The Nuts and Bolts of Online Piano Teaching E-Book

Ratko Delorko

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 119

Beschreibung

The Art of Online Piano Pedagogy. After most of the music pros were thrown into online teaching during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Ratko Delorko, performing and recording pianist (currently lecturing at Frankfurt Music University, former Mozarteum Salzburg) found plenty of good reasons to not go back totally to in-person lessons. Find all dos and don'ts here and find out how he enhanced the online learning experience with innovative technology.

Leseprobe

Ratko Delorko

The Nuts and Bolts of Online Piano Teaching

ZK 05266

Ratko Delorko - 50 years of experience as a performing and recording pianist, composer, mentor, author and producer. He is considered an expert on period stringed keyboard instruments, historical informed performance, music business & technology and online long distance teaching. In this book you will find solutions to the problems of digital teaching, as well as the necessary technical requirements.

delorko.com

Ratko Delorko

The Nuts and Bolts of Online Piano Teaching

Long Distance Teaching Demystified

Problems and Solutions - Gear - Pitfalls

Content

First a Little Trivia…

First Insights

The Possible Learning Approaches

Pragmatic Perspectives

Welcome to the Briar Patch of Paragraphs

What Is There to Discover?

Let’s Get Techy

Let There Be Light…

Cable Clutter - Tied up in Knots

Switch Screens, Manage Options and Zoom Away

My House, My Car, My Boat… ummm - No, My Gear!

It’ll Get Lost in Transmission

Silence Please - Recording

Backups Are for Cowards

Happy Trails!

Something Personal

Imprint

Text:

© 2021 Copyright by Ratko Delorko

Pictures:

© 2021 Copyright by Ratko Delorko

Cover:

© 2021 Copyright by Ratko Delorko

Editor:

English Translation David Andruss

Content:

Ratko Delorko Zeitklang Eichendorffstr. 31 45219 Essen [email protected] www.delorko.com

Distribution:

Tredition, Hamburg

First Insights

Yamaha asked me to present their system at the Frankfurt Music Fair in 2008. Sure, the first Remote Lessons back then were the first baby steps, but they were a massive battle of gear. It was even worthy of a headline, which probably wouldn't be so exciting today. The Distance Lesson has become slimmer in the meantime, but also more complex. I'll keep technical recommendations as general as possible since technical structures change so extremely quickly. If I were to get very device-specific, you could rightfully expect that what you're reading about would already be at least partially obsolete. Online teaching—properly implemented—works splendidly. Online pedagogy, meanwhile, is a bit different because you can't “grasp” the learner and their attention spans are significantly reduced. To illustrate: after only 5 minutes of a remote lesson, the ability to reproduce the content from memory drops to 50%, after 15 minutes to 20%—a real low point. After 20 minutes everything is gone. At this point, at the latest, you have to counteract by targeted distraction. In webinars, this tipping point is at “only” 45 minutes. But I digress…

Just because we as teachers may not yet be able to handle the technology, or may not even suspect any added value behind it since you actually panic about technology—(let's be honest: maybe you're thinking, “Ewwww, I'm not techy at all, but I still want to keep my salary")—doesn’t mean this has to be the case for our èléves. So… The teacher should then also have autodidactic abilities, because his learning process is not finite.

Digitization has not only changed our everyday lives, but also the world of work. To survive in a constantly evolving world, we need to keep discovering and learning new things. In order for young people to adapt to a digital future, it is crucial to adapt the old-fashioned education system to the challenges it presents. Piano lessons are no exception. The path to success lies in exploiting the possibilities of digital education solutions in terms of learning objectives. After all, digital education means using digital tools to impart knowledge and valuable skills in modern teaching. Furthermore, we must be able to apply the acquired skills and learned information in a results-oriented manner in order to arrive more quickly at intelligent solutions to problems.

I find the option of being able to work anywhere in the world exciting. You don't have to embrace the whole world, but you can certainly expand your radius bit by bit. This works best if you discover your niche for yourself as a teacher. Not everyone can serve everything and everyone. That won't work. That would be presumptuous. You also don't go to an ear, nose and throat doctor when you need a new pair of glasses, have a stomach ache or need a hand surgeon. Although the ENT has studied medicine and has a sound general medical knowledge, he cannot do everything. No, as you can tell, I'm not a fan of gendering. Thank you for your understanding and your patience.

Anyway, there are areas in which you and I are particularly good and capable. You probably already know your area of highest competence, or maybe you need to do some serious soul-searching for a few days to figure out what that area is. It is about breaking down the levels in the genre of “piano teaching” in order to have a more clearly defined external effect, and to actually become aware of your core competence. So, it works like this: The umbrella genre, meaning the overarching name of your activity is piano lessons. The genre is then classical piano lessons for example, with the stylistic components being variable. And for goodness sake, don’t just use the word “qualified” and give people a reason to laugh… So, now we have arrived at classical piano lessons for adults as a sub-genre. Here we come to the niche with classical piano lessons for adults who had lessons in their youth. This segment has now come to a head. There you will find your exact target audience, and they will be able to find you. Thus, it is clear for all that you don’t teach children who only come to piano lessons as a condition for being allowed to continue their beloved horseback riding lessons, for example. All components are interchangeable. Please play around with them until you find out exactly who you are and what you have to offer.

With proper preparation, distance lessons work splendidly:

• in these differently structured piano lessons,

• with repertoire development,

• while teaching new terminology,

• with the unloved, but not to be underestimated “solfeggio,” which is hardly used in German and English speaking countries.

• in aural training and music theory up to extended cadenzas and

• with improvised song accompaniment, which is relevant for teaching in schools and universities.

Skillful approaches are required in conveying content since you literally cannot physically touch the learner—every tiny process, every correction, no matter how small, must be verbalized, explained in detail, and then shown from different perspectives if possible, because you cannot, with the best will in the world, provide any manual assistance. In time, one definitely becomes a walking dictionary. For me, this was very educational. Also, I have found that this approach is very gladly taken up by students. Initially, there may be more chatting than playing, but the end result in the student’s playing is achieved with fewer corrections as the lesson progresses. So, not much really changes on the overall timeline, but you can definitely talk your mouth off and empty three bottles of water on lesson days like these.

A lot of things that you would hardly do in a face-to-face class can be implemented well in distance learning. Basically, even the online version of, “I see something you don't see… and it has a slur,” works. Small notebooks can be created very easily. I myself also work with notepads, sticky notes, several notebooks, memo files and voice memos—all of which are excellent memory aids. Writing a short, but important piece of content written down in a notebook in ones own words gets the thinking process going again. This could also be seen as the beginning of reflection: a little less playing and more thinking. Implementation will work better afterwards. The content is then placed under its umbrella term in the back of the notebook or file and in a short time you have even developed your own glossary!

In practice: A short time ago, a smart student from Hong Kong asked me what the difference was between ritardando and rallentando. Actually they are the same, aren't they? (Beethoven Sonata op.2, No.2, 1st movement) This is what I had once been told by linguistically less competent professors in response to my youthfully curious question. In the meantime, I speak Italian fluently, almost like a second mother tongue. Therefore I could explain a lot: how the Italian language became the language of music, that in ancient times musicians spoke Italian, that many today no longer have this knowledge of the language, etc.