Episode Summary
Podcasters unite! In today’s teacher talk, Amy has a chat with Ashley Danyew, a piano teacher from Rochester, NY. Ashley is the producer of the podcast “Field Notes on Teaching & Learning” and founder and editor of Musician & Co, a website for self-employed musicians and entrepreneurs.
Guest
Ashley Danyew, Ph.D., is a musician, educator, and entrepreneur. She is the Founder and Editor of Musician & Co., a website for self-employed musicians and entrepreneurs; writes a blog and teaches online courses for church musicians and music educators; hosts the podcast, Field Notes on Music Teaching & Learning; and maintains a private piano studio in Rochester, NY.
Items Mentioned
Studio Awards Policies and Procedures
Studio Awards Update (Including Some Awesome Trophies!)
Field Notes on Teaching and Learning – Episode 052 What Does Creative Music Teaching Look Like
The Perfect Wrong Note by William Westney
Field Notes on Teaching and Learning – Episode 047 An Inside Look at My Lesson-Planning Process
Find your Kindle Highlights here
Transcript
Hey, teachers! One of my favorite podcasts over the past couple of years has been Field Notes on Music Teaching & Learning. Today, I’m excited to introduce you to the host – Ashley Danyew, a fellow piano teacher from Rochester, New York.
Besides piano teaching, Ashley teaches online courses for church musicians and music educators and is Founder and Editor of Musician & Co., a website for self-employed musicians and entrepreneurs.
While I know you’ll walk away inspired by Ashley’s insight into creative music teaching, I think you’ll really enjoy hearing all the little life details – especially the peek into her daily routine as a content creator and piano teacher. Believe it or not, her daily schedule inspired ME to the point that I am making a few changes to my own routine!
I’m Amy Chaplin, and this is The Piano Pantry Podcast—a show about living life as an independent music teacher.
As we near the end of the school year here in the Northern Hemisphere, I wanted to let you know that there are several posts on the Piano Pantry blog regarding how to handle awards in your piano studio.
You’ll find information on how to organize and track all of your awards, different types of awards you might consider implementing, recommended places to purchase plaques and trophies online, and advice on whether or not you should play “catch up” when starting a new award series.
Find links to all of those in the show notes. And now, my conversation with Ashley.
Thank you so much for being on the podcast today, Ashley. Would you be able to just start by telling the listeners a little bit about your background, like where you’re from, how you got to where you are today, and what your teaching situation looks like currently?
Ashley: First of all, thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be part of your podcast today. I am Ashley Danyew. I live in Rochester, New York, but I’m originally from Georgia. I am a piano teacher, obviously, but I’m also a music educator and online. business owner. And I started out thinking that I would be a professional accompanist and church musician and maybe just teach a little bit on the side.
But then, when I was in grad school at Eastman, I recognized that Teaching was actually something that had always been a common thread through the different kinds of work that I had done and anything that I saw myself doing in the future. So I changed my degree from accompanying to music education and then ended up doing a PhD in that as well so that I could just learn as much as I could about the teaching and learning process.
I knew that I didn’t want to teach in the school system, and I also didn’t want to pursue a higher ed position, so it was unique in that way. However, I wanted to focus on music education at the community level, and that was mostly private studios and church music. So today, I teach piano at a private school in their after-school program.
I have 20 students, ages 1st to 12th grade this year. I also create and share resources and online education for music educators. And self-employed musicians through my blogs and websites.
Amy: Okay, so you have ashleydanyew.com and then you also run musicianandcompany.com. Can you tell the listeners a little bit about what your two different sites offer and, specifically, what Musician Co is about? I know it’s like a blog, a membership site.
Ashley: Ashley Danyew is my home base for all things music teaching and learning. It’s a blog I have a free resource library, online education, I have some sheet music for sale that’s mostly and then I also have my podcast field notes on music, teaching and learning and musician company is a resource for self employed musicians and entrepreneurs.
This site also includes a blog. We have an interview series with music entrepreneurs. We have a free. And a resource library. We have a suite of one-to-one services. A virtual book club. And a few online courses as well. And over there, I write and teach about the business side of being a musician.
So, things like how to market yourself. Web design and branding. Managing your accounting and your data. Taxes for your business, organizing your finances and things like that. The business side of running a private studio, things that all musicians really should know about copyright and licensing, and then some insight into the creative process as well.
So my husband, Stev,e is also a musician. He’s a composer and an entrepreneur. Together, we created our course that goes with this with a musician and company called the music printer model. And that is an audio course kind of podcast style for musicians to learn how to build and sustain diversified portfolio careers.
Amy: Yeah. I have followed your guy’s work for a while, and you do a lot of high-quality stuff. So I just wanted to encourage the listeners to definitely go over and check out what you do and see if there’s anything that you guys do that could help them in their businesses. So, I really love seeing what you guys are doing over there. Thank you for all you’re doing for the music community, not just teachers but musicians as well.
Ashley: Yeah, it’s something that I’m really passionate about, finding ways to support musicians and artists and the unique careers that they are building.
Amy: You mentioned you have a book club, and I was going to ask this towards the end, but since we’re on the topic, I thought maybe you could share a book recommendation with the listeners.
Ashley: I’ll just back up and quickly explain how we structure the book club. We have it structured to be quarterly right now so that the first month of each quarter, I’ll announce a new book. We read things on business, the creative process, entrepreneurship, and being a musician. And I then put together a reading plan with some reflective questions.
I envisioned that you could even take these materials and then form your own small in-person branch of the Musician Company Book Club if you wanted to do it with friends, or you can just be reading along during that month and know that there are. Other people out in the world that are also reading the same book as you. I think we have 80 members now who have signed up for the book club.
Amy: Wow, that’s amazing.
Ashley: Yeah. It’s fun because I was reading some of these books on my own, and I just wanted to create a space where we could share and talk about the things that we’re reading and what we’re learning from them, and so it’s been a fun space to cultivate that community.
Amy: If anything, at least it’s accountability, I think, for teachers. I know when I was in grad school, you were reading so much educational material, and I was reading nothing for fun. And then, a few years later, I was feeling burnt out because I was just partaking in so much because I was so excited to learn. And then I was overwhelmed by too much. So it went in reverse, and then I was, like, not reading anything for a couple of years. So I think it’s just a good way. To be accountable to just keep up I think quarterly is wonderful.
Ashley: I think too; we know that a lot of people are involved in their own book clubs in their own communities and or online. And so we don’t want to be overwhelming. Yeah. Trying to keep up with a book a month or anything like that. So just one a quarter and.
You asked about a top-recommended book. I’m obviously a little biased, but I think the book that we just announced for this second quarter is my favorite for music teachers. That’s my top recommendation for this year. And it’s called The Perfect Wrong Note, Learning to Trust Your Musical Self by pianist and educator William Wesney. It’s about embracing mistakes and recognizing their value. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about how to cultivate that mindset in our students, which I think is really important. And I made, I actually got a physical copy of this one instead of reading on my Kindle, and I made so many stars in the margins as I read. I was up, I read it in It was like four days or something. I just could not put it down.
There were just so many things to take away and process. So many new ideas and concepts that I took right into my studio to test out and practice. And questions to ask my students or just things to study and observe. I started making a list of How my students respond to mistakes in their lessons without my prompting, but just a lot of them will say something out loud and what are those comments, it’s like, oops, or oops. Oh, no, or what is my finger doing? They’ll ask, they’ll like, start talking to their hand, that said, they just have these really interesting kind of reactions and responses, but most of them were not that. Yeah. negative. They were just curious or wondered why that happened. So that’s something I’m still kind of processing in terms of their natural responses to mistakes and how we can cultivate healthy observations around them and just what those things have to teach us.
Amy: I think a lot of times I tell my students when they have reactions, when they make mistakes, I often feel like that it’s a way of Telling the teacher that you realize that you’ve made a mistake. Oh yes, I know that I’ve done that. Sometimes it’s not even conscious, I think, that you say little things like that.
Ashley: Absolutely, yeah. I think my students are the same way. It’s I want you to know that I recognize. Exactly. Wrong note or rhythm here. You don’t have to say anything. I get it. I get it. Yeah.
Amy: Yeah. You mentioned purchasing the book because it was so good instead of just using your Kindle. And I’ve definitely found that. I like reading books that are professional growth-based, habit based, or things like that, that I’m learning from, like personal self-help books, in hard copy form rather than in Kindle form because I find myself wanting to physically write down and highlight. And I feel like it’s easier to go back and look at them.
Whereas I tend to use my Kindle for just my fiction reads. I know that, like on Kindle, you can go back and look at your highlights. There’s an actual link on Amazon or something or wherever it comes from that you can go back and find them. But sometime,s when things are digital, you don’t always go back and look at it again.
Ashley: So that’s interesting because I’m actually a fairly new Kindle reader. In the last couple of years before that, everything was a hard copy. Since I have a Kindle, I find that, first of all, I read more. Second of all, having a businessy book or something where I’m taking a lot of notes is actually easier on the Kindle for me because I can just highlight and then I can export all of my highlighted notes and they, Amazon just sends me a PDF of everything typed up versus having to take.
Amy: That’s true. Yeah. Yeah.
Ashley: I like to type my notes up and have a hard, like a. A digital copy of all my notes from things that I read and I want to go back to because I can search for keywords like if I’m looking for something about rhythm, whatever I read where people have talked about, you know what to do with rhythm. I can just do a keyword search. So absolutely
Amy: true. And I do. The same thing like with quotes, maybe not exporting digitally, but over the years, I’ve kept track of quotes from books and things like that in Evernote so that I can easily go back and search them and find quotes based on certain topics or whatever it may be. You probably use that a lot in your podcast because it is very research-based. You’re always using tons of quotes. Yes. I’m like, this girl is an avid reader.
Ashley: I have a very similar Evernote system.
Amy: Okay. As a fellow content creator, teacher, and entrepreneur, I love hearing about other people’s schedules. Would you be able to give us a little peek into a day in the life of Ashley?
Ashley: I love this question, because I always love getting a glimpse into other people’s schedules too. I’m really nosy. For me, I teach Monday through Friday, three to seven most days, so that means that my mornings are usually free to work on my other projects.
We’ll get up in the morning, we take our dog Rory for a walk around the neighborhood, we come back and have breakfast, and then usually by 9 a. m. We’re both sitting down at our desks, so Steve and I both work from home. He works upstairs and I work downstairs in the sunroom, and so I usually get Rory to come snuggle with me, which is a perk.
So I usually will take care of emails first, and then anything that needs my attention for the day, and then I’ll go into a bigger project. So, something like researching and writing a blog post, creating marketing content, making website updates, or outlining a new course or product.
Something I want to spend like a good couple hours on. Lately, I’ve been working on two presentations for the online NCKP that’s coming in June. And then I’ve also been updating the course curriculum for our music printer model course this year. So, we are getting ready to launch that at the end of the summer and updating a few pages on the Musician company website as well.
So those are my big projects. So we’ll work on that in the morning. We usually stop around noon for lunch. Rory is very regimented on her schedule, so she expects another walk after lunch. So we usually do that. And then around 1 p.m. I’ll sit down with a cup of coffee at last. I try to forgo it in the morning if I can.
Sometimes I’ll have tea. But the afternoon is definitely coffee, and I will spend a little time planning lessons for that day. So this usually takes me between 30 to 45 minutes, depending on the day, how many students I have, which students I have. And then, if I have time, I’ll maybe get to a few more emails or wrap up whatever I was working on in the morning.
And then I exercise. I like to exercise in the afternoon right before I go teach because it gives me this. It’s extra boost of energy, I feel like, going into the afternoon. That’s a great idea. Yeah. I’ve never heard anybody say that. Yeah. Because I don’t want to do it when I come home at 7, 7:30, and we’re eating dinner, and it’s late, and I’m just not a first thing in the morning exercise kind of person. Yeah. 2 o’clock ish, like 1:45, 2 o’clock is a great time for me because that’s usually when you’re hitting that afternoon slump anyway. So I’m less productive in whatever I work on.
So I’ll exercise for half an hour, shower and change, and then go teach. And then I’m usually home by 7. 30. And Steve is often Finishing up cooking at that time, so we’ll eat, clean up the kitchen, and then we’ll watch something together, whatever show we’re working our way through. So right now, we’re watching The Crown on Netflix.
Amy: Oh, good choice.
Ashley: And then we’ll, usually, read a little bit after that. So we’ve been talking about books. I usually alternate between a business book and a novel. I like to just read one thing at a time usually. So, I try to alternate my reading between something nerdy and professional that usually does not help me go to sleep. . And then a novel, which often will help me go to sleep. So right now, I’m in novel land, and I’m reading something by Maeve Binchy. Chestnut, her book, Chestnut Street. Fun.
Amy: Yeah. I’m very inspired by your schedule. Now, so you are, you’re pretty set since you teach at a school that all of your lesson hours, so you don’t have any morning students. So you have really good consistency in your schedule where you teach three to seven. Do you teach until 7 o’clock on Fridays as well?
Ashley: I did a little bit last year, in the fall, and then those students have shifted. Some of them, because of sports schedules and things, move around a little bit. So right now, I’m teaching until 5 on Friday.
Amy: That’s not too bad. Then.
Ashley: Yeah. Yeah. What about you?
Amy: So I’d say my schedule is pretty similar. My husband also works full-time from home. So he’s upstairs, and I’m downstairs. Actually, he’s in what we call the loft, and I’m in the basement. So we have a floor between us.
He likes to say we meet in the cafeteria for lunch. But I’ve always been more of a morning exercise person just because. I don’t know. I think, yeah, because teaching so late in the evenings makes it just difficult by the time we eat and everything. It’s 8, 8:30 and I just never considered like exercising in the middle of the day because I feel like I have to get up and get a shower right away, so that’s interesting.
I’ll have to consider that. But very similar. I do a lot of content planning and podcast recording work for the blog during the morning and early afternoon hours. I then teach usually from three to seven, although on Wednesdays, I have morning students all morning from nine to 11:30, and then on Thursdays, I’m done by five.
A lot of that is just because I’ve had a lot of rehearsals and on Thursday evenings, like church worship team practice, things like that. So, I’ve always tried to keep my Thursday evenings a little bit shorter.
So I’ve really enjoyed your podcast and especially your thoughtful approach to music, education, teaching, and learning. And I love that you especially incorporate a lot of quotes, as I mentioned earlier, and research-based topics. I also have to say I hope this doesn’t come out weird, but I really love just listening to your voice. You have such a wonderful voice for podcasting. I find it almost relaxing. So that’s so you.
Ashley: Thank you.
Amy: I have to hold myself back because I can come across very boisterously in my own voice. So I, I respect people that have a little bit more calm approach. LOL
Oh, anyway, so one of my favorite episodes was one of your most recent ones. And that was episode number 52, called What does creative music teaching look like? And I wanted to make sure I highlighted this particular episode for teachers because it was one where I’m listening and I’m going yes. Oh my gosh. I agree. 100%. Exactly. Could you maybe just recap for us really quickly what the episode is about, and then maybe we’ll chat a little bit about the topic a little bit more?
Ashley: Sure. First of all, thank you for saying that about that episode. I’m glad that it resonated with you because I was actually really nervous to release that one. Huh. Because I thought that my opinions might be a little too strong on the topic and that some people might feel a little offended. Yeah. Which is not my purpose at all in putting it out there.
So basically, in episode 52, I posed a few questions. I asked what creative teaching looks like. What does it mean? Is it something that we bring to our teaching space, or is it something that we co-construct with our students. So, I talked about what creative teaching seems to be today in our studios.
And that’s having a filing drawer of note-naming worksheets and a folder of Google slide activities that we can pull out. A variety of dice board games we have to reinforce every possible new musical skill or concept. And I have used all those things in my studio, and my students really enjoy them.
They love dice games. There’s nothing wrong with them, per se, but I just wondered, at a certain point, what are the educational goals or objectives of some of these games and activities? And are they musical? Which is a really big one for me. I’ve started really evaluating the time that we’re spending in lessons, and how much of it is. It’s really a musical activity.
And do they actually help the student develop their musicianship skills in some tangible way? And so when I took that step back, I realized mostly that they were just fun activities that filled time that didn’t really result in tangible musical development or understanding. Or if they helped a student recognize key signatures, say, or read dotted rhythm patterns or something.There were other ways of getting to that end that didn’t require. So much non-musical time and energy. Does that make sense?
Amy: Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. And I remember, back in, I feel like my early days of teaching, sometimes having moments where I felt like I needed not. I hate to say filler time, but okay, what can I do to, that’s just fun or yes, something that reinforces it.
But then, like you said, sometimes those activities would take a lot of time.
Ashley: A lot of time. Yeah.
Amy: This game takes 10 minutes. Yeah. And what are we really. Utilizing our time well with our students when we have such a short amount,
Ashley: I recognize, with the dice games in particular, how much time we spent rolling the dice, and my students love the little kids, especially just loved rolling the dice. And I was like, what is this really getting us? How much time are we actually spending on that concept that the game is supposed to be reviewing versus the rolling of the dice?
Amy: And I think the hardest place sometimes for that, and I’ve seen in my own teaching, is with the youngest students, with like preschool age kids, where, the traditional piano lesson is hard to do in a way that we’re used to, and they just require a little bit, I don’t know, just a different approach to teaching, and sometimes the teaching and the tools that we use are more experiential and maybe not so much musical, like how can we teach these youngest students and get them engrossed in a musical experience and not necessarily just learning how to recognize a pattern without actually doing anything that’s a musical pattern, and just a visual way or I don’t know,
Ashley: I just kept thinking I was reading Richard Chronister’s piano teacher’s legacy, which is like a textbook for those who haven’t read it; it took me like a year, a solid year, I think, to work my way all the way through it because there’s Again, stars in the margins, so many things to take from that and learn from his teaching approach and his experience. But he talks a little bit about creative teaching in that book and he defines it as any opportunities that we take to make every exercise and every piece and every activity in the lesson a truly musical experience. That is creative teaching.
Amy: Yeah.
Ashley: So how can we, really? It’s not about gamifying everything in the sense that we have to have a board game and. Pieces that we’re moving around or tools that we’re bringing into the lesson, but we can take the materials that are already there and do something with them together.
And I think that has changed my teaching approach in the last couple of years, focusing on that. I did an episode focusing on the music and the musical elements in each lesson. And so this kind of built off of that, focusing on creative ways to make the music come alive. So we spend a lot of time talking about the character of the music or the feeling that’s in the music or look at this musical conversation that’s happening between the hands and this hand is interrupting the other one or this one is silly. This one is serious and just playing with what’s there and the musical material talking about what the composer may have been thinking or even giving – I like to give my students creative permission sometimes to change something that’s on the page.
How would you write the ending differently or what dynamics would you use…I had a 12th grader recently we were pulling a piece from one of the RCM etude books. I was giving him a choice between two that I thought would be a good fit and he just really couldn’t get past the title of one of them. He’s saying I like the music, but I really don’t think that the title matches the music. Yeah. And so I said, what would you like to call it? And he came up with a different name. And so then, I have to try to remember when I put that on his assignment sheet; what piece is that again? It made him part of the creative process in a way, and he took more ownership of the piece and the work that we did, and the work he did to learn it and master the musical skills and concepts within that piece, all by changing the name. And we’re not going to perform it under a different name, but just for learning purposes, it helped him connect with the music in a different way.
Amy: I love that. Part of this is what brought me to actually start learning a little bit about music learning theory back in 2016. And that has completely transformed my teaching, especially again, especially with my youngest students.
Everything that we do in the beginning lessons is about not just doing things one way. It’s about listening about moving. It’s about playing it loud and then playing it soft, playing it separately, and playing it connected. And how do you want to do it differently? How can we mash these two little songs together and being creative with the music and in understanding contrasting musical experiences? And,
Ashley: and I think that’s all that we need sometimes; I think my students think that activities and the exercises from the Rhythm Keeper book are games in the lesson. They get so excited about the Rhythm Keeper part of our lesson time. And they’re really just rhythm exercises on a page. There’s nothing gamified about it, but I think instead of this idea of win or lose games, where again, we’re just, they’re just playing against me, right? Am I gonna let them win, or
Amy: I like having the mindset of just Are you having a musical experience with your students? Is music tied into it in every way that you can?
Ashley: Yeah. And I think finding ways to make the activity a little bit more challenging can help it feel like a game. There’s a little bit of something that they have to do differently or think differently about that helps them set up a little taller and, Oh, I can do this twice as fast, or I can do it twice as slow, or I can do it backwards, or, you do this line and I do that line as a duet, and then we switch parts, and so we find different creative ways to make it new and different.
Amy: Yeah. I’m known as a bit of an organization freak in piano teacher land, so could you share a tool or a productivity hack with our listeners that has been a lifesaver for you in your daily workflow?
Ashley: Yes. I’m not sure that this will be as groundbreaking as some of your ideas have been, but last year I discovered a new app for my iPad, and it’s the Post-it Note app. And this has been so great for writing lesson plans each week. Week, especially if I have several little students on the same day. I read out a little post it note lesson plan for them I think I mentioned this another either Episode 47 or 48.
Amy: Yeah
Ashley: So the Post It Note app means that I can use a different color to post it for each Student, which I don’t have that many different colors of actual Post-its. So it has been pretty fun organizing their lesson plans by color. And then, when I’m planning lessons for the day and creating assignment sheet outlines, I’ll just write out a bulleted lesson plan for each student on their post-it note color.
And then I group them into a board. So when I’m teaching, I actually have a split screen view of their assignment sheet on one half of the screen and then the post-it note. Lesson plan on the other, but because the post-it notes are grouped together in a board, I can just swipe between them from lesson to lesson. So when I have students back to back, I don’t have to remember which post it note is for which student, they’re just right there grouped together, and I’m not using as many post it notes for teaching each week. And then I have an archive of those lesson plan assignments or just outlines, which is helpful.
Amy: I love that because I don’t think I’ve ever heard a teacher share about using the Post it app for lesson planning. So that’s really unique and creative. And we’ll, I’ll find the link to that episode on your podcast for teachers and pop that in the show notes as well.
All right. Ashley, thank you so much for being in the podcast. It’s been really fun chatting with you today, and I’m sure our teachers are going to take a lot away from our conversation.
Ashley: Thank you so much for having me.
Amy: Today’s Tiny Tip continues what Ashley and I discussed in this episode about Kindle Highlights. I want to make sure it’s clear that if you read digital books on a Kindle, there is a place where you can find all of your highlights for all of your books that you’ve read, even if it’s a book you’ve borrowed from the library and that you don’t own.
Having an easy way to go back and look at those highlights is so handy. In case you weren’t aware of this, I’m putting the link in the show notes for you and would recommend Bookmarking the link in your browser bookmark bar. Ashley mentioned she sends them as PDFs into Evernote, which is a great way to have all of your highlights from one book inside of OneNote.
You could also create OneNote for each quote individually by copying and pasting text into the note. Which is what I’ve actually always done. I used to like to do this because I could preview the text of all of the quotes very easily in the note titles. That being said, the more I’ve used these tools, I can see how Ashley’s suggestion is much easier.
The only caveat is that you’ll want to have Evernote personal and not the free version. If you have the free version, you won’t be able to ever search for a quote inside of that PDF. The first paid tier of Evernote, now called Personal, will actually search inside of text, inside of images, docs, and PDFs, so you’ll much more easily be able to search for specific quotes, making it much more useful and easily retrievable in the future.
