Phenomenal Piano Lessons | The Importance of White Boards
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
Hello all, I hope you’re doing well today. What I wanted to talk about today is the importance of whiteboards in music lessons. Technically you don’t need a whiteboard for phenomenal piano lessons. You can learn to play with just the sheet music, your instructor, and your instrument. But a whiteboard can help you learn so much more quickly and so much more thoroughly, just like how a whiteboard in a classroom helps a teacher teach her students more efficiently than if she just had desks and textbooks at her disposal. Whiteboards allow students to visualize concepts their instructors are teaching them more clearly. As such, it allows students to more quickly fix an issue they may be having in their understanding of their phenomenal piano lessons and their performance of their instrument.
And whiteboards give instructors yet another tool with which to teach, and a new way to express what they are trying to convey to their students. Different people have lots of different learning styles, and different instructors have different teaching styles. But I know a lot of people are very visual people, and they’re also very visual learners. So these people who are very visual people, it really helps their learning process to be able to see almost what they need to be hearing when they play expressed visually. It’s like the instructor and the piece the student is trying to learn is like a really dense, old, confusing book that the student is trying to read and understand.
The whiteboard allows the instructor to make the musical version of footnote annotations to an edit of an older volume. They can be less technical, and more personalized instructions and notes on phenomenal piano lessons. And of course, white boards can also be interactive in that both the instructor and the student can visualize and write on them. There are some times where the instructor, no matter how good they are, is not going to be able to understand a question that a student has or what part of the material the student is missing.
Having a whiteboard allows the student to more clearly show the instructor what area they are confused about or struggling in, and then the instructor is able to come up with a new way to explain or reteach the material in question. Whiteboards can also help the atmosphere of the room. Most people generally associate a room that has one or more whiteboards or chalkboards as a place of learning. If having whiteboards in a music studio makes the student think of learning, it can create a more studious mood and put the student at ease that they are about to get an awesome lesson from a knowledgeable and well-qualified instructor.
Which is, of course, always the case at Curtis Music Academy, but if a whiteboard in the room makes the student feel more comfortable about their lessons and their investment, they of course they will be provided. Whiteboards are also good for the environment with phenomenal piano lessons. They allow instructors to cut down on the amount of papers they print out (and re-print out if and when the student misplaces or forgets them), because they can just write notes or lessons on a whiteboard.
And whiteboards have been especially useful in the recent weeks here at Curtis Music Academy amidst the public health concerns and travel restrictions, and concerns some people still have about traveling to places like their music lessons. When students are taking a remote, online lesson over something like Skype or Google, they don’t always have easy access to a printer if there’s something their instructor wants them to have handy while they’re playing in their phenomenal piano lessons. If the student is able to either write down the music or other material for themselves or the instructor is able to illustrate it for them on a larger whiteboard in their room, it helps the lessons go much more smoothly, it helps the student learn material more successfully, it eases the amount of stress and pressure on the instructor, and all involved parties leave feeling more satisfied. Whiteboards are also an economic investment.
Investing in whiteboards and dry erase markers can help reduce costs, because then you need to use fewer pieces of paper, less printer ink, and other things like that. So then that money can be redistributed to other, more productive areas to make Curtis Music Academy an even better environment and create even better experiences for its students. And, for younger children, whiteboards can be a clean and simple but fun distraction or break from lessons.
So, a very young child will have trouble sitting still for the duration of a lesson. And it has been shown that people, especially younger ones, have greatly improved focus if they take short breaks throughout an activity. So for instructors to create the best lesson environment for their students, they need to provide breaks and small side activities for the youngest ones’ phenomenal piano lessons. Whiteboards are generally a very clean source of entertainment, and younger children get a ton of fun out of enjoying them and creating some sort of silly drawing or project on them.
And they can be reused for lots and lots of lessons over time. Sometimes, instructors could possibly tie in the break activity the student is completing on the whiteboard back into the overall theme of the phenomenal piano lesson. So even in the breaks from the lesson, there is still value being added to the students’ learning. And, when the students have finished having their designated break time, they will be ready to come back and be more productive in what they are trying to learn, and they will be less likely to be antsy or distracted, and will overall have a more successful and a more enjoyable experience, which is always the goal of music lessons.
Those are just a few of the reasons why whiteboards are an important resource for music schools like Curtis Music Academy, and how they can improve the quality of their phenomenal piano lessons and the experiences of both their students and their instructors by introducing the use of whiteboards in their curriculums and practices.