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Keys to Music Learning
Keys to Music Learning
James Kessler, Part 2: Beyond the Method: Audiation, Mentorship, and Centering the Child
In Part Two of our conversation with musician and educator James Kessler, we dive deeper into what it really looks like to teach through audiation—across instruments, ages, and experience levels.
James shares candid reflections on his early discomfort with singing and movement, how vulnerability became a powerful teaching tool, and why mentorship is essential when learning to teach through Music Learning Theory. We explore meaningful connections between Music Moves for Piano, Jump Right In, and Developing Musicianship Through Improvisation, including how these approaches support advanced students, ensemble skills, improvisation, and true musical understanding.
This episode also honors the profound influence of Marilyn Lowe, especially her deep understanding of child development and her insistence on centering the needs of the student over the agenda of the teacher. The conversation is honest, practical, and at times emotional—offering reassurance to teachers who may feel uncertain, overwhelmed, or “behind,” and encouragement to trust the process.
Whether you teach piano, band, strings, mallet percussion, or are mentoring other teachers, this episode is a reminder that audiation-based teaching is not just for beginners—it’s a lifelong pathway to musicianship, joy, and connection.
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Introduction to Audiation-based Piano Instruction and Music Moves for Piano
Ready to learn more about audiation-based piano instruction and Music Moves for Piano? Visit Music Learning Academy for online courses, webinars, and resources.
Want to dive into audiation-based piano instruction? Check out Music Moves for Piano by Marilyn Lowe.
Welcome to Keys to Music Learning. I'm Hannah Mayo of Mayo Piano.
Krista:And I'm Krista Jadro of Music Learning Academy.
Hannah:Join us as we discuss common goals and challenges in the piano studio and offer research-based ideas and solutions to guide every one of your students to reach their full musical potential with audience.
Krista:And we're back for part two of our chat with James Kessler.
James:Some of the things that I found really hard when I started to teach Music Moves were... I could sing in tune. I just didn't see any need to sing. So the singing aspect for me was pretty easy when I started Music Moves for Piano. I could easily sing the songs, and I was a little self-conscious about my voice at first. I didn't love my voice at first. I thought I sounded bad, but I got over that pretty quickly. And I realized that, and even now, sometimes if I am singing and I hear myself sing something and I don't like it, I just sort of shrug it off. It's like, oh, okay, you know. I don't find the singing to be that big a deal. Everyone is a little self-conscious about their voice, I'm sure, unless you're a professional singer. And that's okay. That's just that's a part of being a musician. In the jazz world, they talk about singing a lot, but nobody actually does it. It's one of the things that they talk about doing and then nobody actually does it. And the great conductors sing in rehearsals. So musicians sing. It's not just an MLT thing, it's all over the music world.
James:Movement, however, that is not that wide spread in music education. It's often seen as something that only lower elementary schoolers do. But like I said earlier, when I'm learning something new that's hard for me, I just do it by the book and I trust that it's gonna work out. So I forced myself to learn how to move. I read all about the movement. Honestly, Krista, your videos were invaluable. I mean, despite all of my efforts to read and study about the movement, I was still feeling kind of lost. And then even just a few seconds of watching you move on a video just unlocked it for me. So I'm way more comfortable now with the movement. And later on in this interview, I will talk a little bit about mentorship. That's very important to me. But what I tell teachers who I'm mentoring is just, if you feel weird when you're beginning to move, it's okay. Just like let yourself feel weird about it because you'll go through it and it'll get easier, just like everything else.
Krista:That's a really good point, James. I was nervous about moving when I first was probably for years. I was nervous about moving. And then I felt better about moving with my students, but then I started teaching teachers, and those nerves kind of just re-sprouted. And I started getting nervous about moving again in front of this different audience. I feel like even now, sometimes it's in the back of my mind, but you're right, you just kind of like let it go and that vulnerability with your movement or with your singing, it does sneak up every now and then. But like you just said, you just shrug it off. And usually when you're doing it with the students, especially, they're not judging you and they're having fun singing and moving as well.
James:And vulnerability, you use the word vulnerability. I mean, when you're a young music student and you're not accomplished, you're making yourself vulnerable every time you touch an instrument. And we're modeling vulnerability to our students. So being able to do something that we find uncomfortable and doing it anyway is really modeling the right healthy attitude just towards everything in life. So the other thing that I found hard briefly was some of the more difficult content like triple division elongations. The first time I heard that track on the pattern CD, I felt immediately lost.
James:And modes, I've always loved modes, and I've been a master of modes my whole life. Like I said, Dorian from when I was a young child. Locrian, however, was always just super hard for me. I've never been comfortable with Locrian, and unusual meter, too, was something that I never really got the hang of. I had lots of bad experiences as a teenager, being unable to comprehend unusual meter. I had trouble accepting 3/4 time and 6/8 time as enrhythmic at first, until I began to understand how that really works. And Do-based minor versus La-based minor, but little by little all of those challenges resolved themselves, and sometimes to my delight, because things like Unusual Meter, I found myself just suddenly like hearing it. It just made sense all of a sudden. I didn't even have to try. And Locrian too. I was hearing some piece of music that my son was listening to, he was really enjoying, and all of a sudden I heard that there was a passage in there that would like a Locrian measure where it modulated into Locrian, and I suddenly comprehended that measure. Whereas before I was just scratching my head thinking, well, that's a weird sound. Like, what's going on in that measure? I don't know, it's just strange. Could not comprehend that one measure. It just seemed just off to me. And then I realized it was Locrian.
Krista:So, James, I think all of those experiences you had with Music Moves for Piano when you were first starting, it's really important for our listeners to hear that because we hear many of those same challenges from teachers that are just beginning. So many of our listeners, of course, use Music Moves for Piano, the audience-based piano curriculum. I think it's also important since you mentioned that you actually majored on the clarinet and the saxophone, and you have experience with the cello and all these other instruments. You have experience with Jump Right In, the instrumental curriculum. So could you share just how you use Jump Right In, the instruments that you teach, and also how it compares to Music Moves for Piano?
James:I've always had a lot of very highly advanced students, piano students and composition students and adults and teens. When I started Music Moves for Piano and Keyboard Games, I still had a bunch of students who were already very highly advanced. And they were already starting to audiate, even though I didn't know what audiation was. So I began to use a book that I found called Developing Musicianship Through Improvisation. I actually started using that before Jump Right In. Somebody had given me the Jump Right In Teacher's Manual, and I found it very difficult to understand and I tried. I tried so hard reading it and taking notes and just wasn't getting it. And Developing Musicianship seemed to be very approachable for me for these most advanced students, and I was using it with teachers who were taking lessons from me and students who were at very high levels of accomplishment. That was also a big breakthrough for me, and I'll just add one of the reasons that I came to love movable resting tone, La-based minor, was because when I tried it with my top theory students, I noticed immediately, just instantly full grasp of harmonic minor. None of the problems I had previously had with Do-based minor, just harmonic minor was instantly attainable effortlessly.
James:So I knew that I was on the right track there. As I began to use Developing Musicianship more and more, I became a little bit more interested in how I can do some of this with my younger beginner band students. Even though I started using DMTI for short. I'm gonna talk about Jump Right In at this point. I had first heard it mentioned a long time ago in the early 2000s, a band teacher who lives here locally, she had some MLT training, and I ran into her at a music store where we were buying band books at the same time, and I was picking up the Standard of Excellence or the Essential Elements, and she had the the Jump Right In book, and I was like, Oh, what is that? Tell me about it. And she said, Oh, well, it's very interesting. I think you'd really like it. It's got lots of solfege in it. And she she knew how much I loved solfege. So I was very interested at first, but I opened the book and I saw patterns.
James:And again, I had a similar experience with Keyboard Games. I just looked at it and I said, What is this? This just doesn't seem to make any sense. So I never really looked back at it again until many, many years later, I realized that I needed to give it more of a serious look. So I dug into that teacher's manual, and all these teachers' manuals are extremely hard. Just you know, a quick mention about mentorship. I think I would say anyone who has any interest in this, you need to seek out at least a little bit of mentorship at first. Don't try to do this on your own because you're gonna get yourself in trouble. It's so hard to dig through without guidance. So I tried and it didn't really begin to make sense to me until I had a Zoom meeting with Terry Bacon, and he gave me a 45-minute walkthrough of Jump Right In. And it just it all clicked for me after that. It started to make sense. What Jump Right In does is it's not really a method like a lot of these books, you use the word curriculum. I'm not even sure I understand it as a curriculum.
James:I see it as more of an approach. So Jump Right In seems to be more of a template for how you run your lessons. You have a sort of a format and in that format you plug in songs and patterns and instrumental technique and of course movement and singing. And the book does kind of loosely specify what order to do things in, but unlike a turnpage method like Faber, where the the order is really obvious, it's like you turn the page and now you're on the very next page. Jump Right In does not work that way. The order is more flexible. You can't just do whatever you want, but within some guidelines you can change some ordering a little bit here and there just to fit your needs and what the students need.
James:We didn't really get to talk much about Marilyn's influence on it, but I'll just just to say really quickly, one of the things I love about MLT is just it changed my mindset about putting the students' needs first. I'd always prided myself on being a successful teacher because I sort of put myself first, like I know what's best. I'm such an expert, and so I'm gonna teach in the best possible way because I know what I'm doing. And no matter how expert one might be, it's just the wrong mindset. And MLT is built around the philosophy of putting the students' need first and what they need, not what you know as a teacher.
James:So with Terry's help, I was able to understand how to apply Jump Right In, and I began to use that with all of my beginning band students. I formed small groups, which I mean it's unheard of, right? I mean, band students, they either play in full band or in their lesson at school, which might be a small group, but that's not really ensemble work. Maybe they're playing duets with the teacher, but they don't really learn ensemble skills of listening and engaging with the musician next to you as a peer. And Jump Right In is perfect for that. It's built around having um, you know, I've adapted it for private lesson use, but it's really at its best when there's more than one kid. So I did some of that and they love it. They love being in small groups together.
James:So it does just like Developing Musicianship, it does feature improvisation. So you learn to sing a song, you learn to sing the root bass line, there's moving and chanting, acquiring pattern vocabulary, learn to play the song in multiple transpositions, as well as learn to change the song into other tonalities and meters, improvising and composing with the song, so some similarities with Music Moves for Piano. And DMTI is kind of the same, just a little faster paced. I use that with my most advanced students, and not only do they have to acquire pattern vocabulary very quickly, but they have to learn songs with complex forms and learn how to improvise. I love how DMTI prioritizes voice leading, which is, I think, something that is not taught well in the jazz world.
James:That's something that I've always found to be fascinating. That when I was a young teen, I hated the way I was taught jazz. Just learning scales and how to play a scale on a certain chord, and then they talk about Dorian and Mixolydian and everything as if it's just something you do for a second on a chord, and then you have to change to a different mode or scale. I hated all of that, and that was not how I learned to play jazz, even though I was taught that way, my brain did not learn that way. And I was very aware of that as a teenager, that the way I was learning jazz was not the same way that my teachers were teaching it to me. When I came to see the DMTI book and how it features tonal voice leading and attention to retaining a tonic and a dominant over the entire tune that made sense to me. That's how I navigate through jazz standards is by knowing where the tonic is at all times, not by paying attention to each single chord that arrives at every given moment. So that radar of keeping the resting tone in your sights at all times, it's so important and not well done in a lot of other methods.
Krista:So, James, I guess it was about a year ago that you started teaching Luci, my daughter Luci, who started to play the cello in school and really did love it, but was experiencing some frustration about the difference in the way that her teacher was teaching the reading first and wasn't really tapping into everything that Luci could do on the cello with her audiation ability and all of her experience, from birth with early childhood and Music Moves for Piano and everything. And, you know, I don't get to sit on in on every lesson that you have with her, even though I would love to usually I save my laundry and I'm like, I'm going to sit in on the lesson and fold because it's just so enjoyable. But I really am impressed with how you navigate Jump Right In and how you bring in Developing Musicianship Through Improvisation to really bring out so much from Luci. It really is remarkable. And I wish we could show everybody these lessons because it's just wonderful seeing her. I'm guess I'm talking as a mom now, but it's wonderful seeing her have this other instrument that she can express herself on. And you bring out so much joy, even when she's tired, because it's on Friday nights and she's like, mom, I'm so tired.
Krista:Every single time she comes out of the lesson, that was so much fun. I loved it. I had so much fun in that lesson. But anyway, so watching you is a joy, watching you with Luci is a joy. And I've learned some things about Jump Right In just by informally watching and listening and some things that I really like. I like the audio files. I like that they sing the bass line. I think it's a separate track? I think if there's a separate track with just the bass line, I noticed Luci learns it so quickly when she's listening to that. And I'm sure other students do as well. And also these solo books, there's just so much repertoire, there's so many folk tunes for her to learn, so many opportunities for the teacher to really use these materials and use what they need for their specific student. But I liked that the solo books had those music enrichment activities. If anybody has seen, maybe I'll even just copy one of these pages and put it in the show notes so that people can see.
Krista:Because by all of the folk tunes, they have letters A, B, C, D, E, F. It goes through J. And I didn't know what those were. And then at the beginning of the book, it's a checklist, just like Music Moves for Piano. A is sing the song, B is perform the song by ear, C is perform it in a second keyality, then perform in a third keyality, then perform the song with a friend on the same or a different instrument. So perform in ensemble, right? And then perform in a different meter, in a different tonality, perform the roots, and then improvise. And there's so many similarities there, right, with Music Moves for Piano. So I guess that brings us to the next question, which would be: are there elements of Jump Right In that you incorporate into your Music Moves for Piano lessons, or do you use Music Moves for Piano elements in your instrumental lessons?
James:I found that there really is a lot of opportunity for the two materials to support one another. And I think the easiest is repertoire. The JRI with all the solo books and everything, it provides you with literally hundreds of tunes and a good template, like I was talking about before, a sort of a format by which you can teach each new tune the same way and just quickly learn a tune. And then how to use it for all those things like the A through J checklist. So I do use that approach with my M usic Moves students. I'll bring in folk tunes from the solo books, and I'll use the the JRI format of sing the bass line and transpose it and create a counter melody and improvise and all those things. It's just more to do. And wherever their piano skills are at, I can apply those piano skills to the piece.
James:My most advanced students do a lot more with it. They create entire arrangement textures with all kinds of fancy stuff happening all over the piano. Really impressive sounding music. And then the beginners are able to just play a bass line or play a melody, and we can talk about piano fingering and how to use piano fingering to play a melody. So it really does work well, but I would caution teachers that unfortunately one does need to really know a lot about it, really need to to be very familiarized with the curriculum before you can use it effectively. Otherwise you'll do what I did, which is just kind of get yourself lost for a while. And it's a little frustrating.
James:Speaking of Luci and our children, the other thing is my son is fourteen, he's a freshman in high school. I did stop singing songs in solfege to him. His instrument is trombone. He did have a couple of piano lessons when he was young, but we just didn't really continue that. And I've been his primary trombone teacher, even though I wasn't a trombone major. And I did teach him some Jump Right In stuff. I did the beginning of the book with him, and everything that I was learning in MLT workshops from GIML (Gordon Institute for Music Learning), I would try with him. And it's been amazing to see his progress. He's every year he's tried out for regional band or regional jazz band since he was in sixth grade, and he's made it every single year. Now he's in high school, he just made the high school regional band. He plays in a semi-pro band with me, and no matter how difficult the repertoire is, whether he's learning a concerto, (he recently learned two movements of a trombone concerto by Rimsky-Korsakov). No matter how hard the repertoire is, we can always approach it from audiation, and it's just basics, it's tonic and dominant patterns. A breakthrough for him was learning the cadenza to that concerto, and he learned that it was just Mi Re Ti C in minor. And I think it was in minor, or maybe it might have been, but either way, it's a dominant it's a dominant seventh chord, elaborated. That's what the cadenza is. And that just made it so much easier for him to learn.
James:It went from being him listening to it and being stunned at how difficult it would be to learn, and then after one day of just audiating the dominant chord, he could play it the next day. So I am just thrilled with how effective these approaches are for advanced music, and I know we get questions a lot about that all the time. There's this wrong perception that this whole approach, Music Moves, and MLT in general is only for lower elementary schoolers. It's not true at all. I can attest that it is effective at every level of study. I'm talking about up through ARCT, the top level of RCM. This approach works for every level of study. And not only have I used Jump Right In and DMTI with my piano students, but I also use a little bit of Music Moves with my instrumental students, particularly mallet percussion.
James:When my mallet percussion students are learning, I will typically start them with Keyboard Games. And another thing I never mentioned in this interview was that since 2005 I've been a professional klezmer performer. I perform Jewish traditional folk music, I play accordion, and I've had a few accordion students, and for beginner accordion, I like to use Keyboard Games. I've found a way to adapt Keyboard Games for accordion. And accordion is a very, very difficult instrument. If somebody has never learned, the left hand of the accordion is is so challenging, and I tried using Jump Right In as a starter method on accordion, and I found it just wasn't cutting it. So Keyboard Games Book A worked better.
Hannah:I love that idea of using Keyboard Games with mallet percussion. And in fact, at the ast GIML conference, I did a session on adapting Keyboard Games outside of the piano lesson either for the classroom music or for other instrumental lessons. And so I'm so glad you said that. Because that was that was one of the ideas that I thought this would be great if you had Orff instruments or any other kind of mallet percussion. Just you use these Keyboard Games and they work with ensemble, they work with creativity. Right. So if you're using mallet percussion, check out Keyboard Games if you have not already.
James:Yeah, because Jump Right In doesn't really do a great job of it, doesn't really address the issue of acculturation and informal instruction very well. I spoke with Terry about this. It does maybe a little bit, but it doesn't do enough. And so something like Keyboard Games is exactly what students need before they start learning tonal patterns. Tonal patterns should not be the first thing a student starts to do when they're new to music and new to an instrument. And the freedom of moving all over the the instrument top to bottom. I noticed mallet percussion students, when they're taught the typical way, they only use just like a couple of in one section of the of the keyboard. They don't even seem to really fully understand that an octave away is the same thing. So Keyboard Games is just so freeing in terms of just moving around the instrument and not worrying about note names or even tone names, but just playing. Yeah.
Krista:Yeah, it could teach them so much about playing and just the geography of their instrument as well. And Jump Right In, I feel like maybe a reason they don't have as much informal instruction is because if it was written for the fourth grade band student, there might be an assumption that they had informal guidance prior, since the kids, if they're in a band program, are probably 9, 10, or 11 years old, right? So if you're using it in a private studio, then really having that awareness of what other materials are out there, whether it's Keyboard Games or Music Play, to really guide your students towards formal instruction is important.
James:Yes. I asked Terry about that, and I think it's probably just a lack of space and you know, it's just too much, it's too overwhelming to make a method that does everything.
Krista:Yeah.
James:I do believe that they intended to include informal instruction at the beginning of Jump Right In. And you will see some little bits that do touch on it, but it's just not nearly enough. I think this would be a great opportunity for me to talk a little bit more deeply about Marilyn's influence on me as far as that childhood development aspect of it. Because again, it's looking at what students need instead of what we, what our agenda is as a teacher. Like we feel like we have these objectives that we have to, especially public school band teachers.
James:A little humble brag. One of my mentees that I was mentoring is a public school band teacher in fifth grade. And when they first came to me, they weren't that comfortable teaching at such a young age, they didn't really know the best ways to do it, and they were trying to include audiation, but didn't really know how. And through my efforts mentoring them, they became not only comfortable with fifth grade, but they felt empowered to be able to handle even younger. And so they brought a proposal to their board of education to start a band program for fourth grade, and the proposal was approved, and now that district will have a fourth grade band program where it didn't before, and that brought this teacher's employment status from part-time to full-time. So, you know, I have had a bunch of people that I've mentored, and when I see some of the impact that it's making, and that's only one person, and there's more stories like that, but that's why at this stage in my life, as enamored as I am of still teaching students and children, mentorship has become so much more important to me. And what Marilyn did mentoring me in terms ... Marilyn didn't need to teach me much about audiation. I could handle that on my own.
James:She taught me how to center the child and about developmental stages. You know, presumably I should have been taught that in college in those courses that I took, but it didn't really teach me anything. And Marilyn taught me so much about what children need when and individual types of children and what they need. And it's given me a whole perspective, not just for young children, but even as they get older, even dealing with my own son, and teenagers in general. That's something that I don't see any other approach really does in quite the same way as MLT. And Marilyn I think of as the the best of them all in terms of all the educators I've met and read about in GIML, I don't think anyone really understood children in quite the same way Marilyn did.
Hannah:I agree. I think Keyboard Games in general and all the wisdom that Marilyn informally passed to a lot of us. Hold on.
James:Yeah, we're all all three of us are choked up now because of this.
Hannah:Hold on. It put a lot of patience out there. You know, she really encouraged us just to be patient and to understand that. Eric Bluestine made a really good analogy about how teaching preschool is like trying to tap dance in the ocean. And I think Marilyn had all this really great wisdom about children when they're not participating, and children when they're being, you know, very high energy, and children when they're in a bad mood. And yeah, I think she did something for us that many of us didn't have, and it really took away a lot of frustration, I think.
James:Yes.
Hannah:About our agenda versus meeting kids where they are, meeting any age student where they are, really.
James:Yeah, and I've always been good with special needs education, but with Marilyn's addition, now I just feel even more empowered than I ever was before. I just feel like none of us will ever have quite the same level of wisdom that she had, but she gave so much to us.
Hannah:James, this has been a really great conversation. Getting to know you and hearing some of your more maybe controversial adjacent statements. I really appreciate that you were honest and candid about some things about the jazz world and the classical world and the way you came up in your music instruction. But we have one more question before we go. And that is do you have any advice for the listeners, whether it be piano teachers who are thinking about teaching other instruments? And I know some specific teachers who are on the fence about whether to pick up that guitar method and start teaching guitar. Any other advice just in general before we go?
James:I've been encouraged over and over and over again with feedback from parents. I know there's a lot of fear. Newcomers who are starting to get into this have a lot of insecurity about what parents think. But trust me, I've seen plenty of hostility from parents as well, but it hasn't shaken me at all because I also see just gratitude and buy-in from parents like I've never seen before. Even in my older days when I was a successful teacher before, parents never seemed to to quite appreciate just how successful their students were, their children were. And now I've heard parents just fawn over me and this approach, and they've never seen anything like it, and they're just flabbergasted at at how it worked. Even parents who were previously skeptical and then came around.
James:I was told just the other week about a child who I teach piano lessons to, and he's also a Suzuki cello student. He's never taken cello from me. Only has taken Suzuki cello since before he met me. And he was doing well always. But I was told last week that there was a recent kind of a class or an event in class where all the students were playing something. Where they had to learn by ear and none of the others could do it. Only my student was the only one who could do it. And just the parent appreciated that so much, just that she noticed. And I have taught him recently, I've taught him just a a little bit of cello. I gave him like one cello lesson, just one, where we did a little bit of stuff that he won't be getting in Suzuki classes. Things like voice leading on tonic and dominant chords, and improvising, and just the appreciation when it starts to sink into parents that this is really unlike anything else that they'll get from any other music teacher anywhere.
James:That in itself, if we want to think about like a business point of view or competition with other teachers, there really is no competition because when you have this approach that's unlike everyone else, once parents understand what it is, they're sold. I had another parent who told me, she just pulled me aside and said just what a fantastic teacher I was, and just the way she said it, I've never heard any parents say that before in the decades before. I had award-winning students, and I never had a parent pull me aside and say anything like that. So my advice to teachers, I know a lot of teachers are skeptical because of what they think parents will think, and also I see a lot of skepticism of teachers who look at Jump Right In or Music Moves for Piano and think, oh, Audiation seems great, but I'm gonna do it like this instead.
James:And I'm not gonna use Music Moves for Piano, I'm just gonna teach audiation, but I'm gonna use these other books or something. Or I'll use Music Moves for Piano just on the side, just kind of barely use it and focus on some other book. I strongly urge teachers not to do that. It just the way learn. Learning to teach audiation is a very difficult subject for a teacher to study. It took me months and months, I would say at least nine months before I even started to feel remotely comfortable at all. Not that I was doing it great then, but even just to gain some comfort took at least nine months. And then I don't think I was really good at it until probably two or three years in. And now I'm nine years in, just for the record.
James:Again, I've heard so much skepticism about teachers who want to use other books, and I strongly caution against it. I think the way to do this is you really have to dive in and do it by the book. No matter how skeptical you feel, you need time to just follow the recipe before you start playing with the ingredients. And no matter what you think, you think it might be boring for the students, you think the parents are not gonna like it, whatever you think about it, just make yourself do it exactly the way the teacher's guide and Krista, your excellent courses, Krista and Hannah, both of you, your excellent courses.
James:There's no way I could have achieved this just from the teacher's guides alone. It it was really from what I learned from you two. And the community, just checking in constantly with the Facebook groups. Teachers should not feel shy about posting constant questions, never ever hold back a question, you won't see the disgusting attitudes like you see in other Facebook forums where a teacher will ask a question and get nasty answers. You won't see anything like that. And so after you've had at least a year or even several years of experience teaching Music Moves for Piano or Jump Right In, by the book, then you might start to know enough about how MLT works to start changing it to your own thing. But you really need to learn a lot about the learning sequence, the content learning sequence and the skill learning sequence. And it is hard. So don't try to make it up.
Krista:It's hard, but it's worth it. And and I think that using Music Learning Theory, you really need that growth mentality. I've been doing this since 2002, 2003, and I am still learning, and I am still tweaking some things in my lessons and trying new things. And you know, people talk about like overlapping lessons. I didn't feel comfortable with that until about 10 years into teaching Music Moves for Piano. So you're constantly learning, and I think that makes it exciting for both you and for your students as well. It's not a bad thing at all that we're constantly learning.
Hannah:Well, thank you, James, for all your time today and for sharing so much about yourself and your teaching. And James is in our Introduction to Audiation-based Piano Instruction Facebook group. So, he always is providing really great comments and answers to questions. So be sure to join that group if you have not already done so. And you'll see James there and me and Krista and so many other dedicated Music Moves for Piano Teachers. Thanks so much. We'll see you soon.