Teaching Piano to a Product Manager
Skills Developed:
Project strategy / roadmap planning / curriculum design / agile methods
Time:
Aug 2020 - Present
Background
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I took on the project of teaching piano to a friend I met through a virtual networking platform who lives on the opposite side of the country, in Virginia. He had played piano at a young age but had long since discontinued his study before going on to pursue an extensive career in product management. He was interested in finding a practical method for picking it up again while also learning improvisation, doing it virtually, and getting – I was the right guy for the job.
Because of his unique goals, I needed to design a lesson plan that could dynamically adapt based on his progress rather than a standardized method. To do this, I used an agile approach that he would already be very comfortable with and plotted out a tentative roadmap based on the milestones we would need to hit in order to reach his goals.
Developing a Roadmap
Establishing Goals
Our initial conversation centered around what his current ability level was, what kind of music he was interested in playing and why, what success would look like. We came up with a few top-level goals:
- Learn and understand common musical structures (music theory)
- Improvise solo piano music
- Read sheet music well enough to work through intermediate songs independently
Lesson Planning
To begin setting out a course to achieve these goals, I identified concepts we would need to cover for each:
- Learn and understand common musical structures (music theory)
- Scale degrees
- Learning the 24 major and minor keys
- The anatomy of a chord
- Intro of harmonic functions
- 7th chords
- Basic voice leading
- Secondary Dominants
- Improvise solo piano music
- Chord inversions
- Chord tones
- Left-hand patterns
- 4/4 Rhythm
- Read sheet music well enough to work through intermediate songs independently
- Treble clef lead sheets
- Single-position grand staff songs
Milestones
Using these, I established milestones based on progressive difficulty and complexity (yes, I named the milestones after famous composers. I am a geek, after all).
Improvisation requires both tactile facility and an understanding of underlying musical structures, so I created a plan that would incorporate both aspects in each lesson.
I purposefully did not plan too far ahead, as I wanted to leave the direction open to a number of possibilities depending on where his interest takes him throughout the discovery process.
Resources
In designing the curriculum, I created three sources of shared information to be built upon as we progressed:
Milestones Doc: I shared this so we could have a mutual understanding of where we are in the roadmap. This of course is a live document that may change at any point.
Guide Doc: I created a reference document to input important concepts from our lessons. This serves not only a need for these lessons, but as a compilation of concepts that I’ll be able to use and adapt for future students.
Asana: I chose Asana as an agile tool for keeping track of progress as we were both very comfortable with the platform. For each task I created, I assigned both a Milestone tag and a task type; ‘Music Theory’ and/or ‘Tactile’. On some occasions, I upload a video of myself playing the exercise in the task, to be used as a reference during practice.
Music Study
Lessons
Every Saturday, we meet for about 45 minutes over Zoom. I start each session by asking questions about his progress over the past week, what he learned, and where he had trouble. This sets the baseline for what we’ll cover during the lesson.
Having a dynamic lesson plan allows me to tailor each week’s tasks based on his progress. If he’s absorbed a particular concept beyond expectations, I can adapt the forthcoming tasks to capitalize on it . Conversely, if he’s having trouble with a task, I can break it up into smaller components to isolate the challenges.
Materials
After each lesson, I recap the important concepts covered with notes in our shared Guide doc to serve as an ongoing reference. If any confusions or concerns arise throughout the week, we communicate through the associate tasks in Asana.
For a case study, I chose the jazz standard Autumn Leaves, as this song provides examples of each of the core concepts we’re covering. For instance, the beginning section of Autumn Leaves contains the following chord progression: Am7 | D7 | Gmaj7 | Cmaj7 | F#ø7 | B7 | Em |
With just this small subset of chords, I’ve been able to demonstrate many of our target concepts through progessive lessons and tasks:
- Scale degrees in the key of G
- Chord qualities (major, minor, half diminished, diminished)
- 7th Chords
- Harmonic function (ii-V7-I)
- Pivot chords (F#ø transition to E minor)
- Chord Inversions
- Voice leading (7/3 and leading tone relationships)
- 4/4 Rhythm
Looking Ahead
The music theory concepts we’re covering now will serve as a foundation for future learning. Once we’ve established a healthy baseline of music theory, harmony and scales, I plan to have him apply these concepts to new songs, which will then lead to our final goal of meaningful improvisation practice.
Final Thoughts
This agile process has proved an extremely useful approach for teaching those for which a traditional path to learning piano isn’t suitable. For some, particularly children, the goal of music learning is broad and open ended. As such, the pedagogical approach can be standardized and doesn’t require many adjustments along the way, other than the speed at which lessons progress. Those with a specific goal and a shorter term view, however, continue to adapt throughout based on discovery. I plan on incorporating elements of this approach with future students.