This is the second clip from my interview with Juan Cabeza Hernandez, author of the excellent creativity course Piano Patterns in Harmony. Here are a few links!
Transcript
Garreth
What advice would you give to teachers who are nervous about incorporating creativity into their teaching?
Juan
Yes, this is a very good question because most of the teachers, are scared about incorporating creativity.
I think most of them are scared because they don't know how to improvise. They don't know how to do it. They are afraid to do this kind of work with their students. But everybody can improvise and you don't need to be an expert to teach how to improvise to a student.
I started teaching improvisation when I discovered Forrest Kinney's work. And I didn't know much about improvisation. I improve, at the same time as my students. You don't need to be an expert if you, know how to improvise just black keys, but start using this your students. You can learn, with your students, as I have mentioned.
Another advice I want to say to teachers that it's not difficult to improvise. I used to thought that there were people that that could improvise. There are, there are people as me that couldn't improvise, but I was wrong. Everybody can improvise from the very beginning. I encourage people to do this with their students.
They are going to learn, in a more fun way that you are going to enjoy with your students more. You are going to have more tools for your piano lessons, maybe. And I also encourage if there are something there that wants to incorporate improvisation activities and they're scared, maybe start using with students that are not making a big progress, maybe a student that is at the same level week after week, let's start with those students. Try different ideas with this kind of students. And if you see that it's working with these students, maybe it is going to work with more, students that are making faster progress.
Garreth
That's very wise. Yeah, that's really good advice. Because that's the thing, when we're just getting started, we don't need to be improvising like a great jazz pianist. We can just do little changes, and we don't have to immediately start teaching everybody to improvise, do we?
We can just do it with a few people. I always think starting small is really great advice. In all endeavours, actually. Just dip your toe in, and then try it out.
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