It happened again this week. I had used the word "heartbeat" to suggest the way the left- hand chords in the B section of Burgmüller's Ballade should sound. Every teacher knows the usual klunk-klunk sound most students first make when playing them. Owen had immediately responded to this image with exactly the right two-chord phrasing. Ah, success,...

Paper leaves a trail, and usually the trail leads to the trash can. For that reason, I prefer to avoid paper and ink and offer virtual lesson assignment sheets. All my notes for student lessons are written in Pages, a word processor app similar to Word and available for all iOS devices. The notes are emailed as a PDF (portable document file) after ...

Q. I think I had a pretty good college pedagogy class, but I am still unsure about what to include in my student's lesson assignments. Could you offer some guidance on this subject? A. Planning the student's lesson assignment is one of the piano teacher's most important responsibilities. A carefully thought-out and well-balanced assignment takes mu...

When I first started teaching, I was determined not to make my students fill out the dreaded practice log. As a young teacher, I still had fresh memories of my own student days, and times spent scrambling right before a lesson to reconstruct (or perhaps invent?) my practice times for the week. Even as a kid, it seemed like a pointless exercise to m...

    A teacher can learn a lot about a new student's previous study ~ and practice by simply looking at the former assignment notebook. That's why I always ask a prospective student to bring it along to the pre-enrollment interview along with the music and other materials most recently studied. In some cases, the weekly assignments have be...