Why the “Design Your Piano Path” course?

When I began teaching, I dove in head-first – within a couple of months, I had around 40 students! 

Though I enjoyed teaching in those early days, it was also pretty stressful. I had no idea what I was doing. Yes, I shadowed my piano teacher to learn the ropes, but I didn’t have a sense of direction with teaching. My students would show up week to week, and we’d work on some pieces and enjoy each other’s company, but there was no aim. No sense of how long it takes to learn a book or advance a level, no sense of the long-range.

My students did okay. They kept coming back – largely, I think, because we bonded and developed a relationship with each other – and they showed progress. But there were nagging thoughts that wouldn’t leave me alone – am I doing this right? Are they on the right path? Will they be able to hit a grade 8 or 9 level in high school? Am I genuinely, truly helping them on their piano journey?

RCM Curriculum

I kept teaching and started to get really involved in the RCM curriculum. I would encourage my students to take exams, and I began exploring Classical music in more depth (my piano path was largely pop-based as a kid). I started to get a sense of how music schools (RCM, ABRSM) structured their curriculums, and so I began working with it more.

Our lessons started to have more purpose and structure, which eased some of my anxiety. These kid’s parents were entrusting the musical education of their children to me, after all. I wanted – needed – to do my absolute best for them.

But other problems started cropping up. My students groaned their way through music theory, and don’t even get me started on history. We spent most of our lessons playing through pieces, and so the many other elements of a music education – sight reading, ear training, listening to music, theory and history – got totally neglected. Or worse – shoved to the side, kept as a totally separate thing from regular piano lessons. 

 I love history and music theory. I wanted my students to be enthusiastic about them too! I wanted their piano education to be more about playing notes from a page. I wanted it to be about the music.

Designing My Own Curriculum

So I started designing my own curriculum, making a plan for each standard year of piano lessons. The kinds of things we’d learn at a grade 1 level, grade 2 level and so on. 

In this curriculum, I’d make note of concepts I’d like to teach, and find pieces of music that demonstrated those concepts. As an example – if I wanted to teach cadences, I’d teach grade 1 students Mozart’s Minuet in F major since it has many types of cadences. That way, they could learn the music but also get a theory lesson embedded within it. We’d also learn a little about Mozart, so they’d get some history, too.

This started working well. Instead of things like history, theory and composition being totally separate from piano lessons and their music, it was all connected. I felt their education was becoming more balanced and rich.

I kept refining this approach over the years. As my YouTube channel started to grow, I began receiving frequent emails (at least weekly!) from an enthusiastic adult student who didn’t have a sense of what they should be learning. Was there a course I could recommend? A path that they could travel?

Helping Others Find Their Piano Path

I’d always recommend method books, followed by going through the grade levels, but this wasn’t very useful advice. It told them the “what”, without telling them the “why”. It didn’t give them an understanding of where they were at in their journey, or where they were going. 

Inspired by these frequent emails, I began turning the curriculum I developed, as well as the best of my insight as a teacher for 10+ years, into a structured course. Before releasing the course, though, I wanted to share this content via private lessons to see how it landed with adult students in the real world. 

I wanted to give adult piano learners the ability to take charge of their own journey. I wanted to share everything important to learn at each level of piano, key books and collections, planning/structuring suggestions, and much more. I wanted to finally, satisfyingly, be able to answer my most frequent email question – “I’m stuck and I don’t know what to learn.”