This portfolio aims to show my experiences and provide a reflection of my time as a piano tutor, with a focus on teaching young adults with an existing musical foundation and wanting to apply their knowledge to the piano. Working with learners with prior experience listening and learning music, albeit with the piano, allows for a more collaborative and student led approach to their learning, where each lesson considers their holistic theoretical knowledge and can then zone in on the technicalities of playing the piano and the physical aspect of the instrument.
My approach to teaching is most effective when student centred, especially considering each musical learner’s unique background and prior musical history with other instruments. This combined with an understanding of the students’ goals and objectives means they may respond differently to the same rigid lesson structure and not achieve their desired outcome or level of progress. In contrast to the pre-determined structured lessons that I grew up with, I aim to create a flexible and modern learning environment where students are given the opportunity to take an active role in their musical learning. This can provide challenges as the tutor, particularly managing the flow of lessons alongside the student and guiding them to the exercises that enhance the skills they are wanting to work on, adapting lesson plans in real time in order to accommodate the students’ needs. This approach has the overall aim of creating a sense of ownership of your learning, making practice feel easier and inspiring a student to seek out their own opportunities for musical growth.
An important factor in regard to my teaching approach is my education is jazz piano playing as an extension of the classical training I had at a young age. This has given me a greater focus on creativity, aural awareness, and improvisation which are excellent tools for interactive and enjoyable learning.Due to classical music tending to rely on written music and understanding scores, moving beyond that form of restriction helps experiment with harmony and stylistic approaches. Moving away from score reading helps develop an ability to learn by ear, helping understand the music they play on a deeper level.
As part of this portfolio, I will present evidence from my lessons, include reflections on my teaching practice, and examples of how I could improve and develop my teaching practices to a higher level of effectiveness. It aims to demonstrate how a student-centred approach can provide meaningful piano learning, in the jazz style, for young adult students.
This portfolio is a result of my lessons with young adult piano students, between 18-22 who are studying at university level. These students already possess a foundational understanding of musical concepts such as notation, harmony, and rhythm as part of their studies of other musical instruments.Despite this, their experience of playing the piano is limited, although not completely absent due to the prevalence of pianos around the university and how much it is seen as an important skill for a fully integrated professional musician. The musical backgrounds of the students vary among pop and classical pathways, which helps inform the delivery of my teaching. This context was established during part of my first lesson with them shown in the first audio recording, asking about their experience playing piano in an informal introduction, ensuring they are comfortable and confident in my understanding of their skills, allowing our goals to be easier understood between both myself and the students.
The development of a technical understanding and familiarity with playing the piano is a primary goal of these lessons, enabling them to engage with their own learning and practice of the piano to their own applied needs. As a teacher in the jazz medium, I aim to focus on teaching an understanding of chord symbols, self-accompaniment and how to interpret lead sheets using an understanding of theory and their creative interpretation. This framework can develop and enhance their skills in songwriting and arranging, providing a different outlook in how they use their musical skills, in contrast to notation-based learning found heavily in classical music. I am fortunate to have access to a very good quality acoustic piano for these lessons. This helps me as the teacher hear their feel of the piano and can help me support their development of tone production and dynamics, which are important stylistic elements especially in jazz piano performance.
I had a range of teaching resources available to me during these lessons, and I used them sparingly to avoid an over-reliance on notated music. I introduced the students to lead sheets and unfamiliar forms of jazz notation, in order to help them understand the limitations of the written music and where there is room for creativity, improvisation, and individual expression through musical decision-making. Despite my range of resources, I do not follow a formal exam board, as it allows a greater level of communication of concepts between teacher and student. I can shape each lesson to cater for the students’ goals and not the exam board’s criteria for an exam or qualification.
A key challenge of teaching students of the mentioned demographic is students are constantly balancing their work with the existing demands of their university study and can result in limited practice time. This creates a focus on what happens in the lesson and creating quick and efficient exercises that can be applied whenever the student gets a short amount of free time at the piano to develop on the ideas in the lesson, focusing on practicing ‘little and often’ rather than expecting students to commit hours at a time to the contents of the lessons during their outside commitments.
Due to the nature of my students’ background, my approach is focused on developing their practical musicianship by introducing them to piano technique, integrating it with their harmonic understanding to enable their creative application. I aim to demonstrate how the connection between these skills directly supports their musical development as a whole. The next sections delve into my main areas of focus and examples of these areas being developed during the lessons.
Piano technique is an important aspect of learning piano in all styles, and with a large breadth of exercises available, I had to be conscious of the merits of each exercise and what skills they develop, as well as avenues for further learning and integration into performance, which is the main objective. Given the students’ experience playing the piano, finger independence and co-ordination are a key part in giving the students confidence and allowing the areas of knowledge they are more comfortable with, such as theoretical knowledge and listening skills to be fully utilised.
An effective introduction to working on piano technique is an entry into learning scales, a familiar concept that transcends all instruments, brought to the piano to develop finger co-ordination. By beginning the exercise with the first five degrees of the scale, I start with a simple focus of hand position, posture, and control without overwhelming the students with the concept of turning the hand to progress further up the scale until fully comfortable. To further their control and understanding of their weight on the keys I encourage the students to alter their emphasis on alternate beats of the first five degrees, outlining the shape of the triad whilst giving them more practice co-ordinating the hands whilst also now considering the dynamic of what they play. Further development allows the student to experiment with different rhythms and alter the phrasing of the five-finger pattern. Introducing these forms of variation is helpful for building a basis of experimenting and ‘twisting’ exercises to extend their value to the learner and can then easily be applied to other exercises and patterns to develop finger independence and dynamic and rhythmic control.
From that introduction, the concept of turning becomes a more natural development of piano technique, as I show them the C major scale. Due to the step up in difficulty, by beginning with hands isolated, it removes some difficulty and allows the student to focus on the new piece of technique before integrating both hands once they are ready. The video clips provide examples of building the exercise and creating a clear line of progression, increasing in difficulty as the lesson progresses. A key method used to support the students is demonstration, using my ability to show the students how the exercises look and sound in order to give them a clear understanding of the task.
A particular focal point of my lessons is to help the students understand how harmony is visualised on the piano, particularly in a jazz context. This includes the basic introduction of the triad through previous piano technique exercises and introducing the concept of inversions. Due to the students’previous experience with harmony in other instrumental forms, it was important to use this knowledge to translate it into piano learning. Using terminology which the students understand such as triad and inversions help connect the previous learning to their piano knowledge, with the exercises showing what these terms mean and look like when played upon the piano. This takes advantage of the physical and visual nature of the piano, having a bird’s eye view of the key bed comparable to the layout of many DAW’s and Midi Layouts.
Harmonic knowledge is shown to be developed through the recognition of patterns in musical phrases, introducing familiar progressions such as 2-5-1’s and turnarounds which are commonplace in jazz repertoire. This helps reduce the misconception that jazz is difficult to learn due to its unrestrictedforms and spontaneous nature. Teaching an effective application of simple harmonic concepts such as triads and use of inversion aims to simplify complicated jazz vocabulary into a concept which is widely used in music as a whole. Instructing the students to practice inversions develops their own harmonic awareness, such as understanding the quality of certain voicings in different registers and introduces the creative skill of voice-leading into their learning. The expansion of learning is built from its simplest form upwards, similarly and in consistency with my excersises concerning pianistic techniques. Beginning with a focus on bass notes helps the students internalise the horizontal progression of the music, then introducing the addition of chord tones into a jazz progression. This is incidental, with jazz focusing on time and flow rather than specific texture and voicing as this can vary much more widely with stylistic intent in comparison. My intention is to build confidence through repetition and familiarity as opposed to encouraging the break away from time and performance feel to think, although sometimes unavoidable as stopping to think is a common response to an unfamiliar passage or a difficult musical choice.
An introduction to jazz repertoire provides the framework necessary to develop the technical and harmonic skills that I aim, as the tutor, to develop in the students. The primary example used during my lessons was a jazz standard I learned in my beginnings as a jazz pianist named ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street.’ I chose this standard not only because of my passion for it, and my aim to exude that passion onto the students, but also because it contains valueble and accessible harmonic and melodic structures and material.
By using lead sheets, the students are introduced to the form of notation most commonly used in jazz, becoming applicable to further learning. Lead sheets differ from traditional scores and present themselves as a guide to the performer, encouraging personalisation and unique interpretation of melody, voicing, rhythm, and expression. I emphasise in my teaching of voicings that repetition allows for exploration and experimentation, which is valuable learning led by the student. This engages critical thinking skills, helps students identify challenges in the melody and accompaniment, which in turn allows the learner to discuss and work with me as a teacher to find their best way of performing the piece to their advantage. This reinforces the idea that there is no single correct way to play in jazz and to interpret a lead sheet.
In order to support the students understanding of the musical score, particularly when unfamiliar during the first lesson, my use of vocalisation skills to indicate the melody when accompanied by the student aim to facilitate the internalisation of the melody when the student plays the chords and create a stronger connection between the two, with the purpose of hearing both together and making the combination of these two parts feel more natural.
Audio Recordings of Lesson Experiences
Introduction to the Students
An explanation of the importance of control and evenness
Instruction of hand positioning and hand posture
Using emphasis and dynamics to form finger independence
Changing the rhythm for further variation
An introduction to scales
Using both hands to create an evenness in learning with both hands
Explaining how both hands co-ordinate when playing scales
A reflection on learning scales and how to practice them
An introduction to ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’
Encouraging the student to lead and interpret the music in their own way
An introduction to Chord playing and reading through lead sheet chords
The use of inversions to create voice leading
How to practice inversions
How to practice chord playing and seek out new songs and lead sheets
This section reflects upon the experiences encountered during my teaching, evaluating how effectively, my teaching approaches were implemented during my teaching. This reflects on their development of piano technique, piano harmonic understanding, and their musical independence. While the overall outcome of the lessons were productive, and can note the progress made by the students over the course of the lessons, there are some moments where clearer explanations and further development of my teaching material would have been beneficial, whether contained in my lesson plans or acted upon spontaneously.
One of the successful areas of my teaching approach was the progress in control over the piano by using variations on technical exercises. The students were able to implement the suggested variations in rhythm and dynamics easier than I expected, showing an understanding of the isolation of these musical aspects. On reflection, this could show evidence of their experience playing other instruments become easily transferred onto the piano.
In contrast, teaching the students the C major scale revealed some weaknesses in my original explanation. It became apparent in a later lesson that one student had struggled piecing together both hands of the C major scale and navigating the turns in the hands aligning at different scale degrees. A reflection of the previous lesson would suggest that my explanation was brief and rushed for time, keen to get the students to play without first understanding the objective. I should’ve evaluated the task of co-ordinating the scale with both hands to be a greater challenge and allowed for more time to explain the task. In response, upon hearing the students concerns understanding the turns in the scale I adapted my lesson plan to spend more time clearing up the confusion regarding the turns, effectively demonstrating and highlighting the key things to look out for when playing scales in any key. By breaking the scale down to focus on the challenging part, the task became simpler in its comprehension and supported the student in overcoming what was a mental block as opposed to a poor technique.
The work I did with the students based on repertoire and lead sheet reading showed the students’ strengths as well as areas for improvement. The students showed a strong ability to understand melodies and read through the form, particularly the initiative to read while preparing themselves for the upcoming phrases, which is a fundamental of piano sight-reading. This engaged their problem-solving skills, only asking questions when struggling with a specific part. This aligned well with my student-led approach and encouraged independence and active decision making during the lessons.
An area of teaching the repertoire that I found more challenging was chordal playing and the introduction to playing chords in a palatable way for the student. When originally limited to playing bass notes through the chord chart and then moving to root position chords, the student expressed a level of discomfort with the sound being created, citing the jumping around of bass notes and lack of horizontal momentum to be displeasing. While this provided a useful way of introducing the concepts of inversions and voice leading, it also may have been that my initial limitations could have been too restrictive.
Adapting to this, I introduced inversions as a practical solution to a clearly experienced problem, rather than as an abstract concept. This shift proved effective, as students were more motivated to explore alternative voicings when they could directly hear the improvement in sound and fluidity. Encouraging them to compare different options and reflect on their preferences further supported their engagement and reinforced the idea of personal musical choice.
One of the methods for my teaching proved particularly effective in serval exercises. My use of demonstration and vocalisation helped form a strong understanding of the task within the students, allowing them to not only hear the exercise as I intended but to also show hand positions and visualise the task as a benefit of the easily visualised nature of the piano. This alongside lightly singing and indicating the melody while the student plays the chords is beneficial for the student to consider the overall shape and character of the music, as well as creating a more expressive approach to their playing as part of a duet performance.
Overall, my reflection is highlighting the importance of effective pacing, clarity, and responsiveness in my lessons. My student led approach required me to create a more detailed framework and required more preparation in order to facilitate the many pathways a lesson could go through. Despite this, my approach effectively encouraged independent learning and creativity for jazz music. I aim to refine my ability to explain and present tasks and exercises to my students, showing them the purpose of these exercises better and to continue to use their feedback as a basis for furthering their learning.
