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"Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife." - Khalil Gibran Reflecting on these last months, it is hard to process the overwhelming changes that have taken place all over the world because of the pandemic crisis we are enduring. I have been deeply moved by the incredible gener...
LEARNING BEFORE 2020 While teaching online is a new adventure for many professional musicians, it is an extension of distance education that began in the United States in the nineteenth century and was subsequently developed in Europe, Canada, and Australia.1 Often, these were courses offered through extensio...
Forward by Artina McCain, Jonathan Tsay, and Casey Hilder As schools around the country quickly closed their doors, they just as quickly opened virtual classrooms. While the transition wasn't an easy one, many applied piano professors were faced with an additional hurdle—students who hadno instruments for home practice. New, creative, and bold meas...
The need to shelter in place during the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the way music instructors interact with their students. Most teachers now rely on various technologies to facilitate remote instruction for lessons and group classes. While this shift is essential to slow the spread of infectious disease, the sudden move to online instru...
The recent global pandemic has generated a mental health crisis in our culture. Although experts will not fully comprehend the psychological effects of COVID-19 for many years, millions of people around the world are currently experiencing the repercussions. The complex emotions associated with the coronavirus include feelings of fear, grief, loss,...
I run music programs that serve the underserved. Specifically, through OpporTUNEity® Music, I lead community-based music programs that engage undergraduate music students through the design and delivery of curriculum and instruction to children living in poverty. As a program that relies heavily on institutional resources in higher education to par...
Like most of you, I am currently working from home. At the time of this writing, our city is under a stay-at- home order, and our public schools, colleges, and universities are closed. Like most of you, I have moved all my teaching online including my teaching of students who are special learners. I am missing my students terribly, and worry t...
Over the course of a few days in mid-March, the University of Colorado (CU),as many schools, quickly and suddenly transitioned to distance learning.All students who were able were asked to move home. All face-to-face engagements, including classes, private lessons, and committee meetings would move online. In short order, piano teachers everyw...
A New Reality It has been remarkable to see our community of piano teachers come together to share resources and provide support to one another during this pandemic. We had to transition to online teaching very quickly—overnight for some—and mobilize what technology we had on hand to create makeshift virtual studios. I think it is safe to say that ...
In this unprecedented time, we are finding that technology is crucial to our success, both on the student and teacher sides. Teachers who have not embraced technology in their studios are now finding that they must, and the learning curve can be overwhelming. Students who have not embraced using technolo...
A lifeline for many teachers during their sudden change- over into online teaching has been the exchanges on various social media forums of teachers generously sharing their tips, ideas, and experiences. A frequent recommendationI have seen mentioned for getting organized and teaching online during COVID-19 has been the web-based studio management ...
Our New World Our current pandemic has us all teaching in new ways. I have long thought of online learning as an opportunity, a way to indulge in creativity. It represents, however, a significant challenge when it becomes forced upon us in times of global strife. We are all accustomed to conventional in-person weekly studio teaching. In-p...
In this unprecedented time of uncertainty around COVID-19, class piano instructors are faced with the daunting task of moving instruction online. This task is made even more difficult with students in locations without access to a piano or keyboard. It is important to organize yourself and your students in order to create an online e...
The advent of COVID-19 has forced teachers to move group piano instruction online. While the online medium is not ideal to teach performance skills, there is a silver lining. Online learning does present many benefits; chief among them is the great degree of flexibility it gives students and teachers. Students can watch and read instructional ...
Group classes are a vital form of interaction in the time of COVID-19.Now more than ever before, students cherish opportunities to see familiar faces, interact with peers, and make music with others. Online group classes can operate in much the same fashion as in-person classes with careful planning and creativity. A detailed lesson plan is importa...
My recent lessons with elementary and intermediate students have been filled with music making and sweet moments of personal connection. I enjoyed a student's smile with a first lost tooth, another's excitement in showing off her scales with both hands, and exclamations of "I love this piece!" and "That's Treble G!" While these experience...
During a recent tour at the Bell Homestead in my home- town of Brantford, Ontario, Canada, I came across an interesting fact. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell set up a demonstration of his new invention, the telephone. He arranged for friends to play a melodeon and sing over a telephone line in order to show that sound could be transmitted ...
All of us have spent the last several weeks adapting to the reality of a world where the COVID-19 pandemic has acutely changed nearly every part of our lives. For many piano teachers, it has been a time of sink-or-swim adaptation. Our teaching spaces...