Learn piano by teaching others
If you’re a parent who would like to support their child in learning piano, help them find opportunities to teach other people what they’re learning in their piano lessons.
Have you ever heard the saying, “If you really want to know a subject, teach it?” In my experience, that saying is very true — I constantly learn new aspects about music the longer I teach it — and it applies to kids as much as it applies to adults.
In fact, the act of learning through teaching your peers is so effective that it’s a common teaching strategy in elementary schools!
So how does this relate to piano lessons?
Well, it’s one thing for a child know what they’re doing at their piano enough to be able to play their song in front of their teacher or to practice independently. But there’s a whole other level of understanding that can happen when they have to actually explain what they’re doing to someone else.
When your child needs to explain their thinking to another person, it encourages them to systematize what they know and simplify their process into small, clear steps. When they do this, tiny realizations can occur: it helps concepts click into place, it clarifies the steps they need to take, and often helps them uncover knowledge they didn’t know they had!
So how to encourage your child to be a teacher? There are a few ways!
If you’re a willing partner and would be interested in being a student to your child, you could ask your child to teach you how to play a song and listen to how they explain it. (This can be especially effective with a tricky song your child struggles to play themselves!)
Or, if your child has a friend over, maybe playing “piano teacher” could be something that they do as part of their playdate. When they’re looking for something to do, you could suggest that maybe your child would like to teach their friend how to play the song they’re currently learning.
Playing teacher can lead to some fun times at the piano, help consolidate their learning, and it also makes a child feel really proud that they got to share knowledge with someone else. Talk about a win-win-win situation!
After I shared my first video on this topic, I got some really good feedback from people who thought this was an interesting idea that they might try themselves. I was really pleased to hear that I was able to give people ideas on how to positively engage their kids in learning piano!
I realized I could open up this possibility to more people if I clarified that you can use this strategy sooner than you probably think. I created a follow-up video on this (the second video above, if you prefer to listen to your media). In other words, you don’t have to wait until your child is “good” at their music before they start teaching others people how to play it. In fact, the people who stand to benefit the most from this learning strategy are people who are actually struggling with their music! Here’s why that is.
When someone is trying to figure out a piece of music and they get stuck, what can happen is that they’ll freeze, be afraid to move on, and get tunnel vision on the problem they’re having in their music. This leaves them feeling very stuck.
But when somebody is motivated to teach someone else how to play something, it automatically breaks their tunnel vision because they need to take a bird’s eye view of the song in order to describe it. The “teacher” needs to figure out which concepts they need to explain and how to break down their process into steps that someone else can follow. Basically, it forces the child to apply creative thinking, which can snap them out of their tunnel vision and break them out of feeling stuck.
If you’re using this teaching strategy with a song you’re already familiar with, you’ll still get benefits. There are lots of benefits in teaching other people how to do things. But this follow-up is just to say, you don’t need to wait until you’re good at a song before you can try to teach it to someone else. In fact, you may very well gain deeper insight into the song just by virtue of trying to explain how to play it to someone else.
Good luck!