Now for another very short story--this time, about me. When I began teaching piano in 1972, I very quickly found out that many of the problems that came up in the lessons were not musical problems. The issues that came up over and over were psychological in nature, and without training, I could only use my personal impression to help solve them. Of course, some of the problems did not require knowledge of psychology, but many did. Some of these issues that came up, over and over, included self-doubt about ability, how memory works, how to use different types of learning at key points, whether learning by ear is "cheating,' what interrupts recall (when memory appears to fail), anxiety about different aspects of the lessons, etc. In other words, human nature was present right there in the music lesson and I was ill-equipped to deal with it, Long story short, I became a psychologist so I could study, understand and apply solutions to the things I saw happening in the piano lesson.

You may not have thought about it this way, but psychology is everywhere. It is in the workplace (Organizational Psychology), in the school system, and is integrated into formal education for all types teaching credentials.¹ Even preschool teachers have to know psychology. It seems counterintuitive to bring science into an arts lesson, but in reality, it is the psychological science that is missing in arts lessons. For adults, that statement is even more true, since adults have many questions about their own abilities in piano lessons. Adults notice things, such as taking a long time to learn a piece, or how their fingers tend to not go down in the sequence that their brain commands. These questions cannot be answered credibly by someone without training in cognitive neuroscience, learning and behavior, and that's a psychologist. It takes a psychologist to truly know if there is something wrong in the process or whether the student just needs to practice more. What science does for us is to collapse thousands of hours of experience so that we do not have to live several lifetimes to gain it. Psychology gives us answers that someone without that training does not have. 

Knowing about how we learn, process emotions, think, etc., is very relevant to piano instruction--so much so that the Society for Neuroscience is calling for better cross-disciplinary training for teachers, so teachers can be more effective. We are on the cutting edge of that movement. Click here to read the results of their 2009 Summit.

An example of how this cross-disciplinary knowledge helps us would be the notion that children learn faster than adults. In some instances, they do; more correctly, children do best with certain strategies while adults learn best with other strategies. However, for most things, the adult brain is actually way more efficient than that of a child². The brains of children are extremely immature--brains do not fully mature until age 29 or 30--leaving a child to struggle longer than an adult when learning the same things. Another problem with children is lack of experience. Adults pull from their learning histories, which is the sum total of what they know. A great deal of what an adult knows comes to bear on the piano lesson before one note is played. Adults are simply more efficient learners. With music instruction, the style of the instruction just has to be matched with the adult.

Even if a child would learn faster, why would that fact stop you from taking lessons? There is no research as of December 2009 that answers this research question, so no one knows. People learn at different rates for different reasons.

Psychology in the piano lesson will provide real answers instead of personal impression. We know that adults seek answers to the questions they have throughout their lessons. We are here to provide answers to those questions.

Footnotes:

1) Music teachers have NO education in any type of psychology. That includes learning, motivation, perception, feelings, etc. This problem is currently not being addressed by any of the certifying agencies. When a music teacher reports being licensed, that license is not any sort of state competency license. Licensing is done solely by the piano teaching method they use. Some methods require that the teacher pay license fees to teach their method.

2) If an adult has had a head injury, the nature of the injury can be diagnosed and it can be determined if that head injury will preclude one from learning piano. This diagnosis can only be done by a cognitive neuroscientist or a neurologist. It cannot be conducted by a piano teacher.