “How can that be possible?”
You simply cannot find this kind of success anywhere else
One of my students had been working on the William Tell Overture. He had struggled with the dynamics that totally “make” the piece come alive. As they were leaving class that day his classmate said, “I want to play your song as soon as I’m ready.” And that’s where the magic appeared. This boy went home feeling pleased his classmate liked the piece so he really worked on his soft to loud dynamics, and ended up memorizing it to play in the next week’s class. When he finished, all polished up and memorized, his classmates jumped off their benches and gave him a round of applause. You cannot find this kind of success anywhere but small group lessons.
It’s impossible to buy motivation like this. Small group lessons are the real deal, authentic and organic. And it happens over and over again in my daily classes. I am excited to share my methods with everyone who loves to teach piano.
