What follows is a rough-edit of the episode, so please forgive typos and/or formatting errors.

All content is my own; requests to use this material – with proper citation – can be sent to [email protected]

Episode 232: Cheers to What is Working in This Season

Well, hello there, my teacher friends!  Welcome to the Beyond Measure Podcast. Christina Whitlock here, your host, voice of experience, and self-appointed Anytime Piano Teacher Friend. We are REALLY CLOSE to our five year anniversary together here at Beyond Measure and I just want to tell you how much I appreciate you.  Attention is the most valuable gift we have to offer one another, and the fact that you give me 20 minutes of yours each week is not lost on me. Thank you for being here.  And now – let’s get on with the show!  You are listening to episode 232 of the Beyond Measure Podcast.

As promised last week, I am here today with a fan-favorite episode: a glimpse into the things that ARE working for me in this season of life.

Quick backstory for those of you who are new around here: I keep a running list of things in my phone that ARE working for me in this season of life. I also keep a list of things that are NOT working. Every quarter or so, I talk about the things that are working here on the podcast, and then I share more about what’s NOT working in my Piano Confessions e-letter that week.

This is a simple practice I can’t recommend enough.  We think we KNOW the things that are working… and that aren’t… but NAMING THEM?  Writing them down on an actual list? It helps make you more conscious of the things that are giving you energy and the things that are draining it.

SO: Without further delay, I’m bringing you five things that ARE working for me in this season of life.

The first thing I will share is my studio mantra for this year.  If you’ve never heard me talk about this  – I choose a studio mantra every year. I choose something I say ALL THE TIME and make it a theme for the year. I display the studio theme in multiple places around the studio, it’s on the custom binder covers I design each year, and it frames a lot of communications I send to parents.

Here are a few studio mantras I’ve used in years past:

• You get what you repeat. (James Clear, Atomic Habits)
• Progress Over Perfection
• Invest in Your Future Self
• Celebrate the Musician You Are TODAY
• Experiment, Explore, Examine, Express

THIS YEAR’S theme was born out of the research I did this summer on play. My studio mantra for this year is:  Play is the Point.

I’ve talked a lot about this already, but here’s the gist: We all know our society is obsessed with productivity and achievement. I feel like – as music teachers – we’ve ended up caving to those pressures. We took all that research that links music study with academic benefits and ran with it. As in, that’s what we use as our selling point. Be a musician because it will make you better at everything else.

…and those things are true. But that’s NOT the reason to study music. As counter-cultural as it may be, the human spirit needs to PLAY. It needs to explore. To be curious. To create.

Our students are buried under goals to achieve and produce. The last thing they need are piano lessons that pile more of THAT on them. It seems to me the highest value we have to offer students today is a BREAK from the pressures of achievement culture. And yet, many of the students we teach are consumed by the pressure cookers of academia and the weight of expectations.

Thus, friends, PLAY is the point. I’m over piano study as a status symbol. If my students can’t sit down at a piano and express something or create something?  What’s the point?  PLAY IS THE POINT.

Anyway, that studio mantra has REALLY been working for me this year.  I hesitated at first, because I didn’t plan out my “elevator pitch” for this theme.  The first week back to lessons, I definitely spent way too many words trying to explain WHY play was the point.  But, I can safely say: we are 6 weeks into my teaching year and this intentionality around PLAY – on my part AND my students’ part – has already been transformative.

If you’re curious HOW I’m implementing more play in my lessons… I’ll move to my second thing that IS working this season:

In honor of my 30^th year of piano teaching, my students are working on a 30-piece challenge this fall. 30/40/50 piece challenges have been around for awhile. This idea became mainstream in Piano Teacher World thanks to Australian piano teacher/composer extraordinaire, Elissa Milne. The idea is to embrace a repertoire-rich approach to teaching; encouraging students to learn large numbers of pieces.

This is not new for me. I’ve often had students complete what I call the Fall Forty, which is a Forty piece challenge. So, for some, 30 feels like a break.

BUT HERE’S THE THING:  Play is the point, right?  I just got done telling you that we are ditching achievement culture and yet…here I am saddling my students with an expectation of learning a BUNCH of pieces this fall. Sounds contradictory, doesn’t it?

WELL: since PLAY is the point and all, there is a TWIST on this year’s 30-piece challenge. 😊

BEFORE a piece gets added to their list of 30, students have to do two things.  First, they need to present the piece in its entirety. Correct notes, stable tempo, all the usual things. They need to learn the piece as the composer intended. That’s normally sufficient, right?  Well, not when PLAY is the POINT.

After a student plays the completed piece for me, they are ALSO required to put their own unique twist on the piece. They need to offer some kind of creative modification. They can change the rhythm, the meter, the key, the octave placements. They can invert intervals, alter chord progressions, or change dynamics or tempo in a drastic way. They have to do SOMETHING to the piece.

You guys. This has been SUCH a good move. As you can expect, some students dive right in. They’ll modify a piece all day long. They do it anyway, right?

But there are also others. You know the type. The students who have a really hard time NOT playing what’s on the page in front of them. You know, students like me back in the day. 😊

6 weeks in, I can confidently say I have seen DRASTIC IMPROVEMENTS in creative exploration. I mean, BIG changes, friends.  I have a senior this year – she’s terrific – she’s been with me for 12 years – and she is a wonderful student. She has ALWAYS struggled to feel comfortable with improvisation or any other activity where I ask her to do things away from the printed page.  She’s an excellent student and never fails to meet a teacher’s expectations, so she’s ALL IN on this 30-piece challenge. She’s been working hard to complete her pieces as quickly as possible and this past week, she literally SMILED and LAUGHED through several of her creative modifications.  I told her she could use a few Diversions by Juan Cabeza because they are literally written TO BE ALTERED. They’re easier than her other repertoire but that’s the joy of a 30-piece challenge: it means we can still explore “easier” piece that still have something to teach our students.  You know, because PLAY is the point.  But anyway – she was having ACTUAL FUN presenting her twists on these pieces for me and it gave me ALL the warm-fuzzy teacher feelings. It took me “assigning” these creative spins. It took me making them “a challenge”. But she’s DOING IT.

…and she’s not the only one.

Of course, there’s one more bonus related to this challenge at play: When students spend time altering their pieces?  When they PLAY with them in a creative way?  They learn the pieces better. We know humans learn most effectively through play. That is backed by science. And there’s something to this, friends: that not only are my students having fun putting their own twist on their pieces, but they’re also PLAYING THEM BETTER IN THE FIRST PLACE.

There are all kinds of lessons wrapped up in the Creative Twist element of my 30-piece challenge. Many times, my student’s chosen modifier comes from a mistake they make along the way.  A mis-interpreted rhythm becomes the foundation for their creative spin.  Keep missing A-flats?  We’ll ditch them for Johnny’s version.  Aren’t we forever telling our students to turn their mistakes into something useful?  Aren’t we hoping they will see MORE in their performances than the errors they make? Don’t we want them to PLAY?

I’m not always so confident in my ideas… but I’m telling you: requiring my students to change something (or as many somethings as they want) about every piece they’ve learned? It has been a game-changing experience thus far. Play is the point.

…and I KNOW some of you are sitting there thinking, “How do you have TIME to do that in the lesson?” and I’ll just say: you have time to do whatever you prioritize doing. For me, the lesson is always a time to explore and to build understanding of specific concepts. I prioritize those things. Sometimes at the expense of hearing every piece my student practiced that week. It’s okay; I’ll hear it next week. They can keep working. If PLAY is the point, then PLAY is what I will model during the lesson.

Phew – okay – those were two REALLY BIG things that are working for me in this season.  Nothing else I have for you today is that deep. Let’s look at the third thing on my list for you today:

Sigh. Okay, friends: after YEARS of needing to do it, I released my waitlist. My studio waitlist had grown to 64 students. I use MyMusicStaff and every time I sign in, I’m greeted with the number of students on my waitlist. It has been a source of heaviness for me for YEARS.

It’s kind of a “poor little rich girl” problem, I know. Like, woe is me… too many people want to study with me. Boo hoo. 😊 But REALLY: I’m a serial people-pleaser and it’s VERY hard to know there are so many people looking for lessons who I can’t help. Because my retention rate is so high and because I’ve made the decision not to bring on new students for the time being, I really needed to shut down my waitlist. So, after YEARS of planning how I was going to do it, I finally did it. I assembled a list of local teachers who wanted to be on the list. I emailed that list to the 60+ families on my waitlist and told them I did not foresee bringing any new students on this year or next.  I told them if they absolutely wanted to remain on the list, they could reply as such and I would keep them on it, but otherwise, I would be deleting their information from the waitlist at the end of the week.

Well, I ended up with three students who asked to remain on the list. And I deleted the rest.  And – I don’t know why, friends – but it feels SO MUCH BETTER to log into MMS and see “3 students waiting”, as opposed to 64.

So, yeah… releasing the waitlist is DEFINITELY working for me in this season. That could be a whole episode, I know. There are all kinds of counter-examples in this story: things you should definitely NOT do. As always, I’m not here to claim I have it all figured out; I’m just sharing my very imperfect experience.

Moving on: a fourth thing that IS working for me this season of life?

Coffeehouse work sessions with my kids. This one is funny, guys. I figured out long ago that if I REALLY want focused time to write, I needed to do it outside of my house.  You know – my house – where I live and work 24/7… where there is always another load of laundry to throw in or a dishwasher to unload or a stack of piano books to be put away or whatever.  Because we live in a society where multitasking rules, I do my best writer work in a different environment. Undiagnosed ADHD is also surely a factor here.

Anyway, my teenager has discovered she likes working outside the house, too. So for the last few years, I’ve been taking her out with me on the weekends so she can study or do homework or whatever. Well, as things go, little sister has decided she needs in on the action, too.  She’s in fourth grade this year, with a teacher who LOVES homework, and always seems to have an abundance of things to do.  So, the last several weeks, we’ve been spending Saturday or Sunday afternoons at a coffeeshop. Really, I’m impressed at their focus in that environment. My 9-year old brings her work, a book, and a blank notebook she can draw or write in. My 15-year old brings her chemistry and whatever else needs doing. We set up shop and get to work for a few hours.  Sounds like we know how to party, right? Really, I’m trying to soak it up. Homework during the week can be a real struggle with our schedules and personality quirks, so any time they will sit and work willingly and independently?  Oh, I am so here for that.

For some of you, I know this sounds strange. If you don’t have trouble focusing, I’m sure you think I’m nuts. But, it works for us, and that’s what this list is for, right? 😊

It’s exactly why Monday Morning Power Hours with my Patreon SuperFriends works for me. My squirrely brain seems to require some novelty to get really focused. I could easily name Monday Morning Power Hours as something that’s working for me in this season… but I’m pretty sure I’ve already done that once or twice in these types of episodes and I don’t want to be redundant.  I’ll just say this: for a profession where we spend almost NO TIME our co-workers, there is something so beautiful to know that on Monday mornings I’m going to see the faces of my teacher friends on Zoom: I know I’ll see Anna and Laura and Craig and Jennifer and Ginger and plenty of other teachers who show up when they can. We’ll all talk about what we’re going to accomplish that hour: usually lots of lesson plans for the week, some laundry, some admin work… and it doesn’t sound like much on the surface, but there really IS something to hearing other people talk about all these seemingly-mundane things we do for work and life. It doesn’t seem like it should make a difference, but it just does. Seeing faces and cheering for someone when they get all their receipts entered for the quarter or PRACTICE or whatever… that is a level of community we don’t get as piano teachers. Even the practicing of naming what you’re going to accomplish in the next hour is helpful, let alone the accountability of knowing you need to report back at the end of the hour. I don’t know. It definitely works for me.

Monday Morning Power Hour meets at 11am eastern time and all SuperFriends are welcome! You can find out more at the link in today’s shownotes or head to ChristinaWhitlock.com/superfriends for more information.

Last but not least: here’s my fifth thing that IS working in this season of life: The Intermediate Piano Teaching Cohort I’m leading with Janna Williamson! Janna and I have been planning this cohort for a very long time, so to see it all coming to fruition – with SUCH an ariticulate group of teachers – is very fulfilling indeed. We look forward to offering it again in the future.

Okay, friends: that’s it for what’s working for me in this season of life. If you want a peek at what’s NOT working, I’ll send out a list in this week’s installment of Piano Teacher Confessions. Links to sign up for that email, plus links to past episodes in the What’s Working series can all be found in today’s shownotes at ChristinaWhitlock.com/episode232.

Let’s wrap up with a toast, friends!

Studio teacher friends from all over the world: today we acknowledge the power of naming the stuff of life. May we all take a few moments today to reflect on the things that are working, as well as the things that aren’t. Cheers to us, my friends!  Hear, hear.

That’s it for episode 232.  Again, there is a lengthy list of links waiting for you in today’s shownotes. If you’re interested in becoming a SuperFriend of the show, you would totally make my day by jumping into the Patreon crew and seeing what it’s all about.

I hope you are excited to tackle the week ahead, friends! Onward and upward indeed.