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Giana N. Foster, California

At our studio we have a class of two sisters and both parents participating as coaches. Because the coaches are so actively engaged in learning and playing (good problem to have), I’m starting to feel that I’m actually responsible for not two but four students…making sure they each know the patterns and shapes, are able to play it on the piano, keeping up with their playlists, etc.

Is this how it’s supposed to be? Basically all coaches get a 2-for-1 deal on piano lessons?

Is there such thing as the coach being too involved to the point where they also want to be treated as students?

Seems like there’s a fine line that I don’t know how to balance yet. Just trying to figure out time management and lesson planning.

Jeremy

Personally, I consciously try to make sure around 10-20% of the lesson is aimed primarily at the coaches, depending mainly on how patient kids are with me talking with parents. I used to be a statistician, so I measure everything. My best estimation is that active coaching represents somewhere between 50-70% of children’s success and I am leaning more towards the 70% all the time. I taught a lot of the same
techniques before SM and the active time I spend with coaches has been the major transformation using SM.

With very young students, I have actually gone so far with coaching that it becomes a counseling session for the coach more than a piano lesson (I work with a lot of young kids (3-5) that get privates). One mom said this time not only completely changed practice time, but also completely transformed her relationship with her son. I know this is more energy than most people want to give, but I just wanted to point out how important the coaches are. If you value them, they will value the lessons, and the kids will see the coaches value the lessons and want to please the coaches by practicing. It is an almost magical formula.

Robin Keehn, Washington

We encourage parents/coaches to learn along with their student.  In fact, we tell people in the FIS that they can consider this a “two-for-one” if they like.  I don’t want them to dominate the lesson but I’ve never had that problem.   In my experience, a coach who really wants to learn will eventually do one of two things:  stop trying at some point because they aren’t able to devote the time, or enroll in lessons themselves.

Can coaches be too involved?  I don’t think that they can as long as everyone is clear on the expectations.  I will tell coaches that I am not going to routinely call on them to play the piano.  I will periodically but I am not going to hear their playlist, for instance.

One thing that comes to mind is coaches who want to control the lessons or instruct their child.  I am going to nip that in the bud if it even looks like it is happening!  They are there to provide support, both in class and at home. They are not there to teach their child–that is what my job is and what the videos are for at home.

Julia B., California

On the one hand, I would love to have parents involved to this degree, and on the other, I know what you mean in terms of class time.  I have always encouraged parents to participate, and I openly tell them they can get 2 lessons for the price of one if they learn alongside their child.  In class, however, I don’t treat them as one of my students.  My focus remains on the child.  For me, it is rare that a parent keeps up with their child at home, although they will sometimes learn a piece here or there, or try to keep their level 1 songs alive.

I’ve had two parents seriously try to learn the pieces, however, I quickly discovered that I just did not have the class time to listen them play, or teach them specifically.  They also did not want the class time focusing on them rather than their child, so it never became an issue.   Basically I just encourage them, ask them if they learned a particular piece, but rarely have them play in class unless we are doing a review game.

Here are some things I do to encourage parent participation.  I’ve learned most of this from training and other teachers, so thank you to everyone!  For the most part I feel like these things help our classes to have a healthy balance of parent participation but not parent domination:

1. The usual stuff:

• Parents sit beside their child, No cell phone use unless it’s an emergency,
• Parents stand around the piano behind the students during round robins or instruction time,  (these keeps younger children from returning to parents rather than observing each other)

2. Keypad time:

• Parents learn on keypads along with child
• After mapping a pattern or sentence on the fingers, I have the student put it on their parent’s fingers, then the parent must put it on theirs.
• If I feel the students need more time on the keypad before going to the piano, I have them teach their parent this passage on the keypads (including verbalizing strategies), and then watch and make sure the parent plays it correctly.  If the parent already knows it, I just tell them to pretend they don’t.

3.  Discussions:

• I encourage parents to participate verbally with certain kinds of questions, particularly discussions about “how” to play a piece i.e. what is the mood of the piece, what did you imagine as you listened, what did you notice about how Jane played this piece.. etc

4. Accomp:

• Singing during accompaniment time.
• Helping a child who plays an accompaniment song too fast:   parent role plays being a “star”  who really sets their own pace with a song.  Nightstorm 1 is great for that — exaggerate adding pauses, speeding up the tempo etc….

5.  Comic relief –

• If parents are getting sluggish about participating, I love to say to the kids “You know, you guys have been doing all the work here, and it seems like your parents are just sitting back, taking it easy…  don’t you think they should have to do something too?”   Kids are very enthusiastic encouragers and love putting their parents in the hot seat.
• Then we do something really silly, like  have the kids play Head and Shoulders or the Grand Old Duke of York from Songs for Children while parents sing along and do the actions.  Kids (even the older ones!) love to see how fast they can make their parents go!
• Someone suggested having the parents and kids sing a familiar song like Dreams substituting animal sounds for the regular lyrics – this is hilarious (and gives parents ideas to try at home to keep things fun).
• Sometimes I pull out funny hats and make everyone dance to an upbeat piece like Family Tree while kids take turn playing.

6.  Reading Rhythm and Reading Notes —

• everyone always claps and verbalizes the rhythm.  Parents can take a turn clapping a rhythm that others repeat and write, find intervals on laps etc.

7.   Recently, when a group of students were not effectively processing the chords from the middle section of Ballade, I had them come up with their own way to process the chords, draw a diagram to represent that and then teach it to the parent at home.  The parents then played it in class.  The process of having to teach it to someone else really helped the students find meaningful ways of remembering that chord sequence in the LH.

8. I regularly talk about their role and validate how important they are to the process (3 legged stool discussion).

• Identify things they do as “life coaches” and give honor where honor is due (I have the child turn to their parent and say “Thanks for being an awesome life coach for me!)
• Parents are always brought in on playlist issue discussions and anything else that falls into the “life coach” domain.

13.  Timed review game:

• My students love that game where you set the timer for 20 seconds, call anyone up to the piano and have them play any piece for 20 seconds, then the student that played calls someone else up and resets the timer.
• Kids delight in calling on their parents.   If they don’t know a  piece, they just improv on black notes for 20 seconds.

14.  Use of videos at home.

• I am trying to be more intentional about assigning parents the role of training their child to use the videos effectively at home.  I thought this would be obvious to parents, but many let kids watch the videos independently too early, and I’ve discovered many kids watch it like a TV show rather than use it as a learning tool.

Joanne D., Australia

Hi Giana, I started a private lesson last term which was a bit like what you described. The mother seemed to want to be able to play the songs too during the lesson. It happened over a couple of weeks then settled down. I love that she is involved in the lesson, but it is her son’s lesson.  I would suggest that you don’t invite the coaches to the piano but give them a keypad to play on while the students only try on piano. You could ask the students as part of their assignment for the week to go home and show the
parents how to play the songs and see if they can play them too on the piano at home.

Good luck – not such a bad problem to have! 🙂

Laurie Richards, Nebraska

Here are some things I like to do to involve coaches in the lesson time:

• Coach shows me a new pattern on the student’s hand, then switch
• Ask the kids “who thinks mom & dad should try this on the piano?” – they always seem to get excited about this, and I tell the kids “she may need your help, so I want you right here”.  Then they are processing it from a different perspective.  I only do this if I know the parents can be successful at it.
• They are always up at the piano with the kids
• Occasionally it’s fun to play Simply Music Pictionary, kids vs coaches.  Start drawing a diagram from the reference book and see who recognizes the song first.  Then they have to explain the diagram.
• For accompaniment-style arrangements, have the coach improvise on 5 white notes while the student plays the arr.
• This just occurred to me – I haven’t done it yet, but using Robin’s thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs anywhere between idea for students to indicate where they’re at with piano:  How about doing that with coaches?  “Where are you at with your relationship as piano coach?”  Might open up some great dialogue about why it’s worth it to invest in that relationship.
• For students in the Reading Rhythm program, I always have coaches participate with MORs so they can help the student at home.  I sometimes invite them to do transcribing exercises with us, but I don’t require it from them.  When students are processing MORs on the piano, I like to have student/coach do it at the same time.
• Same with Reading Notes.

Keep the ideas coming!

Kevin M., California

One thing I’d like to add to this which will also help with the Teaching Level 4 conversation is this. When a student comes back to class  they can’t play their song from last week and I ask what happened? Commonly the student will swear they watched the video then either forgot it, or didn’t understand, we’ve all heard this before right? I use this opportunity to have the child come up to the piano with their coach and show me how they watched the video together.

Even though it seems a bit time consuming and  like I am singling out this student, this is really for the benefit of the whole class. You will be surprised at what you see here. The most common mistakes are:

• they didn’t watch it the day of the lesson
• the coach is just watching the child not manning the remote themselves
• the coach is telling the child what to do instead of asking them to repeat what Neil’s instructions were
• the child tries to play while the video is going instead of waiting for the coach to pause, then have the child demonstrate what they just saw pressing rewind and reviewing if need be
• the child is not saying the instruction aloud
• the child is being bratty and not cooperating like they do in class (time for the no arguing with parents about music, request verses requirement conversation).

We could go on forever here; the point is once they are coached in class and everyone gets to review the correct way to use the videos. The next week I find that everyone has had a better experience with watching the videos and you get the opportunity to ask what they learned, what are they doing different now? It’s a great tool to have especially in later levels when we really need to slow things down and focus on fragmenting