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I can agree on that because he is unlikely to be able to understand them fully. But I also understand how someone would feel uncomfortable just trusting what they are told by strangers if it seems to be in contradiction with what they read in research. There may not even be a contradiction, but to assess that a more critical discussion is needed. I think that is what kevin is looking for. It just easily comes out as questioning the expertice of the teachers on this forum.

Isn't this forum a much better place for such critical discussions than an actual teaching situation? We can imagine what would happen if the student keeps questioning everything the teacher presents and demands "proof" that it will work

That's a fair question. I think I'm already tolerably good at the kind of stuff that is played from a lead sheet -- I've been doing it a long time. What I want to play is four or five-voice fugues. And Chopin ballades. And Mozart sonatas. And... well, everything really.

My problem is that I've learned to play in a way that didn't require me to develop any basic technique. I play with three fingers on each hand, essentially. I'm currently working on the kinds of technical studies that most people seem to master within a few months of playing the piano but, because I have to prepare for other events where I'm playing, I have to combine that practice with the other stuff I have to prepare. It makes for a long day.

But enough about me...

Outo, you are in Finland, a small nation which has become lauded widely for education over the past generation. My guess is that piano teaching might even be a regulated profession in your country. In N. America, we preserve a frontier mentality: anyone can hang out a piano teaching shingle and just plunge into the trade, with prior training or not.

Some teachers do use a metaphorical stick in their studios; some don't. My guess, however, is that the same is true in Scandinavia.

Why would that happen in the first place?

Students come to me, wanting to play music. No matter what music students bring in, I play it, at sight. Anything. Theoretically a student could come in with some incredibly difficult piece of music, the kind of thing we hear very find pianists or performers play on stage, wanting me to play the music instantly. And of course I could not not do that. There are limits.

But you would not believe the things people come in with.

One student wanted to play Watashi no Uso, written out by some Internet bozo, wrong notes, wrong time signature, but I always take any strong interest from a student seriously.

(If someone came in with a strong wish to learn Scarlatti, I would jump into that with complete energy and it would be fun...)

So I looked at it. We found the music in YouTube (I had had NO idea what it was or where it came from), then we found another source that was much more correct. We listened, and a few weeks later he had it finished, with my help. I rewrote it myself by listening carefully to the music and finding out what was wrong in the scores.

Yesterday another student came in with the theme to some TV cartoon show, again horribly written by someone with a notation program with no idea of common rules about how to write music, but I was able to guess from the music about how it sounded, never having heard of the show or the theme, and we talked about how the music SHOULD be written. (It was in 9/8 time but should have been in 3/4 with a common direction at the top, to swing it.)

Then one of my favorite young students, who just turned 15, told me that what got him interested in playing the piano was the Tom and Jerry piano theme.

Here's a long arrangement of more complicated music from the show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYrUWfLlYI0

Here is a short excerpt someone worked out for piano.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meNHUZdqq78

Where in heaven's name am I going for find out from "research" about other teachers doing what I'm doing, dealing with just about anything you can imagine coming from very different students with only one commonality - something ignites their interest to play the piano?

There are a few of us, here and there, who are REALLY GOOD at what we do, and we are loosely scattered all over the globe, a bunch of mavericks who are experimenting, really out of the box. You can look up all the research you can find, and you won't begin to find a description of what I do, or what a few really out-of-the-box teachers are doing.

Well, that of course is not the main goal of research. But wouldn't it be a good thing if someone actually proved that an out-of-the-box method is in fact useful and it became something regularly used? This is what has happened gradually when our understanding of learning and psychology had advanced. People really believed 100 years ago that violent punishment improved learning and generally thought not hitting students was neglect. Few would think that way now and we have science to thank for that.

Yes, BUT:

If you are doing something that is in the least revolutionary, even if it will eventually be accepted as a great stride forward, it will be fought against in the present.

Think only of Chopin, whose ideas about technique were fought against by old school teachers insisting on rigid hands. Or Debussy, completely changing how the world viewed different ideas about what is proper or acceptable in sound.

Many out-of-the-box ideas turn out to be missteps, dead-ends. But if we have to scientifically investigate every new idea before it is tried, a lot of great new ideas will be held back.

I'd just say that it is very complicated.

We have private piano teachers too and they are not regulated. But many if not most are still qualified and have experience also from teaching in publicly regulated institutions. My teacher is private but has several degrees and has tought in a regulated music school before. The same goes for my first teacher.

I would say one of the main reasons that my country is so succesful in education is the fact that we value research and use it to develope education.

OK. Then most likely you are or were weak in bass clef, because lead sheets use the treble for the melody with chord written in over that lead line. They are extremely useful and even necessary in situations where you are required to play a very large number of pop/rock/jazz tunes and are in a situation where you will be called upon to improvise.

By the way, I teach this kind of chord structure to every student, regardless of age. So called "classical players" are often hopelessly weak in this area.

As I understand it you have not worked with a teacher, as an adult, because you can't find someone you trust.

Four or five voice fugues is a big ask for any player. Mozart sonatas? Not so much!

Oh, I do not think that new ideas must be researched or proven before they are put to practice. That would never work. Most great innovations start with someone experimenting.

Personally, I think teaching is a talent in itself. A talented teacher who has little experience can still be a great teacher that experience will iron out some of the rough spots.

As I said previously, people pay teachers to teach them, not to be their friend. If friendship happens, that's great, but it shouldn't be a pre-requisite that the student even like the teacher's personality. I've learned TONs from teachers who were jerks, but knowledgable jerks.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.........

I would be interested in how teachers would answer the underlined question (my underling). From my reading on the forum, the general gist of this question is not uncommon from those starting out with lessons. Should it be asked? Is there an answer?

Yes, Gary, AND... we ARE proving it with each student that can achieve their goals successfully. Am I "experimenting" on my students? No. I understand the goal desired, and I see the obstacles that the student has. Then I problem-solve to help them overcome those obstacles. This is just plain teaching.

Do I need a study to research bad teachers? Hardly, I see the effects of what they do with every transfer student I get, but I don't always judge because if the student doesn't practice then there's no way of knowing what the teacher actually taught. How would one even conduct such research anyways?

Similarly, I found out that there aren't many studies to prove the efficacy of flossing your teeth. There is only one or a few studies out there, and the results aren't reliable. Why? Because there was no way to account for every participants' diligence in how they flossed, even assuming they didn't lie on the surveys.

I see the same problem with studying different teaching methods: no two teachers teach alike, and even if they did, how many students would actually do exactly what they said? My students lie to me all the time on how often, how long, and which methods they used in practicing that week.

What is the best proof of a teaching method? That students walk out of my studio having learned how to play and how to problem-solve on their own so eventually they don't need me.

Stubbie, I'll take a brief stab. Most of my studio consists of adult hobby pianists, and many of them at near-beginner levels. The first movement of the Moonlight Sonata is often a request, and/or the middle movement of the Pathetique Sonata. They are both gorgeous pieces, and both well beyond a beginner's abilities, unless simplified - which I generally don't allow.

But that doesn't mean I don't help a student work on one of these Beethoven movements; on the contrary, I do. I generally suggest that they just confine themselves to the first page - not the whole movement - and warn them it will be a tough slog, but tell them that yes, they certainly can do it if they put in the time and aren't impatient. If some press me for how long it will take for them to learn the first page, I'll say maybe a month or more to rough it in. If they press me on how long it will take to learn the whole movement, I'll say maybe a few months to rough it all in. We're not talking about performance ready, even for one's pets; we're talking about being able to stumble through iconic and poetic Beethoven so that it is recognizable to the player and to me (at half-speed or less).

With the desire and sufficient practice time, any adult student can tackle lots of repertoire that might seem beyond them - especially if they have an encouraging teacher, and the tempos are slow enough.

I don't know how much reputable research there is on flossing, but there is a colossal amount of research on many serious health concerns. That research subjects don't always tell the truth is a well-known problem, and well-organized studies attempt to control factors like this. Confounding factors are often difficult to control, and the extent to which they have been controlled is, as I'm sure you can imagine, the subject of considerable debate, particular in contentious studies. Still, we can try.

Of course every student is different, and every teacher is different. But the same is true in my original field, which is medical research. Every physician is different, and every patient is different, but that doesn't stop us trying to study the efficacy of treatment. Many profound medical discoveries started with a happy accident (penicillin), and many started with a vague idea that something might be worth trying (limes for scurvy; clean drinking water for cholera). All however, that continue to be considered effective, have had the benefit of careful research. As a society we tend to weed out medical treatments that can't be proven effective, although I concede that some (homeopathy, for example) tend to linger, against all the odds.

Not everybody who has a bacterial infection benefits from penicillin, and some people are even harmed by it. That doesn't stop it being one of the more important discoveries in human history.

Methodological studies of teaching effectiveness are, relatively speaking, in their infancy in the UK. It's probably only in the last twenty years or so that (at least some) UK universities have started to insist that teaching staff have qualifications that indicate that they might have some experience with contemporary teaching research. Some teaching staff continue to fight against the trend towards research-led teaching methods, for all sorts of reasons.

I think a common mistake in this area is to assume that because research can't give perfect or universally-applicable results, it's not worth doing. Medical research is similarly imperfect, but most of us continue to think that it's worth doing.

Actually, it's worse that that. I didn't sight-read a note of music until I was in my 40s. I could pick out notes very slowly, one at a time. I relied mostly on playing by ear with guidance from chord symbols. I still do, in fact -- If I'm accompanying a singer, for example, I improvise my part around the chord symbols. Because I can now sight-read tolerably well, I can sometimes work out the harmony on the fly from a written score, and improvise something vaguely appropriate, even when I can't get my fingers onto the written notes.

My problems start when I have to play the written notes Most of the music I want to play is written on the basis that the performer has ten, more-or-less equally useful fingers, for example.



In fact, I do have a teacher now. He's very particular about the fine points of technique that I always ignored, and he thinks that I should spend most of my practice time on technical studies, starting with the ones that most people work on in the first year of playing. What I'm unsure about, and so is he, is whether I can combine technical studies with my "usual" practice, in such a way that the two completely different approaches don't somehow cancel each other out.

What piano teaching research are you referring to, and it is something that isn't being talked about in the resources I listed earlier in this thread that I have used for learning how to teach, including pedagogy textbooks, piano pedagogy seminars, and trade publications?

Thanks for the insight AZN.

I tell them they are about 8 years away and, if they don't improve quickly enough, 12 years. People who ask those kind of questions are usually impatient about the process and VERY quick to quit lessons after finding out that there's so much work involved. They also tend to have an inflated sense of their ability.

Take the OP's question as an example: the Inventions are listed here in California as level 7-8. Beethoven sonatas (Op. 49) is also level 7. What most people don't realize is that there's a range of difficulty, even within a book. The difference between Invention No. 1 and Invention No. 12 is about just as wide as the difference between Beethoven Op. 49 and third movement of Moonlight Sonata (and Beethoven sonatas get much, MUCH harder than that!).

And just because you can figure out one Invention without the help of a teacher does not mean you should play Inventions. Hardly.

I don't think it necessarily means that you shouldn't, either. I guess it depends what you want to get out of the exercise. If I want to hear a Bach Invention played expertly, I can buy a CD. There's something to be said for the intellectual challenge of learning to do something difficult, using nothing but your own resources. That remains true even if you never do it well enough to impress experts.

I'm not saying it would be a good plan if your long-term intention is to become a concert pianist.

I built my own log cabin using raw timber. Is it as good as something built by a professional builder of log cabins? heck, no. It's slightly uneven, and the rood lets in a bit of water in heavy rain. But I built it. I built it using my own two hands, "Woodworking for Dummies" and a good stock of Band-Aids. I'm never going to be building cabins for a trade, and I'm unlikely ever to build another one, but every time I use mine, it gives me a warm fuzzy. Literally, in fact -- the wood-burning stove I just installed gives me the "warm," and the surplus carbon monoxide it produces provides the "fuzzy."

In my region at least, piano instruction traditionally means following the path that leads step-by-step to being a concert pianist. Or, at least, a wannabe concert pianist. However, not everybody has that as a long-term goal.

Most students do not want to become concert pianists, and most teachers don't have those expectations, either. However, that doesn't mean we will teach with less skill and less quality to a student who is not on that track. Perhaps the demands on how often they practice and the goals would be farther stretched out for someone not on track to be a concert pianist, but otherwise the skills needed are still the same to play the same repertoire.

Any teacher who would teach a student to play poorly is not a good teacher, wouldn't you agree? Taking your log cabin analogy, that's fine that you wanted to build it yourself. I get it. But if you paid a contractor, a professional, to build it and it had those problems, would you say that was money well-spent?

In the same regard, if someone wants to teach themselves poorly by playing repertoire beyond their skills, that's fine. People are welcome to do what they want. But to expect a teacher to compromise standards means they have the wrong kind of teacher. I'm sure there's someone out there who would gladly take your money to hear you struggle through these things.

Sometimes a student will insist on playing something beyond their level and I let them, giving them fair warning of what they're up against. Usually after a couple of months (or sooner) they realize that they just cannot do some things required to play it the way they want to hear it from themselves. Then I tell them how I can get them there, and I show them the steps they need to take. Sometimes they listen at this point.

What AZN said is correct: