The Way of Piano – Pianodao

ADHD and piano competitions

Education Strategies • Andrew Eales
Clinical Expertise • Louise Eales RMN, NMP

Continuing our series exploring the challenges and opportunities faced by pianists with ADHD, this article unpacks the issues faced when taking part in competitive piano events, which range from local festivals and school competitions to major international competitions.

This article aims to foster understanding, encourage players who feel confused by their reactions to competition, and promote discussion about how we can create a healthier, more inclusive performance culture.

As ever, I extend my gratitude to my wife Louise for sharing her extensive clinical expertise, offering important editorial suggestions across this series of articles. This article arose from our many conversations about the topic of how ADHD has impacted my own piano journey.

For an in-depth introduction to ADHD, outlining what it is, how it is diagnosed and treated, and how it impacts piano players more generally please refer to our article ADHD • A Pianist’s Guide.

Adaptive Teaching and Metacognition

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I’m happy to welcome back KAREN MARSHALL with a new piece for the ADHD Insights series. Her writing again reflects Pianodao’s focus on practical and thoughtful piano teaching, and I hope readers find her ideas here helpful and interesting.

Supporting neurodivergent pianists

Adaptive teaching has become an established principle across education in recent years and is widely recognised as an effective way of supporting neurodivergent learners. Rather than creating entirely separate lesson plans for pupils with additional needs, the aim of adaptive teaching is to adjust in the moment, or plan ahead so that every child can access a rich, rewarding curriculum.

But let’s be honest: as instrumental teachers, we’ve been doing this since the year dot! One of the great strengths of one-to-one music teaching is that we already provide every student with a bespoke learning experience.

Having spent years bridging the gap between classroom experiences and my private piano teaching, I often ask myself: how do we take these academic ideas and make them truly work in an instrumental lesson?

ADHD and ‘micro-breaks’

ADHD • Insights for Pianists

Education Strategies • Andrew Eales
Clinical Expertise • Louise Eales RMN, NMP

Everybody seems to be talking about Molly Gebrian’s book Learn Faster, Perform Better (OUP 2024, available here) and rightly so: it is a superb read, well argued, engagingly written, and filled with brilliant tips and advice on how musicians can practise more effectively.

Author Molly Gebrian holding a viola, with the book 'Learn Faster, Perform Better' displayed next to her. — Molly Gebrian with her book ‘Learn Faster, Perform Better’

We all want to improve, and Gebrian offers insights from neuroscience that back up many of our well-established strategies for effective practice, along with some interesting newer nuggets of advice, including what has become one of her signature suggestions: incorporating “micro-breaks” between repetitions when perfecting technical passages.

Post-Pandemic Piano Teaching

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In this insightful guest article, best-selling author and teacher KAREN MARSHALL points to the continuing challenges faced by those whose childhood and education were disrupted by the pandemic, and offers powerful hope that through piano lessons, we can help rebuild that generation…

The Long Shadow, Lost Learning, and the New Reality

Back in 2023, when the dust was finally beginning to settle on those surreal lockdown years, I wrote a series of blog posts about “Post-Pandemic Piano Teaching” for the previous Musicroom site.

At the time, many of us hoped, and I was definitely one of them, that by 2026, the phrase “things will never be the same again” would have been a distant memory. Perhaps we imagined we would be back to business as usual, with the fallout of those disrupted years safely behind us?

Yet, standing here today in 2026, the reality on the ground, both as a classroom music teacher and a private piano teacher, tells a very different story. The landscape didn’t just temporarily shift; it permanently fractured.

When I first examined “lost learning” a few years ago, I focused on immediate, obvious gaps: the physical absence of live performance, the technical difficulties caused by internet lag during online lessons, and a sudden drop-off in fundamental musicianship due to the rise of performance-only digital exams.

Personally, I treated it like an emergency to be managed with quick-fix, pattern-dense repertoire, and short-term interventions. What I perhaps didn’t fully anticipate was just how long the shadow of the pandemic would be, or how unevenly its impact would be felt across society.

Summer Repertoire Project

Active Repertoire Project

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Written by Andrew Eales

Summer is here, and as John Kirkwood puts it in his book The Way of the Five Seasons (2016):

“Following the rapid upward growth of spring, it is as if nature is now reaching outwards to fill as much space as it can.
Like a ball tossed in the air which reaches its apogee before descending, summer is the highest peak of growth when things can grow no further, and seem to hang in mid-air for a time, celebrating the fullness of expansion.”

As nature “reaches outwards to fill as much space as it can”, we too step into a larger vista, embracing the season with outdoor events, barbecues, social gatherings with family and friends, summer courses, camps and festivals.

Why not share student images and videos?

Pianodao Articles • Full Archive

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Written by Andrew Eales

Scroll through your social media feeds, and if you’ve ever taken an interest in piano education it’s likely you will encounter videos of children at their piano lessons, students performing in events, and celebratory photos of them with certificates or trophies.

The desire to share such media online is understandable from a number of angles. Firstly, and most obviously, it seems entirely appropriate for parents to celebrate their children’s musical achievements on their private page in this way, and potentially for teachers and schools to do the same.

As the NSPCC put it,

“It’s important that children and young people feel happy about their achievements and have images of their special moments for themselves and their families to look back on. This might include photos and videos taken by teachers during school performances and special events, or by staff and volunteers delivering events and activities outside of school.”

Secondly, there are good reasons for teachers to share videos on forums when seeking advice from colleagues: what better way to explain a technical challenge or developmental issue when seeking an expert second opinion?

Thirdly, some teachers use pupil videos to promote their teaching. Personally, it concerns me that doing this could easily skew a teacher’s attitude towards learners who don’t enjoy performing, or result in them enforcing their own interpretation of a piece rather than nurturing the player’s own response. Nevertheless, as a colleague explained to me recently, she sees videos of pupils as her “professional portfolio”.

So why not share student images and videos online? When considering this question, we need to firstly understand that there’s a big difference between:

public publishing: for example on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or a teacher/school/festival/etc website
private publishing: such as in a secure, password-protected web space, or a private WhatsApp group

This article pertains particularly to publishing or sharing media on public platforms, explores the reasons that so many professionals are opposed to this practice, and highlights the legal, ethical, and professional concerns that parents and teachers should all understand and mitigate if sharing student videos or images online publicly.

These are thorny and sometimes complex issues that I have had to grapple with over recent years, and investigate from a number of angles: as a teacher, business and website owner, and online forum moderator. In this article I will outline what I’ve found…

Who really needs mnemonics?

Pianodao Articles • Full Archive

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Written by Andrew Eales

Long established as a memory tool for note reading, well-worn mnemonics such as All Cows Eat Grass and Every Good Boy Deserves Football seem to have fallen out of favour in piano teaching circles these days.

Some suggest mnemonics should be avoided altogether, claiming that they are detrimental because:

they add an extra step for the learner decoding notation
they mitigate against the development of intervallic reading, harmonic understanding, and pattern recognition
they don’t scale for reading ledger lines, different clefs, etc
they can create a level of dependency that makes the transition to fluent reading harder

These are certainly important points to consider.

But when we explore the research into the use of mnemonics, a very different picture emerges. And teachers may notice that they are often recommended for learners who are dyslexic or with neurodiversity such as ADHD.

So what is the truth of the matter: are mnemonics useful, and if so for whom? Perhaps a balanced reassessment of the topic, grounded in academic and scientific research, is overdue. So let’s begin with the science bit…

Spring Repertoire Project

Active Repertoire Project

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Written by Andrew Eales

The Spring season is a time of dynamic reawakening and renewal. That which has remained quietly dormant is reborn, joining the fresh abundance of new life. I’m surely not the only one who finds this the most vibrant and beautiful time of year!

There’s perhaps no better time for embarking on exciting new piano projects, but let’s also remember to give our perennial Active Repertoire a fresh ‘spring clean’.

Our Active Repertoire is the music we can play with confidence, fluency, and expression, for our own and others’ enjoyment, and preferably from memory.

Through my teaching, and here on Pianodao, I encourage players to always have three or more pieces that are performance-ready, and to support this goal I offer a quarterly project sheet for you to freely download:

Spring Repertoire Project Sheet

Our Active Repertoire is our point of peak strength as pianists. Even so, some pieces can become tired and worn, in need of refreshment, while some others we might simply want to replace.