Piano Teacher Qualifications: What do you really need to teach piano lessons?

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Piano isn't one of those skills you can pick up quickly and start teaching. Piano is a complex world and a lifelong learning commitment. But how good do you have to be before you can start teaching others? Do you need a degree?
Benefits of Becoming a Piano Teacher: • Should I Become a Pian...
Reasons Not to Become a Piano Teacher: • Reasons NOT to Become ...
How Much Does it Cost to Become a Piano Teacher: • Start a Piano Studio f...
00:52 Education Qualifications
04:43 Experience Qualifications
07:49 Business Qualifications
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[@DentGal83]

I have a degree (ARCT from the RCM) - basically an Associate’s degree, but quite comprehensive. I’ve also done continuing education for my teaching.
When I receive transfer students from other very unqualified teachers, I notice those students have horrible habits that take forever to re-learn correctly, and lack of knowledge. It’s difficult because the students don’t know they’ve been taught poorly, but they have to struggle to re-do a bunch of things that would have been a breeze to learn correctly the first time around.
A degree doesn’t make a good teacher, but lack of good training in a teacher does ruin their students.

[@patrickwells4014]

I beg to differ on the qualifications for piano teaching:: YES YES!!!! YOU DO NEED A DEGREE IN MUSIC. When I first started out I taught piano and singing in a studio had a variety of teachers. Only 3 could play and read music. I was the only one with a degree. The director of that studio was clueless in how to acquire good help so I convinced her to hire one of my friends as a teacher. She did. The quality of teaching improved. I turn he had some friends that were recommended by him that became part of the faculty. One was a Julliard graduate the other graduated from UCLA. YES, YOU NEED A DEGREE!!! The quality of teaching can be accessed when teaching a class or an individual, the performance mastery of the instrument can be evaluated in a recital, and their music background can be verified.

[@philipmcniel4908]

I personally feel that I learned much of what she mentioned getting out of her bachelor's degree from a local two-year college. And even then I learned much more than I can or should teach most piano students: Music theory is a must, and I do teach functional harmony to my students, but I find that the rules of four-part chorale harmonization just aren't that useful when playing piano (except for a few things like tritone resolution and some doubling techniques, e.g. when playing hymns out of a hymnal, if a chord is in first inversion I tend to leave out the "extra" 3rd in the right hand). Ear training is great too, but very few of my students have any reason to practice aural transcription of twelve-tone rows.
Music history is another story, though that's perhaps because I only took one year of it: Listening to historical music for _other instruments_ is, in my opinion, instrumental (pun not intended) for learning the "sound" you're going for in different periods. Too often I've heard teachers think that "we play Baroque music detached because harpsichords couldn't play legato," or "because they preferred the detached sound." I came away from that explanation in my piano lessons thinking that Baroque listeners just liked their music to sound clunky and disjointed rather than smooth and lyrical. Much to my surprise, I listened to a historically-informed orchestra playing the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and noticed that the violins weren't actually playing in a highly-detached way; it was mostly the basso continuo group that was doing that, and it was for rhythmic emphasis rather than just lack of connection between notes. I also came to understand that the reason we don't use pedal when playing Bach isn't that harpsichords didn't have pedals (a few did), but because _Bach thought in terms of voices_ because at the beginning of the Baroque period, there was a huge built-up tradition of how to write vocal music (and, to a lesser extent, music for single-note instruments such as the recorder) but no similarly-huge tradition had been formed for writing music for keyboard, so they leaned on vocal ensemble writing techniques when writing early pieces for keyboard.
I learned a lot about how to interpret music from other periods as well from listening to non-piano music; I now think it's essential for a piano student to listen to non-piano music from the composers they're studying as well as piano music.

[@javierjosemm]

great video!! totally agree, music and the way its been taught has been arround before conservatories and degrees, and after the degree-ification of musical studies we havnt had actually much better results, think about europe and the bologne treatie, the mandatoriness of degrees and masters for everything has just made things more bureaucratical and not necessarily for the best, and indeed there are even great famous pianists that arent that good of a teacher, so i too think its a skill built on its own, of course researching having mentors and also degrees on education help alot, i think also the way arround, to play better we need to learn how to teach, it should be a natural part of being a musician, its a very nice topic u brought here.
saludos!

[@cecilialeffew9253]

What books would you recommend on the subject of music education? Thanks!

[@TheTattooedPianoTeacher]

This is such a great question. I could quickly list the books I've read over the years, but if I'm putting my name behind a recommendation... 😅 (Ya know, sometimes you take a few things from a book but don't agree with everything) Let me give this some thought and look back on my notes. I'll turn it into blog post/video! In the meantime, if anyone has read a great music education book recently, comment the title!

[@cecilialeffew9253]

@@TheTattooedPianoTeacher thank you. I look forward to a future post or video about it. I can't wait to hear how you do partner and group lessons.