Piano Lessons – Pianodao

The Piano Stool: a safe harbour

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In this new guest post for Pianodao, best-selling author KAREN MARSHALL points to the importance of helping students feel welcome, seen, and ready to learn…

Years ago, my late teacher Eric Leveridge told me,

“Karen, remember that a piano teacher can actually be providing a service to the community. Supporting parents and young people as they make their way in life.”

I have never forgotten those words. Instrumental educators enjoy the rare privilege of spending years of consistent, one-to-one time with a child. Sometimes for up to twelve years, or more. We are not just teaching an instrument; we form part of that child’s long-term developmental support team.

Attachment theory offers a helpful lens through which we can understand this connection. Borrowing John Bowlby’s concept of a “secure base”, we can see how music teachers can create a predictable, encouraging environment where children feel safe enough to take creative risks.

This is not to suggest we replace parents or act as therapists, but rather to recognise the meaningful difference a trusted, consistent adult can make.

Many of us notice students arriving at lessons with limited attention, heightened anxiety, or low resilience. Modern stressors, disrupted routines, and educational pressures profoundly impact confidence. The piano stool can become a reassuring space, a place to rebuild resilience and rediscover potential.

Adaptive Teaching and Metacognition

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Interviews • Opinions • Guest Posts

I’m happy to welcome back KAREN MARSHALL with a new piece for Pianodao’s ADHD Insights series. Karen’s writing again reflects our shared focus on inclusive, practical, and thoughtful piano teaching…

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?

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.

Creativity is a Dialogue

Fermata • The Pianodao Blog
Short Reflections by Andrew Eales

Developing creativity is one of the high goals of learning an instrument. And yet over the decades I’ve taught, those advancing a more creative approach have been variously seen as either maverick outliers or magical superstars, but rarely as the piano teacher norm.

I have also met some who emit an impression that improvising pianists are somehow superior to those who “merely” regurgitate the music of others. Some even cast the concert pianist who can rattle off Rachmaninoff as a rather pitiable savant, akin to an imagined orator who can deliver a Shakespeare soliloquy, but who can’t hold a real conversation.

I think they are quite profoundly wrong. Having frequently improvised in front of an audience, I feel considerably less comfortable rising to the challenge of performing Chopin to the classical cognoscenti. I suspect many would. We all have different strengths, and need not compete.

And I would say that the creative arts of interpretation and improvisation are equal in value, complimentary in nature, and both have an important role to play in piano education.

A Piano Teacher’s Foibles

Fermata • The Pianodao Blog
Short Reflections by Andrew Eales

Which of the incredible teachers in this picture would you like to sign up to have piano lessons with?

Finding the “right” match can certainly prove challenging for some. Writing in a recent issue of Pianist Magazine, Warwick Thompson sagely advises:

“A teacher is actually a human being, surprising as that fact may sound, with foibles, prejudices, blind spots, strengths, and wonders within them.
If those foibles and wonders don’t align with yours, it doesn’t mean you’ll never progress at the piano. It simply means you’ve had the wrong teacher (or rather, to spin the mirror, it means your unfortunate teacher had the wrong student).”

Relief all around, then!

Making Every Lesson Special

Fermata • The Pianodao Blog
Short Reflections by Andrew Eales

When I started teaching back in the 1990s, the best known teacher in my neighbourhood was a venerable older gentleman who tuned pianos in the mornings, then gave lessons once the schools turned out in the afternoons. Sidney was a much loved, highly successful, and clearly very able teacher.

I was a tuning client of Sidney’s, and hearing that I was entering the fray as a teacher, he couldn’t have been more encouraging, referring pupils he was unable to fit into his busy schedule, and generously sharing advice from a lifetime’s professional experience.

This included his thorough list of rules for student conduct, outlining his expectations of practice, attitude in lessons, and even specifying a required dress code. And in this regard, Sidney’s demands were crystal clear: boys had to make sure their shirts were be tucked in properly, while dresses or skirts were compulsory for girls.

Sidney explained that piano lessons must be regarded as a special occasion, and that students benefitted from making an effort to dress up accordingly.

The Landscape of Play

Fermata • The Pianodao Blog
Short Reflections by Andrew Eales

In my article Putting the PLAY back into playing the piano, I set out what I described as a “radical manifesto for piano education”.

That article was a watershed moment that brought together many of the ideas previously proposed on Pianodao, and outlined a fresh, positive future for piano education. Concluding the article, I wrote,

“There will long be those who value a piano journey which ventures beyond a prescribed series of sequenced tasks, levels and achievements, who long to depart from the digital learning super-highway to explore lesser-travelled, but astonishingly beautiful and fascinating byways.”

Naturally, as readers have considered Dr. Stuart Brown’s seven properties of play and their application in piano education, many have asked what this looks like in practice.

Teaching Adults to Play the Piano

Supporting Piano Education
Article written by Andrew Eales

There has been an interesting and persistent debate in recent months about whether adult students can effectively teach themselves to play the piano (tapping into the growing plethora or apps, books, etc), or whether there is an essential ongoing need for a teacher’s involvement. I have addressed this in my recent article Who Needs Piano Lessons Anyway?

But while there’s no shortage of arguments for learning with a “good teacher”, many seem to struggle finding one who is sympathetic to their goals and in tune with the needs of adult learners.

In this post I will therefore share some of the strategies which have worked for me over the last three decades of teaching these enthusiastic learners.