Piano Teacher Institute Update

Since last week’s announcement, I have been spending every spare moment of my time writing the course material to be able to offer a six-week course this summer.  It is challenging work, but I’m having a blast.  I’m happy to announce that the Week 1 coursework is complete and Week 2 is nearly complete.

As I’ve been writing, I have also been revising the schedule of topics somewhat.  It is bound to change again as I continue writing, but here is how it currently looks:

1. Business Sense — business structures, bookkeeping, taxes, marketing, and more.
2. On Teaching and Learning — teaching objectives, learning styles, and developmental stages.
3. Developing Music Literacy in Students — music literacy, music education philosophies, a history and overview of current piano methods.
4. Piano Technique for Beginners — developing posture, hand shape, fingering, pedaling, and more.
5. Finding and Choosing Repertoire — leveling, publishers, anthologies, editions and more.
6. Lesson/Curriculum Planning — leading the lesson, making assignment sheets, effective practicing, and planning long-term for students.

I have received a lot of interest and feedback (thanks so much!), and the email list is still growing.  Allow me to answer a couple of questions that I have received:

> > > Why is registration limited to 10 people?  

As much as possible, I want this course to feel like an in-person group class — except better.  I know that I could certainly utilize a webinar format for the course, which would allow me to reach many more people at once.  However, I’m not interested in big.  I want to keep things small.  I want to be able to get-to-know each person who takes the course and work closely with them as they make their way through the material.  I want to be able to give detailed feedback on the assignments/projects and be able to have great small-group discussions.  Visit the institute.joymorin.com to learn more about the class format.

So, the first offering of this course will be open to the first 10 teachers who register.  I definitely plan to offer the course again in the Fall, and I will definitely re-evaluate at that time to decide whether 10 is still a good number.  (Registration will open sometime in May.  The cost has not yet been set.)

> > > Would you consider offering separate, per-topic courses?  

I am writing the course in such a way that the six weekly topics are co-dependent and flow into each other.  I do not plan to break-up these six topics, although that certainly does not mean that there will not be certain topics in the future that I could potentially offer as a stand-alone course.  We will see how things progress from here!

Thanks for your support, friends, during this new project!  Let me know if you have other questions I can answer.