038 – Janna Williamson: Ingredients for Effective Intermediate Teaching

Guest Host

Pianist Janna Williamson runs an independent studio in the suburbs of Chicago where she teaches pre-college students of all levels. She is a Content Creator for TopMusicPro and coaches teachers through her online consultation service and YouTube channel. Janna holds bachelors and masters degrees in piano performance and is an MTNA Nationally Certified Teacher of Music.

Items Mentioned

Episode #15 – Teacher Talk with Janna, Joy, and Christina

Happy Birthday By Ear

Christmas By Ear

Episode Resources

Transcript

Amy: Welcome to episode number 38 of the Piano Pantry podcast. If all goes as planned, I, your normal host, Amy Chaplin, spent the past weekend with my husband in Cologne, Germany, with some friends we knew when we lived in Australia. The date this episode lands, we’re likely spending time now in Amsterdam and surrounding areas of the Netherlands.

Later in the week, we should be heading to London to watch a friend from Indiana run the London Marathon. Due to being gone for this amazing trip, I’ve invited some special teacher friends to host their own episode of this podcast. Today, you get to spend some time with intermediate teaching guru Janna Williamson.

Pianist Janna Williamson runs an independent studio in the suburbs of Chicago, where she teaches pre college students of all levels. She is a content creator for Top Music Pro and coaches teachers through her online consultation service and YouTube channel. Janna holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano performance and is an MTNA nationally certified teacher of music.

You first met Janna here on the podcast in episode number 15, when I had a teacher talk with her and two other friends, Joy Morin and Christina Whitlock. We had a great time recording, and at this moment, that episode is actually the highest-ranked episode on this podcast thus far. So definitely check it out.

Welcome to the Piano Pantry Podcast, where together we live life as independent music teachers. I’m your host, Amy Chaplin. 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 Janna.

Janna: Hello everyone. I’d like to say thank you to Amy for inviting me to do a guest episode on her podcast. Of course, when she asked me if I’d be willing to do that, I thought, yeah, why not? What topic should I discuss that fits my own areas of passion, but also fits the piano pantry branding? If you’ve checked out my YouTube channel or heard me speak elsewhere, you already know that I’m passionate about intermediate piano teaching.

Unfortunately, it seems like it’s an area of piano pedagogy that can get overlooked, either because our study time is spent on beginner methods. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a worthy subject, or we focus on advanced level teaching. I’m on a mission to remind everyone that our intermediate students deserve thoughtful, sequenced, quality teaching just as much as our beginners and our advanced students do.

And I’m here to offer support to teachers hoping to improve their intermediate teaching game. In doing this, I often talk about a balanced diet of an intermediate piano student curriculum. But this is the Piano Pantry Podcast, so let’s take it a step further and use the analogy of a really good cookie recipe to talk about teaching our intermediate students.

Many teachers who have the goal of their intermediate students reaching advanced levels tend to focus solely on repertoire and technique at the intermediate level. Certainly, these two components should be the core of piano lessons, as being physically able to play pieces at the piano is what most students want to gain from their lessons.

Repertoire and technique are, shall we say, our butter and sugar. Unfortunately, as delicious as they are, butter and sugar alone cannot create a cookie. Neither can repertoire and technique alone form a functional musician. For cookies, we need many more ingredients, in various quantities according to our specific recipe, to form something that takes shape and is delicious.

Likewise, based on the natural inclinations and needs of a specific student, we will choose the quantities of various activities and lesson components other than repertoire and technique to form and grow a musician who can function in various contexts and continues to make music for a lifetime. What are some of these other ingredients in a well-rounded intermediate curriculum?

I’m going to list what I cover in my studio. I am not including written theory work in this list because theory and analysis, or musical understanding, if you will, should be infused in everything that we do. Perhaps that musical understanding is the eggs, or other binding ingredient in our recipe, that which holds all of the rest of it together.

Alright, back to my list. I am not saying that my students and I do all of these things every week. I am also not saying that I should prioritize each and every one of them, nor am I even particularly good at teaching every one of these skills. You, similarly, might have elements that you’re naturally inclined to teach frequently or other elements that you find terrifying, but for better or for worse, here are several ingredients that we can and should include in our teaching.

Sight reading or sight playing, whatever your preferred term is, improvising, transposing, playing a melody or chord progression by ear, harmonizing a melody by ear, playing from lead sheets and chord charts, arranging a folk melody or holiday tune into a solo piano arrangement, composing, playing an ensemble such as piano duets, accompanying a singer or instrumentalist, and for those who are churchgoers and desire this, hymn playing.

My personal favorite element on the list that I just rattled off is arranging. And if I’m honest, my favorite part of any cookie is the chocolate. So we’ll just say that arranging is the chocolate chips in my recipe. Arranging in my studio usually begins with learning and harmonizing a tune off of a lead sheet, although sometimes we start with learning the melody by ear, particularly for pop songs.

This system works for folk tunes, holiday music, and, as I already mentioned, popular music. Whatever the melody is, the basic process is generally the same. Number one, learn to play the melody with your right hand. Number two, learn to play the chords as written with your left hand, or if you’re playing them by ear, figuring them out with your left hand by ear.

Number three, experiment with what inversions you’d like to use for your chords, what placement, where you want your left hand to be for that harmony. Number four, experiment with various chord accompaniment patterns such as broken chords, waltz bass, alberti bass, etc. And then number five, finish off the arrangement by adding a special introduction or ending or just making some final touches to it.

Now, there are actually many more things that you can do with an arrangement, such as changing the mode from major to minor or vice versa, reharmonizing it with more interesting chords, putting the melody into the opposite hand, changing the meter, playing in the style of a famous composer, doing a mashup with another song, and much more.

This is the reason that I personally love arranging over composing and improvising. There is a clear, concrete starting point. But once that starting point has been used, the creative options are endless. I’ve had students do all kinds of fun things that put a big smile on their faces as well as mine.

Arranging is also a much quicker way for students to be able to play something recognizable than if they had learned a written-out arrangement at their current repertoire level. Another reason I love arranging is that it’s so easy to connect this activity to the student’s current repertoire. If a student is learning her first Chopin waltz, then doing a waltz-based accompaniment is an obvious connection.

If a student is learning a piece with large arpeggiated chords in the left hand, then transferring that accompaniment style over to his arrangement of the given tune will solidify the technique that’s required, as well as his understanding of those open-position chords. I’m guessing that Amy also has a special love for arranging since she has two resources on how to do that with your students: Happy Birthday by Ear and Christmas by Ear.

I’ll let her tell you more about them. If we go back to my list, I’m wondering what your favorite ingredients are of these lesson activities. Do you have additional activities that you do that I didn’t list here? Which activities do you tend to prioritize, either because you find them to be most important or most enjoyable?

Let me read through my list again so you can ponder those questions. The activities I mentioned are sight reading, improvising, transposing, playing a melody or a chord progression by ear, harmonizing a melody by ear, playing from lead sheets and chord charts, arranging, composing, playing an ensemble, accompanying, and hymn playing for those who are churchgoers.

Of course! Sometimes, when we think about long lists of tasks like this, we get overwhelmed with thinking about everything that we should be doing in a lesson, and juggling several elements can quickly make a teacher feel disorganized. Since this is the Piano Pantry Podcast, the last thing I want to do is leave you feeling disorganized.

To that end, I want to recommend a few resources that can help you learn how to teach these skills Sequentially, as well as consider how to organize your intermediate students curriculum first. If you want to teach your students basic arranging skills, in addition to Amy’s resources, I highly recommend the books written by Forrest Kinney.

In particular, his Puzzle Play series is excellent and comes in several graded levels. He also published several books to help teach improvisation. In regards to repertoire, the easiest way to stay organized and ensure your student plays pieces in a progressive order is to use a quality intermediate historical repertoire series.

By repertoire series, I’m talking about leveled books such as Jane McGraw’s Masterwork Classics, the Celebration series from the Royal Conservatory of Music, Helen Marley’s Succeeding with the Masters series, or Keith Snell’s Piano Repertoire series. Some of these have corresponding theory books if you want to go that far in coordinating curriculum.

And I do have a resource on how to evaluate and choose a series that will work best for you and your students, and I will ask Amy to link that in the show notes. Another resource that I use every day that I teach is my Illinois Achievement in Music or AIM syllabus. Many states in the U. S. have their own theory and repertoire exam system, much like the RCM or exam boards outside of the U.S., I happen to be quite partial to our system, as I have learned so much about how to teach in an organized, progressive manner by using it. Our syllabus, unlike some, does have a harmonization component, where students harmonize melodies off of lead sheets. Anyone in the world can purchase the Illinois Syllabus. I think it’s priced at $25, and I’ll ask Amy to link that as well in case you do not already have a syllabus that you consult for both functional skills and repertoire grading.

Of course, the Illinois Syllabus is not the only one available, and many listeners are likely already familiar with one exam system or another, such as RCM. Some of you might also think exams are terrible and not worthy to even talk about. Let me just say this. Even if you never plan to enter students in a piano exam of any kind, the work that the exam boards have done is very helpful, if for no other reason than having a large list of repertoire arranged into levels.

Regardless of the number placed on a particular level, you can easily see by consulting a syllabus that Clementi’s Sanatina, Opus 36, No. 1 is nowhere near Debussy’s Clair de Lune. Okay, that’s a particularly obvious example, but you get my drift. These syllabi can also help tie repertoire to other areas of study in a leveled approach.

For instance, on the RCM or Illinois AIM syllabus, I can look up various pieces of repertoire and then see what the scale and arpeggio speed requirements are at the same level. If my student is playing that particular Clementi Sonatina, then according to the RCM syllabus, my student should be able to play his D major, F major, and B flat major scales in eighth notes at quarter note equals 80.

Sight playing is another example of a skill that most exams include so you can easily check what level of sight playing examples fit what level of repertoire. I hope this has given you some inspiration for your intermediate teaching as well as some ways to think about and plan an organized intermediate curriculum.

Thanks again to Amy for inviting me to share my thoughts as well as my soapboxes with you all.

Amy: Thank you so much to Janna for taking the time to be with us today. If you’d like to find Janna online, you can find her at JannaWilliamson.com or on her YouTube channel at Janna Williamson, both of which I have linked for you in the show notes. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please consider taking a moment to jump over to Apple Podcast and rate and review the show.

Visit piano pantry.com/podcast for more details. Stay tuned next week for our final guest host, episode number 39, which will be brought to you by Kate Boyd, professor of piano at Butler University and creator of the amazing new YouTube channel, the piano prof.