What Makes the Best Piano Lessons

April 26, 2021 Leslie Young

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As an educator, a piano teacher searches for the good, better, and best ways to give piano lessons to the student. Notice the good to better to best wording? That’s because this is usually a process of discovery. Educational theories on teaching approaches are just that – theories – before an engaged and resourceful piano teacher puts the theory into the action of the best piano lessons.

A Teacher’s Journey to the Best Piano Lessons

A teacher just beginning a career in providing piano lessons probably starts off using whatever method book was used for his/her own first lessons. After a while, flaws in the method will begin to show with some students. Some will understand very well using that approach, some won’t, and some are at the in-between level. What to do? Why did this approach not work for every student equally well? Then the search for a different method book leads the teacher to investigations and comparisons. However, here’s the issue: All the standard method books are structured in the same way and do not give the best opportunity for all students to succeed, especially the struggling ones.

What in the world am I talking about, you probably are wondering. I don’t blame you – I have been there myself. Over 40 years of teaching private and class piano lessons, I have sampled (I believe) all the standard method books. With the exception of copying what the teacher plays (which is not note-reading), these standard works have songs written in specific hand positions (five keys to play using just five fingers). They SHOW several keys and the fingers to be used to play them. The student learns “this is the 1 finger key, the 2 finger key” etc.

So WHERE is the note-reading? There is none. A bit later the student is shown the staff and a short line note that is NOT on the staff and is expected to learn that this is Middle C which is the “1 finger note.” Additional keys and notes are shown, but there is no note-reading thinking process – it’s just SHOWN and ASSUMED that the student has learned the association of staff space or line and key. The songs are written to “hand positions” and finger numbering – not note-reading.

I really simplified this, but it IS the standard way of teaching beginner piano. It’s the way I myself was taught. It happened to “stick” with me, but I’ve certainly seen many students who did not learn with this method, and certainly did not learn to note-read. How enviable it is to see someone play a piece of music never seen before – just sit down and play it, like the skill of picking up a book and just start reading it. The best piano lessons give students this skill.

So what are the best piano lessons? In my opinion, the lesson must be based on an overarching plan. The plan is to teach the association between a particular piano key and its particular representation on paper (the line or space of the staff). This is very similar to teaching reading words by the phonetic approach (learning the sound each letter makes), rather than teaching whole words – which is really just memorizing what a word looks like. The phonetic approach enables someone to read ANY book. This approach in the best piano lessons allows someone to, over some time, PLAY ANY written piano music.

A Thinking Approach to the Best Piano Lessons

This approach I call a “cognitive thinking” approach – like thinking through the sounds made by letters and combining them into syllables and then words. In The Revolutionary Piano Method, this thinking process has the student using the space letters and their keys to identify and locate the line letters and their keys. The very first lesson has the student saying the letter name of a treble space while playing its key on the piano.

The student sees the staff, reads the circled space (shaped like a whole note), and plays its key while SAYING the letter name. This procedure pushes all this information into long-term memory very quickly. Skipping over the saying of the letter names will not produce the desired results – which will be apparent when playing more notes of the staff. Take a look at a first lesson in this very short video.

Instructional Design Creates the Best Piano Lessons

This process has a name: Instructional Design. It’s the process of learning any skill or knowledge based on a sequential process. A learner must acquire underlying skills or information, called prerequisites, before advancing to more difficult levels. A baby rolls around before crawling; he crawls before walking. If an individual starts the learning process without the necessary prerequisites, the expected learning, usually done through memorization, will not be sustained. Short-cuts, like using finger numbers to play certain keys, will not produce true note-reading ability – because the step of identifying the letter name of the space or line has been removed. There’s no thinking-process at work.

The process of Instructional Design is to identify the end result and working backward, first identifying the prerequisites or underlying skills and information essential to acquiring the end product. Once these prerequisites are identified, the instructor can decide on the best teaching strategy to enable the student to acquire the desired level of proficiency.

Before a person can learn complicated knowledge or intricate skills, all of the prerequisite information and foundation skills must be in place for the learning to be most effective. In fact, once each subsequent skill or knowledge is mastered, the subsequent level is guaranteed. – Dr. Jon I. Young, PhD

As an educator, a piano teacher can find the successfully proven way to give piano lessons in the books of The Revolutionary Piano Method. There are five levels for the very young student aged four and five. There are five levels for six-year-olds through adults. Each student goes at his/her individual pace. When not skipping over procedural steps, the educational theory of this instructionally-designed method allows the teacher to put into action the best piano lessons for individual students.

Additional information on Instructional Design:

https://www.shiftelearning.com/blog/top-instructional-design-models-explained

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructional_design

https://online.purdue.edu/blog/education/what-is-instructional-design

What Would the First Lesson for a Young Student Look Like?

What Would the First Lesson for a 6 to Teen Look Like (video)?