Dear Friends,

Classes have ended, final grades are due on Thursday, and I’m sitting here with a cup of tea, looking out at the lilacs and wrapping up the last of the semester's grading. But here's the truth: grading piano lessons has never felt particularly natural.

When I was a student, lessons weren’t graded week by week. You practiced as much as you could, went to the lesson, and used that time with your teacher to get past the blocks you couldn’t solve on your own. The teacher listened, asked questions, offered ideas, and helped you learn how to make it better. The point wasn’t assessment—it was growth. You left the lesson with a clearer understanding of what to do and how to do it.

But times change, and with it, the culture changes. We are now living in a culture where it feels like nearly everything is assessed. Even a quick trip to the post office or an order from a food delivery app will result in a follow-up, asking me to rate the experience.

Today’s college students have grown up in this culture of assessment — it’s been a defining feature of their education. Universities like mine now use “learning management software,” which syncs all of their assignments and grades for every class into one dashboard.

Over my twenty years teaching at the university level, I have learned that if I do not grade the students’ lessons, it sends the unintended message that lessons don’t matter — because if they’re not entered into the LMS, they’re invisible to the student next to the demands of their other coursework. This is how I’ve come to find myself grading every lesson I teach.

This leads to the following questions:

• How do you grade a piano lesson?
• How can you create a rubric for something that is fluid, individual, and intimate that can be tailored to every student, regardless of level?
• How should you track weekly learning objectives in a meaningful way?
• And how do you do it without shifting the responsibility for growth from the student to the teacher?

When a grade is given, there is something transactional that happens; it changes the dynamic. The student performs, and then waits for my assessment. This can lead the student to not trusting their own perception of how things went. It can cause the student to hang back and wait to see what I thought before they allow themselves to really think about it.

Additionally, grading a lesson based on whether a student has accomplished the “assignment” from the previous week sets a cap on expectations. If I lay out specific learning goals for a student, then they will try to meet those goals. However, if a student is intrinsically motivated, there is no cap on the learning goals. Their limit is only on what their time, imagination, and effort set on themselves.

As times change, we adapt. And so I find myself at the end of the semester catching up on grades, reviewing my records of each student’s lesson, and doing the bookkeeping our digital, data-driven age demands.

By now, I have my rubric and my own system for communicating weekly expectations to my students. But as a fun thought experiment, my question for you this week is: If you had to assign a grade to a piano lesson, what would you focus on? What matters most — and what can actually be measured?

👋 Have a great week! Happy practicing! 🎹

-Kate

Practice TIP of the week:

Here are the most recent practice tips I have covered:
🎵 April 6: Dynamic Contrast​
🎵 April 13: Pacing Hairpins
​🎵 April 20: What is Phrasing?
​🎵 April 27: Connecting Dynamics to Emotional Expression​

Each month, I focus on a specific theme for practice tips. This month’s theme is Memorization Strategies.

Today's Practice Tip: Chunking

Watching a pianist perform a whole recital on stage without music can feel like witnessing a magic trick. After a recital, people sometimes ask in wonder, “But how did the pianist memorize all that music?”

What’s really going on under the hood is a technique called chunking.

"Chunking" is the process of grouping notes into meaningful patterns, and then memorizing those chunks instead of memorizing each individual note. As you become more and more familiar with the piece, the chunks get larger and larger, and it is possible to hold the whole piece in your head at once.

Our working memory can only hold about 7 separate pieces of information at once (give or take a few). If you try to memorize too much at once, you’ll overload your system. That’s why attempting to take in an entire phrase – or worse, a whole page – without breaking it down, can feel so slippery. You think you have it but then when you play it again you forget a different spot than the previous time.

Imagine trying to memorize a list of 50 vocabulary words. You could laboriously work through the list one word at time, but it will be much more effective if you can create associations between the words. If you start to notice related words: mug, coffee, spoon, cream – you can group them under one idea: coffee. Suddenly, you’re remembering one category instead of four separate words.

In music, a "chunk" is a musical pattern or a musical gesture: a group of notes that has meaning. I always like to work from the end when memorizing and learning pieces, so when I memorize music, I look at the last musical gesture of the piece and I memorize that. Then I go back one musical unit and memorize that, working my way forward.

This week, if you’re trying to memorize something, break it down into chunks. Look at notes that make a pattern or define a musical gesture. Learn one chunk carefully, repeat it 6-8 times until it feels secure, and then add the next chunk. After you learn several chunks, put them together and learn those chunks as a single chunk.

Zooming in on the smallest musical gesture and, as you memorize each chunk, expanding out to phrases and, ultimately, to the large-scale form of the piece is an effective way to approach memorizing music. Try chunking this week and me know how it goes! 👋

​

💜 Some of My Favorite Things

1. 🎶 The Chopin Competition: If you love piano, now is the perfect time to tune in to the 19th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, one of the most prestigious piano competitions in the world. Held every five years in Warsaw, it’s what helped launch some of today’s greatest pianists — including Martha Argerich and Krystian Zimerman.
   The competition itself will take place in October, but the preliminary round has been happening this week, and concludes today.
   🎥 Watch the preliminary round performances on YouTube​
   🖥️ View the official competition site​
2. 🎂 Happy Birthday, Johannes Brahms! In honor of Brahms' 192nd birthday on Wednesday, May 7, here's a score-recording of his deeply contemplative and beautiful 3 Intermezzi, Op. 117, performed by one of my all-time favorite pianists, Radu Lupu. Click here to listen.​
3. 🎨 Museum Masterpieces: Piano Music Inspired by Art: If you love music and visual art, Catherine Rollin’s Museum Masterpieces series is a great discovery. Each piece is based on a well-known painting, with images of each artwork included. Rollins is an expert at composing expressive, satisfying music that is carefully tailored to the student's level.
   • ​Book A - Elementary - Late Elementary
   • ​Book 1 - Early Intermediate
   • ​Book 2 - Early Intermediate - Intermediate
   • ​Book 3 - Intermediate - Late Intermediate
   • ​Book 4 - Late Intermediate