Piano Teacher

What you should get before you start piano lessons, and that's just materials, things you can use in a piano lesson, things you can play rhythm games with, percussion instruments, mats and things like this you can do on the floor, either like a keyboard or a staff. I have a million flash cards and other cards that I use, letters, solfege, rhythms, notes on the staff. I use these things all the time. So cards, of course books, tons of books. The more sheet music you have, the more options you have to give to students. Stickers, kids love that. The more things you have to use in your lessons, the better. So a lot of that misconception is that because I know how to play piano, I can teach it. But you're going to be glad to have a piano teacher.

Another thing you should do before you get started teaching piano is consider what method you're going to use. There's tons of methods out there, so if you're not familiar with them, go to a music store, especially one with music books, and browse their methods. Guaranteed, if they have a music book section, they're going to have a section on piano methods. Go research methods. A lot of pianists and teachers don't even know what's even out there. They just kind of do what was taught to them, and I think it's a really good idea to go research and see what other options are out there.

If you're thinking about becoming a piano teacher, one of the things you definitely should do before you start is write down what you think your teaching philosophy is. People are going to ask you, what's your teaching philosophy? And you want to be prepared, and this will also just help you to be a better piano teacher if you know what you want to focus on. Teaching piano is not just teaching kids how to spell book, you know, that there's only one right answer. There's many right answers. So what is your right answer? What are your priorities? Are you going to be focusing on feeling the music? Are you going to be focusing on, you know, teaching them how to read music or teaching them how to feel music and experience music? Is it focusing on having fun during the lesson? So things like priorities that you want to focus on. So I would write those down or type those out and consider what your teaching philosophy will be.

I think getting started, it's definitely good to have some few basic tools. So definitely have scale books, like different scale or technique books so that they can start to practice that. There's a lot of different piano series that are super good. I always use the Faber books and I really like those, but I know that there's a few different like book series where it's, you know, like levels one through five or one through ten or whatever it may be, and each level you get harder and harder as you learn to be a better pianist. So I would say research those, advise your students to use one of those, and then just kind of work through the books. A lot of them have theory books and technique books and lesson books and performance books, and so just by using the materials that are already out there, plus a few scale books and practice charts that you create on your own, that'll be more than enough that you need to help kids get started as you begin teaching them lessons.

My advice for first getting started as a piano teacher would be to make a studio policy. Before you even advertise anything, make sure that you know how your studio is going to run, how much you're going to charge, what you're going to do with attendance, how many lessons you're going to have, how long those lessons will be, what the students will be learning. And then the next step would be to create a website and start marketing via Facebook to people in your community using flyers, people in your neighborhood. And then once you have marketed, when people come to you, you will already have a studio policy and everything that they need to know right in one paper, so that when they want to start taking lessons, you are good to go.