OUR APPROACH
Good teaching
is a craft.
The road to consistent student results is through learning that craft. It can be taught AND it can be learnt.
That is what IMPA is: the technical and musical knowledge, the business skills, and access to outstanding mentors, in one place, at one time, working on the problems you actually have in your studio. Nothing held back.
Anthony van den Broek
Principal Lecturer, IMPA · AMEB examiner and examiner trainer
FROM INSIGHT TO PRACTICE
Learn it. Try it.
Understand what changed.
1
Understand →
Connect musical and educational principles.
2
Apply →
Bring the ideas into your own teaching.
3
Reflect →
Observe the student’s response.
4
Refine ↺
Develop your judgement through feedback.
This cycle runs through the course’s teaching, practical tasks, recorded lessons, reflective journal and assessment feedback. The point is to return to your studio with something specific to try, then understand whether it worked.
FROM THE COURSE CURRICULUM
What guides our teaching.
1
Start with the learner.
Look at the student’s stage of development, motivation, musical experience and current understanding. Choose explanations and tasks that make sense for that learner.
2
Sequence the learning.
Break larger goals into achievable steps. Build on what the student can already do, scaffold the next challenge and check that the foundations are secure.
3
Choose repertoire for a reason.
Select music for the skills it develops, its expressive possibilities and its place in the student’s longer learning sequence. A grade is only part of that decision.
4
Let technique serve the music.
Connect movement, coordination and sound with musical intention. Diagnose the cause of a difficulty before choosing an exercise or a practice strategy.
5
Build independence.
Use questions, demonstration and specific feedback to help students hear, understand and evaluate their own playing. Practice should have a purpose they can explain.
6
Reflect and adapt.
Observe the student’s response, examine evidence from lessons and adjust your teaching. Keep developing your own philosophy through reading, experience and professional discussion.
An examination syllabus
is not a curriculum.
An examination syllabus tells you what will be assessed. It does not tell you what to teach in March so that October takes care of itself.
Our starting point is the skill inside the music: what a student can already do, what comes next, and which piece or exercise will help them get there. A piece can be the right grade without being the right next step.
What this means in the next lesson.
A student copies a rhythm but cannot read it in the next piece.
What you investigate: Which part is missing: pulse, notation, subdivision or transferring the skill?
What you develop: A short sequence of activities that teaches the missing skill, then checks it in new music.
The notes are right, but the music is not expressive.
What you investigate: Does the student understand the phrase, hear the intended sound and know how to produce it?
What you develop: Listening, analysis, demonstration and movement connected to a musical purpose.
Practice happens, but progress is patchy.
What you investigate: Does the student know what to practise, how to practise it and what success will sound like?
What you develop: Clear goals, purposeful practice strategies and ways to recognise improvement.
WHY I BUILT THIS COURSE
The guesswork went out.
The joy came back.
For years I was a decent pianist and a sometimes frustrated teacher, and the frustration turned out to be the useful part. Every time I was frustrated with a student, it was because I did not have the solution. Usually not because the student was lazy, or unmusical. I didn’t know what to do next. Even when a student hadn’t practised, that was still mine to solve.
Most of us teach from a very small number of models: our own teacher, maybe one or two others, and underneath it all, ourselves as a student. And most of us were the motivated ones. We practised. Which leaves us least equipped for the students who don’t. If the only model you have is yourself, you teach brilliantly to the one student in ten built the same way, and improvise for the other nine.
Take a student who reads poorly. You can hand her another piece at her reading level, watch her feel small, and call it consolidation. Or you can teach her something genuinely difficult by rote, so she sounds like the musician she wants to be, and quietly backfill the reading underneath. Same student, same half hour, an entirely different year.
I didn’t invent moves like that. I went and found them, from teachers who were willing to hand them over.
Teaching can look mysterious from the outside, and our profession doesn’t always help. A good deal of what works is held close, as though it were a trade secret. It isn’t one. When I hit a problem I couldn’t solve, I brought those mentors into my own studio and watched how they solved it.
Years of examining did the rest. You hear the full range of what is happening in studios around the country, and how many of the problems have straightforward fixes that nobody has ever put in front of the teacher. The guesswork went out of my teaching, and the job became enjoyable again.
You don’t have to be the best pianist in the room. You have to be the teacher who knows what to do next.
The studio around the teaching.
Good teaching needs a studio that communicates clearly, sets expectations before the first lesson, and brings parents in as support at home.
Clear policies and professional boundaries
Thoughtful intake and student assessment
Practical business and communication skills
Somewhere to take the hard questions.
A student has stalled. The practice has not happened. An explanation that worked last week no longer helps.
The founding cohort’s ten extra group tutorial hours give you time to bring a real difficulty, discuss the possibilities and return to your studio with a next step.
You have to be the teacher
who knows what to do next.
Explore the curriculum, check your starting point or request a questions call.
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