Four piano teachers share their experiences from a one-of-a-kind retreat focused on organizing the often-overlooked digital side of teaching. Hear how personalized coaching, tech tips, and shared stories helped them gain clarity, confidence, and control over their digital workflows—while enjoying community, great food, and a refreshing change of pace.
Items Mentioned and Other Related Content
Digital Organization Coaching Online
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Transcript
Amy: Welcome to The Piano Pantry Podcast – a place where we “talk shop” for living the life of a studio music teacher. I’m Amy Chaplin. In this space, you’ll get loads of easily-actionable tips on managing your studio while balancing life and home.
While not a star-struck type of person, if I had to compare what we do here to famous people, consider me a cross between Ina Garten, Marie Condo, The Lazy Genius, and your favorite piano teacher.
Today you’ll hear a conversation I had with four teachers who, just last week, attended the 2025 Digital Organization Retreat at my home in Northeast Indiana. This special event is the only one of its kind where teachers like you come to get personal help and focused time tending to an area of their daily work life that is often easily ignored – their digital workspace. In today’s chat, you’ll hear about their teaching life and the work they’ve been doing on their digital life.
Jenny: Hi, I am Jenny Fisher. I’m from Milan, Michigan, which is west of Detroit, near Ann Arbor. I teach mostly piano classes at Eastern Michigan University for music majors and minors who play other instruments or sing. And EMU also has a small community music academy with an early childhood music program and two of us teaching piano.
Dee: My name’s Dee Fisher. I’m born and raised in Ohio, and currently I have a studio of about 30 private students, both piano and voice.
Debbie: My name is Debbie Woodkey. I’m from Dune Acres, Indiana, and currently I’m not teaching at the moment. I’m just a newly person here from in California. But I did have a strong 15 years of piano teaching before I moved here.
Jennifer: My name is Jennifer Kurtz and I’m from New Concord, Ohio, which is about an hour east of Columbus, and I currently have a small studio in my home of about 30 piano students.
Amy: So I’d like to ask all of you guys, if you have any kind of just a general routine that you follow on your teaching days that you can share with us.
Jenny: The only routine I can think of is that I. Have a plan ready so I can hit the ground running when it’s time to teach. After those classes and lessons, I might be very tired, but I almost always plan for the next time around before I head home for the day because it’s way too much work to get myself back into that head space, even if I just. Stop for dinner.
Amy: That’s great advice.
Dee: I understand that perfectly. I have a couple of part-time jobs that I also do. So some of my mornings are taking, taken away from me, but my afternoons are, when I teach, I have to take a good oh, hour and a half to two hours to get myself really prepared. I try to have everything ready to go as far as what I’m doing for the day, but then I have to get in, as you’ve mentioned, Jennifer, get into the space of what I’m doing. And that usually means lunch is at my desk.
Amy: Yeah, I’m sure we can all relate to that times.
Debbie: When I was teaching, I I was teaching edu in a school sys system, regular education. And so then my lessons would all be in the afternoon. And then when I basically retired from teaching at the elementary school, then I would have my adults come in the morning and any homeschooled students came in the morning and then my afternoons were available for those students who were attending public school.
Jennifer: I don’t have a regular routine, like some of them have said every day is. It’s different, but I have three children and so my days always start with getting them ready and out the door. And then I, sometimes I start first thing with some homeschool students that come during the day. Most of my students are right when school is letting out.
So I try to have a lot of crockpot meals ready for my kids when they get home. ’cause I’m not really able to feed them. But every day is different.
Amy: So Dee,, you’ve been a piano and voice teacher. What are some of the differences you’ve experienced in teaching voice versus piano?
Dee: There’s a lot of difference differences between teaching piano and voice.
Piano you’re dealing with teaching from the very beginning you’re teaching keys. Leading up to notation, rhythm. You’re looking at paper an awful lot for the music. Okay. Voice students, not necessarily. Some of ’em come to me and are able to read music. They’re in band or they’ve taken piano lessons or sometimes take piano lessons from me also, but a lot of times they don’t have that.
So I have to sneak those kind of things in. I have a whole, shuffle of papers full of theory, teaching for voice students, how I get them to read music, because I do like them to learn how to read music. And probably the biggest difference between the two is, and this is changing a lot through the years too, but the biggest difference is I have to have accompaniment.
Tracks for the vocalists to take home, because whether they play an instrument or not, they can’t play and sing at the same time. So I have to have that ready or find it on my favorite app, YouTube, and and with pianists you don’t have that quite as much.
Amy: So Debbie, you spent the majority of your career as an elementary special education teacher. Did you find ways to incorporate music into your work as an elementary teacher?
Debbie: I absolutely did, especially when I was teaching primary grades, because so much of what we did, I could turn into rhythms. So if we were learning multiplication tables or if we were learning certain things, I. I could really incorporate the rhythm or a song that they know with new lyrics for them to sing as we went around what we did during the day.
And I had some wonderful principles who really encouraged me and the students to learn, we were both real theater buffs, so I would teach them something from one of the musicals. So when everybody came in to sit down for program that was being done, or any assembly that I would be playing the piano of the song.
So when every, all the students came in, they were all singing. There was never any shoving or pushing or talking because everybody was involved in music. So I was really fortunate to be able to use that. Wonderfully well, when I was teaching school, and then conversely when I stopped teaching and just had piano students, the background of being an elementary educator in special ed gave me insight to my students in how they were working.
If they were having trouble sitting at the piano, if they needed to hear a different way of doing something, if they needed to speak a rhythm before they could do it, maybe they had to walk around the piano backwards first so that they could get some wiggles out. There was just a lot of things in special ed that you can.
Really adapt and use in a music studio. So I was very lucky.
Amy: We’re all inside chuckling about the walking around the piano studio backwards. Awesome.
So Jenny, you live the life as both a university teacher and studio teacher. What do you enjoy the most about that combination and then on the flip side, what makes it difficult?
Jenny: Yeah, there’s both. For sure as the sole breadwinner in our home for several years now. The university teaching has supplied the bulk of our income and that system is nice because I don’t have to recruit the students. I do love the opportunity to impact the lives of future music educators and music therapists and, future parents of young.
Students who are gonna take piano lessons and I’m hopefully impacting them with a love for piano. A level of comfort with that. It’s like an all important. Non-primary instrument for these music majors and MI minors. And I hope I’m also giving them some experiences with music learning theory and a respect for natural learning processes.
So that’s all really exciting to me about the university te part of my teaching. EMU Community Music Academy gives me the opportunity to work with students at the beginning of their music learning journeys, and that’s extremely important to me. To have that opportunity still is extremely important to me.
Ever since I discovered the research of Dr. Edwin e Gordon, which led to the development of music learning theory and the term audiation. So I’m glad I can be on that end of the spectrum at do a little bit. It’s not. I don’t know if I really call it true studio teaching, but one of the challenges with the academy is it’s been without a director for something like a decade.
Oh my goodness. I don’t even know exactly how long it’s been. So that’s definitely an added challenge because in the university setting, these students are forever rolling in and out as every new semester opens and closes. So that adds up to a lot of organizing and coordinating and administrating that falls to the individual teachers. And that’s not the part I enjoy. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I’d love to do it once and let it last for a while, but yeah, it doesn’t. Yeah.
Amy: Dee, you’ve been a studio teacher for 42 years. In what ways has technology most altered what you do for the better? And is there anything you miss about the studio teacher life without technology?
Dee: There, there are yeses on both sides. Technology has done a lot. I mentioned earlier that I use a lot of audio tracks for especially the voice students, but I also use ’em for the piano students. It’s so much easier now to take out your phone or go over to your computer and pull up quickly a recording of, first thing that popped in my head for Elise, my Beethoven, several different renditions of it. And you can listen to it that way. They can listen to it, you can send it to them, to their home, whether they have email or their parents. Do you send it to them or on the, on a phone. It’s a great thing. It’s a wonderful thing.
It’s so much easier than what it used to be, which was to go to a library and try to find, to see if they had it. And most of the time they didn’t. So it was really difficult to do. I also like the fact looking on the business side of teaching, it’s so much easier to schedule people now. So much easier, especially if you use an online scheduling calendar.
So much easier than finding out what all of their conflicts were for a particular area of time. Is so much easier now they can actually go on there. They don’t have to call me. They can actually just go on there and do what they need to do, and I find out through my email, which is very nice.
There are some things I do miss. I miss not having to tell students to turn their phones off. I miss tell, telling them to put them away, they’ll forget and all of a sudden it’ll take off ringing. I did. It’s not a great thing. It’s not a great thing at all. But I would say that’s a small thing for the progress that we’ve made.
Oh, for sure.
Amy: Yeah. And that’s a good one though. I hadn’t thought about that, but yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah.
Jenny, what did your digital work life look like prior to this? This is a loaded question. Did you have any moments that made you think. There may be a better way. And what kind of made you decide that now was the time to finally do something about it?
Jenny: Amy, you asked before the digital organization retreat for a little background, and so I had to think about it a little and my organizational skills are a mixture. There are some times I’m really on top of things. But much more often, I’m just rushing around and I do not follow through on upkeep of my in inbox or my desktop.
And I’m also a little bit technology averse. I’ve never been an early adopter jumping on the bandwagon to like, get the latest gadget, join the newest thing. Sometimes I just don’t know what I should do in terms of updates or whatever. So sometimes my digital life was a little bit nightmarish.
And I’m not the kind of person who says, oh, I’m gonna just Google it. I’ve just never been that person. I especially in an area like this, I really. Wanted somebody to hold my hand, like just walk me through.
Amy: So I Googled stuff for you.
Jenny: You totally did. She totally did. We would get stuck on something and she’d go to her laptop and she would look it up and she’d have an answer quickly.
And I’m like, I can do that, but I just don’t look, I’m just not wired that way or something. Anyway for me the, this was just a perfect opportunity. And I found out that. Maybe Amy wasn’t gonna do it again in the month of May, and I was like, oh, this is actually the perfect time for me, the perfect time of the year for me to fit this in.
So with a little finagling I made it work and I’m really glad ’cause it seemed like it would all be manageable. Chunks of time to focus on one area and then do a little work and make some progress and gain a little confidence. And so that’s, that has definitely come out and be able to ask the same questions over and over.
And I’m saying that because sometimes you have to hear things multiple times before it, remember them. Yes. And that’s okay. That’s what part of the process is like, how did we do that again? Oh yeah. Okay. I learned how to do the two finger tap right on your Mac and then it gave me different options that the one finger or other options you to give me.
What, there was one memory that came to me a few hours ago actually. About, it was about seven years ago. There was a colleague from another campus who happened to see my inbox and happened to see the number of emails that were in my inbox, and she was very gracious about it, but it was obvious that it was distressing to her.
And she never said how many were in her inbox or how many should be in my inbox. But she gave you a look. It was, yeah. I had an awareness that. Oh, that must be a problem. And it’s, I won’t tell you how many were in it or still are in it.
Amy: It’s okay. We’ll keep your secret. Yeah. We’ll just say that You won the email contest astronaut, right? Yes. And you made Debbie feel really good.
Jenny: You did? Oh, I was so pleased. Yeah. Oh my God. But as a, not a big social media follower I definitely won the contest when it came to. Least amount of social media follows least and also apps on my phone.
Amy: Yes, there is. She was already well on her way on those. Yeah.
Jenny: Because you know when, like areas of where your life are getting out of control, but sometimes you don’t know how to rebalance. And so that’s it. That’s, I rebalance Amy is helping rebalance. Yes, I gained some control.
There are things I have control about that I didn’t know how to get the control back. So That’s great. Thank you.
Amy: Jennifer, this is the second time you’ve attended the retreat. What made you decide to attend again and how did it feel different this time?
Jennifer: I think I said the last time I was here, what made me attend the first time was the words piano and retreat in the same sentence.
I thought that sounded wonderful. Two things I needed. And honestly, that is a lot of the reason why I attended a second time. ’cause that’s what it was. It was a retreat with other folks who love piano and do it for a living. But I. I also knew that there was some things that I maybe hadn’t implemented from the first time through, and that maybe there was some more that I could do, like file organization.
I really resisted the email cleanup the first time around. Still resisting it the second time around, but I’m making small progress there. But a lot of it felt the same too. It’s the same small environment and amazing food. She is a wonderful cook and so amen. Definitely don’t leave hungry.
So yeah, definitely a little bit the same and a little bit different.
Amy: I think what we said too is that like the first time around you had things that were more pressing to you.
Jennifer: Yes.
Amy: And then like you said, you, there was other things that you learned and you were like, oh, that was cool. But it’s it just wasn’t the time for you for those things.
So what you did the first time opened up the door for more later on, basically. Yes.
Debbie, what would you say overall has been the most beneficial for you?
Debbie: The fact that there are so many things that you’ve explained. That I thought I knew, but I discovered I really didn’t in, in all the different aspects of things, especially my phone.
I, I use my phone a lot. I really enjoy an iPhone. I know we also had Androids here, so it’s nice that we have a mix of different, equipment and that you can help all of us. But I never even thought about what was most important to be on my. For opening screen. Everybody else might think that’s just a normal, oh, of course.
Not for me.
Amy: Everybody’s shaking their heads. No, they didn’t either. No, you weren’t the only one.
Debbie: And to go back and really realize, okay, if I’m not using these apps, why am I keeping them? And to know that if I decided to put them back on my, a lot of my information will still be there. So that was a real big thing.
And then even during, when we were working on something, these little things would pop up in the corner of my. Screens, and you’d said do you like to have those pop up? And I go, and not at all. So now I learned how to get rid of some of those things, which, affect me on my computer, on my iPad, on my phone.
It’s just amazing. A huge thing about file folders of renaming them so that you really know the importance and how to find them and how to label them so that. You go from the big part down to the small part and that’s where you look and you can find things or cleaning up. My is it the documents?
Oh yeah, the documents. The very first column of the documents. I probably win on the number of the length of time length of my first column there. You win in the emails, but that’s a good one. So yeah, you, one of the documents, what she’s describing is like when you go into your documents folder like that first level of files that you have, that first level of folders. She had like pages and pages of files in that very first Right level before she ever went into any folders. Exactly. Yeah. And just realizing like what is comfortable, like what would be a good amount to actually have and really how to think in terms of, okay, so how are these similar and how can I group them?
So I only have one folder, instead of 15. That all kind of matched, but they’re much better off in one home. So those things were just, so I know that I’ll go back over so many of the things that you’ve said in the wonderful handouts that we’ve received, and really try and fine tune some of these things, maybe not all of them but it’s just been invaluable, the aha moments.
Amy: The things that Jack my jaws, but the things that we’re all dying for her to say her awesome phrase, Jack. My jaws so cute. Awesome.
So final question, Jennifer. What advice would you give to someone who’s thinking about attending the retreat?
Jennifer: I would say definitely come and it doesn’t matter what your reason is, if you’ve come once before, it’s definitely worth it to come again. You’ll be surprised how many new things you pick up that maybe you heard the last time or maybe you didn’t hear the last time either way. And if you’ve never come, whether you think you’re good at technology or not, you’ll be surprised at how much you thought you knew that you don’t know.
And technology is changing so quickly. Even just two years ago when I was here and some of the things that have changed, amy really stays on top of that, and so that was really helpful to see some of that too.
Debbie: Can I chime in on that too?
Amy: Of course,
Debbie: because I was a little hesitant at first because right now I don’t have a studio of students and I thought would I just really be out of place?
And, but my background, I’ve, had a studio for many years and everybody here is so gracious and. So we all love music and we might be upstairs working and someone’s playing the piano down here and but the organizational skills just is the umbrella for so much in whether we’re teachers of school or music or voice or choirs or
Amy: you really don’t have to be a piano teacher to come. No. Honestly, because the content it covers, it’s about like many professions.
Debbie: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s great. Yeah. That’s great.
Amy: Thank you so much everybody for being here. This has been really fun. I appreciate you taking time to share with other teachers your experience. It’s just always fun to just hear about the lives of other teachers too and where we all come from. So thank you for being here.
Jenny: Thank you.
Dee: Thank you.
Amy: If, like Dee, Jenny, Debbie, and Jennifer, you would like to take part in some personal digital coaching, be sure and join the waitlist at pianopantry.com/digitalwait The summer online session has already kicked off but you can be sure there will be more opportunities in the coming year.
Patreon If you enjoyed this episode and would like to be part of my crew of teachers who get access to regular advice and tips from me, a few special sessions every year, and more, visit pianopantry.com/patreon to join.
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