Piano Lessons – Pianodao

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 • Pause and Reflect

Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection 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

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Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection 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

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Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection 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

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Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Reflection 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

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Supporting Your Piano Pathway
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.

Who needs piano lessons anyway?

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Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Written by Andrew Eales

As Chair of the European Piano Teachers’ Association, Mark Tanner seems an unlikely cheerleader for shunning expert tuition in favour of “teaching” oneself to play the piano. And yet in his new teach-yourself-book for older beginners, The Piano in Black and White (Faber Music, 2021), this is the path he advocates, enthusing:

“Learning to teach ourselves gives us the advantage of becoming masters of our own universe.”

Tanner ignores the obvious point that our own universe, without the guidance and insights of those more experienced and knowledgeable than us, might well prove to be a rather limited, small universe…

16 Attributes of a ‘Good’ Teacher

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Supporting Your Piano Pathway
Written by Andrew Eales

With these striking words, the contemporary author and thought leader Deng Ming-Dao invites us to consider how our personal qualities can help us be the best people, and by extension, the best teachers that we can be:

“Those who follow Dao believe in using sixteen attributes on behalf of others: mercy, gentleness, patience, non attachment, control, skill, joy, spiritual love, humility, reflection, restfulness, seriousness, effort, controlled emotion, magnanimity, and concentration. Whenever you need to help another, draw on these qualities.”

Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao Daily Meditations, 188 (Harper Collins)

Reflective teachers might devote a professional lifetime to discovering the answers which are presented right here. Deng offers us another perspective, rooted in ancient philosophy, and recipe for successfully helping others, and in any context.

In this post I am going to look at each of these attributes in turn, briefly exploring the powerful links that exist between a piano teacher’s character and the quality and effectiveness of their teaching…