There are three basic goals that ought to be pursued simultaneously at lessons:

1. To develop the ability to read music independently.
2. To develop proper technique and achieve quality performance.
3. To study the universally-accepted literature.

Are your students really reading? Reading music is the ability to convert musical characters and signs to be heard on an instrument or by singing. Most teachers believe reading is of primary importance for beginning students. However, teachers often do not detect when students are actually playing by ear, memory, or guessing. This problem may only become apparent when students reach music too difficult for them to imitate or remember. Look for these signs of poor reading comprehension:

• Needing help from parents during practice time at home.
• Can play a piece fast, but not slowly.
• Having difficulty reading while following the metronome.
• Play by rote or imitation to learn a piece.
• Having difficulty playing unfamiliar melodies.
• Looking up and down at the keys while playing.
 

Inadequate reading skills are the result of incorrect teaching tricks such as using:
• Rhymes to name the lines and spaces of the staff.
• Finger numbers to help students read music.
• Multi-key hand position methods.
• Intervals and chords named prematurely before reading is fluent.
• Familiar music for method studies.
• Imitation and rote to learn new pieces.

These are some of the many shortcuts that are intended to speed the process of learning to play for beginners; instead, they delay and avoid the all important fundamental task of learning to read music alphabetically on the staff and will ever after compete in the student’s mind with the true logic behind staff reading.

Are your student developing technically? Do you have trouble correcting these technical issues?

• Fingers flat, not curved, or joints collapsing while playing.
• Fingers flying up or falling off the keys.
• Controlling touch and dynamics.

The Conservatory Piano Course Teaching Manual gives clear direction on how to correct these problems common to beginning piano students and many other important technical factors.

Are your student developing musical interest? Those who study piano should, right from the start, become familiar with the children’s literature by master composers. Piano literature is far from boring; on the contrary, it is very fun. Only when it is too hard, do students think it is boring. Then, in looking for something interesting to play, they choose what is familiar to them and fail to become acquainted with the huge amount of delightful literature for beginners. This cycle will be broken if students progress quickly to successfully play literature at an early stage of lessons. To know the piano, one must play its literature.