Creative Piano Method Program
Teacher Training
Teaching Aural Skills and Creativity
Do you struggle with finding enough time to include ear training and improvisation in your piano lessons?
Your current lessons are focused on learning how to read notation, playing with proper technique, mastering repertoire, and completing theory pages. Where is there time for building essential aural skills and musical creativity?
Do you want to be able to:
1) Teach aural and creative skills in an effective sequence with confidence
2) Offer your students a way to practice these skills without extra 1-1 lesson time with you
3) Improve your own musicianship as you teach your students these skills
But you just don’t have the training, resources, or time to add it to your lessons because they are already jam packed with technical work, repertoire, sight reading, and music theory?
I get it!
As a teacher who sees 140 students in a week, I need an efficient way to ensure that they are all getting access to a way to practice and track their aural skill development, while applying those skills to improvisation and composition.
Since I was taught in a more traditional way (reading music, and playing it with accuracy), and I started my teaching journey along those lines, my lessons were missing a proven way to get students to play by ear with understanding, and apply that to being creative at the piano.
After many years of teaching, I realized that the most popular piano methods, such as Alfred’s, Piano Adventures, Bastien, and Wunderkeys, leave it largely up to the teacher to include and properly sequence ear training, improvisation, and composition activities in their lessons.
Although piano teachers know the importance of aural skills in being a musician, most piano teachers are not prioritizing essential aural skills in their lessons, partly because the pieces in those popular method books are primarily sequenced according to what students are able to decode on the music staff.
Introducing The Creative Piano Method Program
This unique teacher training shows you how to teach your students the foundational aural skills necessary to become functional musicians who can dictate rhythm patterns, melodies, and harmonies, and connect that with the ability to improvise and compose their own music.
This is the only teacher training that comes with a studio licensed course for your piano students, called “Hear My Music”. You get instructor access, which allows you to edit the course and add your own videos and material to the given modules and lessons, and allows your students to access the course outside of lesson time.
In the Creative Method Program, I show you how you can structure, teach, and package your own online musicianship classes to add value to your studio, and make the most of the instructor access to "Hear My Music".
The “Creative Piano Method Program” for piano teachers, and the accompanying “Hear My Music” course, allows you to learn alongside your students, so you don’t have to be great at playing by ear, or improvising, to be able to teach your students these skills.
You will learn how to use this course with your students and create your own musicianship program, so that you can weave aural training and creativity into your curriculum in ways that your students enjoy, while increasing your teaching efficiency and bringing in more studio income.
If you already know how to play by ear and improvise at an advanced level, the Creative Piano Method Program will help you to sequence and present what you may already know in a way that even your beginner level students will grasp, and offers you a way to track your students’ progress.
The “Hear My Music” Course
Is a studio licensed online course with a workbook that you or your students can print, along with videos and audio that students can access and use outside of their lesson time or more independently from you.
In Level 1 of Hear My Music, your students will have the opportunity to:
- Listen, move with, echo, and improvise rhythm patterns in duple or triple meters
- Listen, echo, and improvise melodic and harmonic tonal patterns
- Translate neutral syllable rhythm patterns into Gordon rhythm syllables
- Translate neutral syllable tonal patterns into “moveable do” solfege
- Hear and sing the tonic as a drone against melodies in major or minor tonality
- Hear and sing bass lines to melodies in major or minor tonality
- Hear and sing melodies above a bass line in major or minor tonality
- Use familiar rhythm patterns to improvise and compose on the piano
- Use familiar tonal patterns to improvise on the piano against a tonic or dominant harmony
Completion of Level 1 of Hear My Music will help your students to hear and recognize:
- The difference between duple and triple meter
- Same or different rhythm patterns
- The difference between major and minor tonality
- Whether two tonal patterns are of the same or different harmonic function
- The sound of each scale degree in a major or minor tonal context
- Changes in harmony between the tonic and dominant in a major or minor tonal context
- Your students don’t need to be able to read any form of notation, or have much experience in piano lessons to benefit from the “Hear My Music” course.
The Hear My Music Level 1 course is suitable for the beginner pianist, or the intermediate level pianist who needs further development of their aural and improvisation skills. It typically takes 18-24 months for a beginner musician to successfully complete Level 1 of Hear My Music with weekly access and practice. Teachers can fast track student progress through offering more frequent group musicianship classes or lab time at their studio.
As a participant in the Creative Piano Method Program
You will have lifetime access to the Creative Piano Method Program online course, so that you can rewatch training videos, as well as stay updated on new observation videos and lesson plans for musicianship classes, and updates to the Hear My Music course (valued at $497).
You will have lifetime personal access to the Hear My Music course, so that you can use it during any of your piano lessons or classes with students (valued at $297).
You will have 6 months of instructor access to Hear My Music, which means that you and up to 50 of your students will be enrolled in the “Hear My Music” course, with full access for 6 months, and the ability to add your own audio, videos and modules to your instructor copy of the course (valued at $349).
You will get access to live Zoom office hours with me (or replays) once a month for 6 months, to show you how to maximize the results your students will get from the Hear My Music course and/or your musicianship classes, as well as answer any questions you may have (priceless 😉).
If you were to pay for each individual item included in the Creative Piano Method, it would cost over $1500 (lifetime access to 2 online courses, 6 months instructor access for 50 students, 6 live hourly consultations).
However, I am offering a heavily discounted pricing during 2024 at only $497.
Why?
Because I am passionate about helping teachers incorporate more audiation based creativity into their lessons, become more efficient with their lesson time, and increase their studio income without experiencing the burnout that can ensue.
I want to see teacher and student success for as many piano teachers as possible, at a price that encourages motivated teachers to make the most of the provided resources.
What about after the Creative Piano Method Program?
After the 6 month trial period of instructor access, you can either:
1) Continue instructor access to the “Hear My Music” course for an annual fee. This means that your students can continue to have their own access to your instructor copy of the course outside of your piano lessons, and you can keep adding to and personalizing this online resource for your studio. You can continue instructor access for $397/year for up to 25 students, or $697/year for up to 50 students. You can unenroll students and replace their spot with a new student anytime for no extra cost, and students can stay enrolled for as long as you have instructor access.
Or
2) Simply use your lifetime single user access to "Hear My Music" at no extra cost to you during your live piano lessons or musicianship classes. Your students can buy their own access to the course to use it outside of lessons, if you like.
Either way, you finish the program with a much better understanding of how to teach aural and creative skills, a growing library of lesson plans and observation videos for musicianship classes, and a clearer picture of how to sequence ear training and improvisation.
Enrollment is open!
- Make it easier for you to assess the aural and creative progress of your students.
- Increase the value of your lessons, and increase your income.
- This course contains aural and creative tasks that can be completed by the student independently during “lab time” with headphones at a tablet, laptop, or digital piano during the lesson while you teach another student.
- The activities in “Hear My Music” can be done interactively in group lessons (online or in person), so you don’t need to spend extra one on one time with students practicing these skills.
- Save you time and energy in planning, as you don’t have to be the sole guide for your student’s aural training.
- Give you a better understanding on how to help your beginner level students to improvise and compose music in a fun, methodical, and effective way.
- You will learn these skills alongside your students, or be comfortably ahead of them.
- They will progress as musicians at a faster rate, because they can be productively immersed in the language of music for longer each week and outside of lesson time.
- All content, including videos and audio, can be easily accessed by your students at home.
- They will build musical vocabulary that will bring greater understanding to the music they are playing, and be the ingredients that they can use in their improvisations and compositions.
- They will unleash their creative side, so that they will enjoy music and piano lessons more.
- The longer term result of your students progressing through this course is that they will learn their repertoire more efficiently because you can highlight rhythm and tonal patterns that they have internalized.
- They will be able to improvise more easily on repertoire that they are learning.
- They can look back at “passed” repertoire and create new compositions out of them!
Li-San Guerette
Over the past 20 years, Dr. Li-San Guerette has taught hundreds of students, including children from the age of 3, teenagers, and adults. She teaches students ranging from the absolute beginner to advanced pianist, and currently has a thriving studio of over 140 students in group lessons as a solo teacher.
Li-San loves music, whether it is classical, jazz, or contemporary, and enjoys teaching any student who is eager to learn. She is a patient, and committed teacher who cares about each student. She recognizes the importance of integrating aural skills with repertoire, so that students understand music, and perform it expressively.
Li-San is an accredited teacher by the Music Teacher's Association of NSW, Australia. Her qualifications from Sydney include Bachelor of Arts in Communications from UTS, the Associate Diploma of Music (Piano) from AMEB and the Graduate Diploma of Music (Classical Performance - Piano) with Distinction, from the Australian Institute of Music. She completed her Ph.D in Music Education at The University of New South Wales (UNSW).
