What Does Teaching the Piano Look like?

Abstract

Teaching beginner piano students is an endeavor that builds implicitly and explicitly on teachers’ beliefs, musical ideals, and personal values. This chapter begins by exploring how many twenty-first century teaching resources and practices have their origins in the piano’s history, influential educational movements, as well as scientific and industrial developments of the 1800s. As alternatives to this pedagogic history, teachers may incorporate principles of democracy and parenting as models for instruction—two approaches that highlight how teaching is concerned with the relationships between teachers and students. Democratic music teachers draw from the ideals of freedom, equality, and dignity to solicit their students’ thoughts and opinions. Democratic teaching emphasizes how the teacher’s role has inherently moral and ethical undertones. The parenting model highlights how teachers begin by leading because students may not know the way, they hand over the musical tools students need for successful mastery, and they expand students’ ongoing mastery of musicianship.