A behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the growing internet phenomena

I have become progressively more enamored with online learning as a learner myself over the past decade.  I love taking classes online, synchronous or asynchronous, from my favorite yoga instructor who lives in another country.  I love settling in at my home piano, with my beloved dog curled up at my feet, and logging in to take a jazz piano lesson from an instructor who lives only 20 minutes away.  I love working through a course online at my own pace, on-demand, whenever I have a few focused minutes to devote to it.

As I’m an educator myself, an idea started niggling at me.  Could an asynchronous piano curriculum be created to motivate a student and provide a similar experience to in-person, real-time piano lessons?  Could I work in everything I would cover with a student in one-on-one lessons into videos that the student could work through independently? 

Empowering asynchronous piano lessons

I decided to try it, focusing on an age bracket near and dear to my heart: six to eight-year-old beginning students.  I find this aged student a sheer joy to teach; they tend to be excited and curious and have no problem slipping into a creative world of sound when encouraged.  Where I live and teach, this is the biggest category of students seeking lessons and the category many piano teachers shy away from.  These beginners take energy, plus careful curriculum pacing so those basic skills are genuinely learned.

I quickly realized that this project couldn’t simply consist of recordings of the same lessons I would teach an in-person student. In the in-person scenario, I am monitoring and responding in the moment to the student’s actions, absorption, accuracy, and frustration. If the focus is good, I can encourage another repetition or two of the task at hand or save the task for another day if the student is tired.

In short, I needed to let go of most of my control over the students' in-the-moment experience and create lessons that put the students in control.

Motivating through repertoire, playing, and pacing

An essential fundamental piece of this model would be repertoire choice.  I decided to use as many familiar children's songs as possible as “learning vehicles.”  Familiar songs are much more motivating for six to eight-year-old children than abstract pieces composed to illustrate concepts.  Plus, familiar songs encourage self-correction.  When familiar songs are misplayed, young students can hear the error and have a desire to fix it.  With unfamiliar tunes (like the ones found in most piano method books), the student has no idea what the finished product should sound like and less motivation to play it note-perfect.   

Another key element to this learning model had to be less explanation and more learning through doing.  Children this age quickly become bored with lengthy, technical explanations or stressed with too many expectations.  I tried to make the script in my lessons short and brief, i.e., “Let's play up the white keys saying their note names together” while simultaneously demonstrating other concepts through playing, such as steady beat and phrasing.  The same holds with the accompanying PDFs;  there are few words on the page beyond the title, a few color graphics, and the musical symbols we are working on in that particular lesson.  

However, a QR code at the bottom of each page takes the student to a link to a YouTube video of me giving a demo of the song.  I hoped to create a more genuine musical experience of the song, not reduce it to a series of symbols (both linguistic and music notation symbols) to be deciphered.

Deciding on the pacing of my program was a challenge.  With many areas of piano study, the student needs to both understand the concept and develop reflex action, or muscle memory, of these concepts. How could I pace the lessons to encourage repetition to get the ideas down without the student getting bored, turning off the lesson, and finding something else to do?  (Remember- my goal is that the student is the driver in this learning model, without a parent encouraging or requiring them to sit and complete the lesson.)  I decided to create main lessons centered around the review and gentle introduction of the new, coupled with alternate lessons that reinforce the new through improvisation and rhythm and, later on, drawing the staff notation they are learning to read.

How do you encourage regular practice, an essential part of piano studies? My solution was simple boxes at the bottom of each song or activity page. At the end of each main lesson, I would ask students to check a box at the bottom of the page every time they played the song, encouraging them not to move on to the next lesson until most of the boxes were checked. 

Exciting Success

It took most of my spare time for about a year. Still, eventually, I created a collection of 24 progressive videos that I felt optimistic about having students work through independently.  I had a handful of families in my studio test them out and give me feedback, families with younger children who hadn’t started lessons yet but were interested.  The feedback from my test families was exciting; the parents admitted to being skeptical of the entire project. However, their children were engaged in the lessons and actively participated regularly.  They looked forward to their next asynchronous lesson!  And they were confident and proud to share the songs they learned in the recorded lessons with anyone who would listen.

Currently, my “Beginning Piano for Kids” program is free of charge on my YouTube channel for anyone to watch and learn from.  I like to imagine that motivated self-learners are watching the lessons and absorbing concepts in a well-paced manner while having fun learning familiar tunes.  Perhaps these self-learners are working simultaneously with an in-person instructor.  Maybe these kids are learning entirely independently due to a lack of available teachers, their family’s finances, or their family’s busy schedule that doesn’t allow for in-person lessons. 

Or perhaps, like me, they are cozying in at their home piano with a beloved family pet close by and enjoying their piano lesson when it fits into their busy schedule.

Why don’t you give it a try?  First, you’ll need to purchase a copy of the materials (visit my online store here to do so).  Then, head over to my YouTube channel, “Shannon Keeler Piano,” and visit the “Lessons for Children” playlist.  

Do you need additional help with my program, or does your child want to share musical successes from the program with me?  Schedule a one-on-one virtual consultation with me here. 

Happy Playing!