Guest Host
Natalie Weber, NCTM, has operated a piano studio in Kansas since 1998. She teaches all ages in private and group lessons and runs the popular MusicMattersBlog.com, which is devoted to inspiring creativity in music education. When she’s not teaching, Natalie loves spending time with her family, including her first granddaughter!
Items Mentioned
Episode #12: Share Your Stuff, I’ll Go First
Episode Notes
Natalie’s 7 Teaching Inspirations
Invest your whole heart in teaching
Inspire students to do their best
Cultivate personal relationships with students
Promote camaraderie among students
Challenge students with difficult assignments
Try out-of-the-box ideas
Love your students for who they are
Transcript
Amy: Guess what, teacher friends, my husband, Drew, and I are getting ready to embark on a four-week trip to Europe in celebration of our 20th anniversary; rather than killing myself pre-recording four episodes ahead of time, I thought it would be fun to invite special guest hosts to share on whatever topic was near and dear to their heart.
I can’t tell you how excited I am, not only for our big trip, of course, but also for you. I just thought this was such a fun idea. Not only is it helping me, but I love changing things up. And this series of four guest hosts was the perfect little shakeup. Today’s guest is quite a pioneering woman, as she was one of the first piano teachers to start a piano teaching blog more than 15 years ago.
If you’re interested in hearing a fun little timeline of piano teaching websites, jump back and listen in on episode 12, Share Your Stuff, I’ll Go First. Natalie Weber has operated a piano studio in Kansas since 1998. She teaches all ages in private and group lessons and runs the popular MusicMatters.com blog, which is devoted to inspiring creativity in music education. When she’s not teaching, Natalie loves spending time with her family, including her first granddaughter.
Welcome to the Piano Pantry Podcast, where together we live life as independent music teachers. In this space, we talk about all things teacher life-related, from organizing our studios to getting dinner on the table and all that comes between. You’ll get loads of easily actionable tips on organizing and managing your studio while balancing life and home.
Welcome, Natalie!
Natalie: Thank you so much, Amy. I really am excited to be here with you and with all of the listeners of the Piano Pantry podcast today. As I’ve been thinking about this start to a new school year, one of the things that is on my mind is the idea of inspiration. I have a plaque on a cabinet in my bedroom about inspiration.
It’s an Inspire plaque and it’s It says that inspire is a verb that has two definitions. One is to encourage somebody to greater effort, enthusiasm, or creativity. Number two is to awaken a particular feeling in somebody. And at the bottom it says that it comes from the Latin word inspirare. Which means to breathe.
So it’s really the idea of one life, one person, one whole being breathing on and inspiring, sharing that, and impacting another person. When I think about that, I can’t help but be reminded of a person in my life who breathed, if you will, who inspired me. Anytime somebody asks the question, can you name a favorite teacher from your childhood?
This person stands out at the forefront of my mind. It is a lady who was my third-grade teacher. Her name is Becky Carney, and even now, to this day, over 30 years later, I have never forgotten her. I went to a small Christian school for three years of my life before my parents started homeschooling me, and she was my third-grade teacher.
A huge influence in my life, really in my journey as a teacher, at least at that point, if not before, was when my dream became to be a teacher someday, and her life, her teaching, and her inspiration have hugely impacted it. the way that I’ve established my piano studio and the kind of teacher that I’ve become.
So I wanted to share seven specific ways or seven specific teaching inspirations in my life from her. First of all, she was a woman who invested her whole heart in teaching. Her whole countenance, her room, everything about her just oozed with an obvious love for teaching. And you could tell that she put a lot of time into making it memorable for all of us impressionable and eager third graders.
And as I think about it I just see that it’s not just what she did, but it’s who she was as a person, that it really embodied her teaching and the way that, that she interacted with us. And so That’s been an inspiration to me in my own teaching, just to treat every lesson, every student with importance.
And for myself, as a teacher, to realize that more often than not, it’s not just what I say or what I do in a lesson, but who I am as a person that’s going to most impact my students. So I want to devote myself to learning and growing, to becoming the best person, the best teacher that I can be for each of my students.
I think it was Francis Clark that famously said that the method, in essence, something along the lines of the method, is the teacher. That it doesn’t really matter what method you use because as the teacher it’s going to be the overflow of what you know and who you are that is how you teach each of your students.
So that’s something I’ve taken to heart a lot and just tried to acquire as much knowledge and expertise and understanding as I can. to become an excellent teacher and to know how to address the specific challenges and needs of each student. One specific way that has been really fun over the years is with students, especially if I have a struggling student, a lot of times I’ll assign them what I call the any song assignment.
And I write it in their assignment book that way; I’ll say any song, and it just frees them up that week to do anything they want – go find something on YouTube that they want to learn or pick something up by ear or improvise something or compose something or a new piece of sheet music, whatever it is.
It just frees them up to do that. So that’s been a really fun way to try something new and invest in my students and find out what makes them tick. Secondly, my teacher, Becky Carney, inspired us to do our best. And one of the ways that she did that was through the use of incentives. And I specifically remember having this bonus bucks system where we could earn bucks throughout the day and then we could use those.
I think it was 25. to gain ourselves different privileges, and so anybody who’s familiar with my blog, Music Matters blog, and some of the materials I have on there will recognize that influence on me in the practice incentive themes that I use in my studio. Something I’ve been doing for over 20 years now and was just an epiphany one day when I realized I could infuse that idea of an incentive program in my studio and use it to generate enthusiasm and to help inspire and motivate my students to do their best and to work hard at whatever they were learning.
And that has been a huge benefit across the whole studio, partly in that it gives me a framework that helps structure and guide my teaching for the year. And then it’s also a really imaginative way that students can work toward goals and measure their progress and see how they’re doing throughout the course of the year.
Huge inspiration to me in that respect. Thirdly, she is someone who cultivated personal relationships with us as students. Even as little third graders, I can remember going with her. My family spent time at her house and got to meet her husband, and I just saw that she was. She’s investing her life in us and welcoming us in to be a part of her life.
And so that’s encouraged me to be involved in my student’s lives, whether they’re in some kind of a musical or have a sport that they’re involved, a sport that they’re involved in. I just have enjoyed getting to see my students in other contexts outside the studio and build those relationships with them.
One of the things that I’ve often heard in the business world is the advice, don’t mix your personal and your professional life, especially if you’re a small business owner. And that is advice that I have chosen to completely ignore and instead to develop personal relationships with my students and their families and get to know them on a personal level.
And it’s been extremely rewarding to do that. The fourth thing I think of with my teacher, Becky Carney, is the way that she promoted camaraderie among the classmates. And even as I think about some of the history that was developed between us years later, long after we’d all gone separate ways and were at different schools, different seasons of life, we had a, what we called our third-grade reunion, which now that I think about is crazy that we would have a third-grade reunion, but we did, we all got together and caught up and it was her and all of us students.
And so that just speaks volumes to her ability to create a culture of camaraderie and support for one another. So that’s something I’ve tried to be really intentional about in my studio as well by having a monthly group class that all students are invited to in addition to their lesson that week. And we do a variety of games or activities or ensemble playing, all kinds of projects, just anything that is going to help them learn to work together, to support each other, and to build that camaraderie.
The fifth thing that I think about is that Mrs. Carney challenged us with difficult assignments. I distinctly remember getting these sheets of paper that had entire chapters from the Bible that we were supposed to memorize and recite in class. And that’s a far cry from a single line or verse here or there.
And yet so many of us. And so that’s been an example to me as well, not to undersell my students in terms of what they can achieve and accomplish, no matter how much they might struggle or what age they might be or how old they might be when they’re starting lessons or transferring in as a student. Just to really push them in a gentle and supportive way to achieve excellence and to do things that might be beyond what they thought they were capable of.
So that has been simple things like a note stars challenge that I’ve done with my students where they have groupings of flashcards where they have to identify and play notes from the staff on the piano and really, Challenging them to reach certain proficiency with that and not giving up on them even when they struggle and it’s hard for them, and it’s been incredible to see them persevere and succeed at that and then the confidence that has built-in them and how that has influenced the rest of their learning and what they’ve pursued musically.
Another way we do that every year is by having students memorize music vocabulary. So every week they choose, or I choose for them, a music word, a term, from their dictionary of terms in the back of their assignment book. And they memorize it, and then every week they’re reviewing every previous one, so that by the end of the year, they have dozens of musical terms memorized that they can just whip out and define at the top of their heads.
And that’s another huge confidence builder for every student, no matter how old they are. So just little things like that we’ve tried to incorporate into the structure of the studio that help students pursue excellence and challenge them toward greater progress in their musical skills. Another thing that really stands out to me, this is number six of the ways that my teacher inspired me, is she tried out of the box ideas.
For example, she would let us rearrange our desks, so instead of having just regular rows of desks, we could do all kinds of creative patterns in the classroom. And she, as part of the bonus bucks awards, we could trade desks with her for a day. So we would get to sit at the teacher’s desk and she would sit at our desk.
Or another option was that we could go out to lunch with her and she had a few restaurants we could select from. So just things that were unheard of for a teacher to do with their student or for their student were things that she incorporated into the classroom. So that’s been very inspiring to me as a piano teacher, having grown up within a pretty narrow idea of what it looked like to go to piano lessons or have a recital.
We’ve done all kinds of maybe a little bit more out of the box things as a studio. We’ve done like a patriotic dinner where students were servers for the first part of the evening and came and helped prepare the food and serve the food and then presented a patriotic musical program for the evening with a variety of solos and ensembles.
I’ve done pizza parties and sleepovers with girls at my house. We did for the end of one of our practice incentive themes one year. Students who had reached the highest level got to go on a field trip to a recording studio and learn about the whole process of recording and then record their own pieces.
We’ve gone as a group to a local chamber music at the barn, a place that small chamber ensembles from across the world have come and performed while we sit in the garden and eat our dinner. We’ve even Similar to what my teacher did, we’ve incorporated into one of our practice incentive themes where instead of the regular lesson for the day, I will let the student go with me to a local music store and pick out a piece of sheet music.
So that’s been a fun, pretty similar treat that I’ve implemented that’s been a lot of fun for the students. And then the final and seventh thing that really stands out to me from. My dear third grade teacher is that she loved us. She genuinely cared for each one of the students in the class as different as we all were.
She knew what was going on in our lives, and we just had a sense that she was there for us. And that is something that hit home for me just recently, actually, after my spring recital and backyard cookout this year. I was sitting at the picnic table eating dinner, with one of the families of a couple of girls, a couple high school girls who have been taking lessons from me now for a couple years.
And they came in as transfer students, and we’ve worked really hard over the last two years just to cover some gaps that they had and help them pursue excellence and achieve really, I’ve been amazed at. at the things they’ve achieved in their playing, and as we sat there the mom looked at me and started to thank me and, if I would have thought through what she might thank me for, it would be, oh, the girls love music or that they practice or that they are playing repertoire that she didn’t think they were capable of, any of that, but it really surprised me what came out of her mouth.
She looked at me and she said, thank you for loving my girls. And so that really hit home for me that so many of the parents of our students, yes, they want them to take piano lessons. They want them to do well, to learn, to play the piano well, to love music. But they really also value someone who will come alongside their children and love them.
And as piano teachers, we have a unique opportunity to be a part of students lives, often for many years, and to walk alongside them through a lot of different seasons of their lives. And I think in retrospect, as I reflect on that conversation, I realize it’s probably one of the greatest compliments we could get as a teacher is for a parent to say, thank you for loving my children.
So those are seven things that are just inspirations. that have been on my mind and have really guided me in my journey as a teacher, and I hope that they will encourage and inspire each of you in your journeys as piano and music teachers as well.
Amy: Thank you so much to Natalie for taking the time to be with us today. If you’d like to follow Natalie online, you can find her at musicmattersblog.com. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please consider taking a moment to jump over to Apple Podcasts to leave a rating and review. Visit pianopantry.com/podcast for more details.
Stay tuned next week for episode number 37, which will be brought to you by Sara Campbell over at Savvy Music Studio. Have a great week.
