The Art of Effective Piano Teaching

The focus of The Art of Effective Piano Teaching is to help teachers, whether novice or experienced, create an atmosphere where learning to play piano is exciting, challenging, and most of all, fun. The aim is to enable teachers to develop in students an “I can do it” attitude and thus build self-esteem by making piano a positive experience.

Teachers need only to talk with fellow professionals or read the available literature to realize that there is a plethora of views re-garding the proper pedagogical emphasis to place during the ini-tial years of piano study. Some teachers are of the opinion that beginning students must first learn to feel and understand rhythm. Other teachers believe that technique is much more im-portant. Still others would insist that students must be sub-mersed in theory, otherwise they will lack comprehension, lose interest, and quit. There is even a widely held school of thought that says to forget about rhythm, technique, and theory and that the only way to be a successful piano teacher these days is by teaching popular music at the expense of all else. As the meth-odology of this book is made clear, these pedagogical positions will be brought into proper balance, allowing teachers to make sense of this often-conflicting body of opinion.

Most teachers, even the successful ones, will have to admit that a relatively low percentage of students ever learn to play fluently. This is because the task of learning to play piano is similar in magnitude to that of rolling a boulder up the side of a huge hill. Unless one gets the boulder to the very top, it will certainly roll back down to the bottom. Too many students take years of les-sons and push that boulder up the proverbial mountain, only to let it slip back down, stopping instruction before ever reaching a lasting degree of proficiency. After a while, it is as if they had never taken lessons at all. Thus, the challenge for teachers is to find ways of making the learning process exhilarating and stimu-lating, especially until such time as students become intrinsically motivated. When teachers succeed, their students experience a lifetime of musical enjoyment.

Although there are no absolutes in piano pedagogy, you can count on the fact that every student is different and will learn at a dissimilar pace. In this book we will look at ways of optimizing that pace and maximizing each student’s potential.

The Art of Effective Piano Teaching adapts sound teaching methods to the unique personality and gifts of the individual stu-dent, techniques that can be applied to all ages, at every level of mastery. We will consider the vital role of the parent both at the lesson and at home and will examine new and innovative ways of quantizing students’ progress through the use of aids such as a metronome, stopwatch, and “Student Progress Graph.” We will look at motivational tools such as “Mystery Tunes,” the use of praise, the running of recitals, and more.

You will add a new degree of excitement to your piano teaching career as you digest the contents of this book and see firsthand how the techniques actually work. That excitement will surely carry over to your students!

Dino P. Ascari