Let’s get oriented to the work we are about to get into.

The experiences that you have had over your musical lifetime effect how you teach today. In this lesson, we will begin the process of mapping these experiences.

Now that we’ve mapped your musical life, let’s take some time and do a brief analysis. What worked well for you? What didn’t work? What caused you harm, and what built you up?

Now that we’ve mapped your musical life, let’s take some time and do a brief analysis. What worked well for you? What didn’t work? What caused you harm, and what built you up?

Introduce your lesson with an optional, short summary. You can edit this excerpt in lesson settings.

If music really is the foundation of the human experience, then it’s worth looking at how that works and what the implications are.

A deep dive into the first four of the foundational traits of a musician.

A deep dive into the next three foundational traits of a musician.

Getting into the culminating virtue of a music maker.

Time to reflect. How has this effected you? What traits do you think are most important?

Take the time to deepen your understanding by wrestling with the concepts you’ve just learned.

Setting a foundation for a basic and usable knowledge of the brain.

Getting the basic structures of brain knowledge built.

Time to reflect. How has this effected you? What part of the brain are you most excited to learn about?

Don’t worry; we’ll be getting deep into each part of the brain in the next three chapters.

In this lesson, let’s get our heads wrapped around the importance of the midbrain - the seat of music, and our emotions.

Let’s review the functions of the midbrain, and see what implications we can deduce from those functions.

How do the thinking brain and the feeling brain interact? Does it have any implications for my music teaching? If so, what are they?

Let’s think about thinking!

Doing this work will help you optimize your work with your students’ midbrains.

In this lesson, let’s get our heads on straight about the functions of the forebrain before we dive in to how to use it well.

When Rene Descartes said, “Cogito, ergo sum,” he unintentionally created a cultural prejudice for thinking - in other words, forebrain processes. But how powerful is our thinking brain compared to other parts of the brain?

How can we connect forebrain functions (language creation) to our powerful midbrain?

Helping our students really understand what we are teaching is so key to our teaching - helping them enjoy that learning is a cut above! Here are some basic ways that you can optimize your teaching for the thinking forebrain.

Let’s think about thinking!

Doing this work will help you optimize your work with your students’ midbrains.

Creating habits of automatic movement is a key skill for musicians. Let’s learn about how to use this brain area in an efficient way!

How does the hindbrain create automatic movement best? Learning the basic functions of the hindbrain helps you know how to optimize your teaching.

Hindbrains don’t think. Hindbrains don’t feel. Hindbrains move.

What kind of brain-smart practices can we use to help our students learn to make movement easy?

Gamification is the key to excellent hindbrain teaching. Are you playing enough games with your students? And how can you create better, more efficient, and more brain-smart games for your classroom?

Let’s get a move on!

Take your time getting your teaching optimized for your students’ hindbrains.

Building the skill of emotionally intelligent music instruction starts with understanding how emotions work. Let’s build a foundation by asking ourselves some deep questions.

What is the first step to understanding emotions? Let’s get to know how to read someone’s State.

What does it look like to misread your students’ emotions? Let’s review a lesson and walk through how to appropriately handle big emotions.

Let’s review the first two of the five steps in the Proactive Cycle.

Let’s consider the last three of the five steps in the Proactive Cycle.

This chapter has gone over one of the most important skills you can acquire as a teacher. As you do this chapter’s homework, really take your time and put good effort in.

So, how do we apply everything that we’ve learned to the actual process of learning? We start here, with understanding how to live the long days so that the short years and productive.

What does it look like to move a student from one stage to another? Let’s dive deep into what it is to plan the short years well.

In this lesson, we’ll spend good time thinking through the high-level but very practical growth periods for humans between the ages of 5 and 30.

Now that we have an understanding of the long arch of human development, let’s look at how we effectively cultivate successful and whole humans by learning from the gardening process.

In this video, we lay a foundation for working through the four stages of competence - plus sublimity.

This week’s homework will lay the foundation for the big work we will do in the next two chapters. Take the breath, and allow these seeds to germinate to prepare for upcoming lessons.

Before we dive into the first three stages of competence, take some time and think: how has your ability to “start in the middle” with your students improved since you’ve started this course?

What are the common midbrain states for people in Unconscious Incompetence? In this lesson, we will work through what those states are, and how to help our students work in and through those emotions to achieve great things in their music.

Fear is a common emotion in music students. Having and sharpening skills to help your students experience fear well will increase your effectiveness as a teacher.

What does it look like to walk someone through fear? In this lesson, we use stories to illustrate what it looks like to walk a student from Level 3 to Level 1 fear.

What are the common midbrain states for someone in Conscious Incompetence? In this lesson, we will learn how to use a practice map to help someone navigate their way through this difficult stage with joy.

Even more than fear, frustration is something that all musicians must learn to endure. But can we, as music teachers, actually help our students use frustration as a tool that leads to joy?

Working with students through frustration will create all kinds of internal dialogue. In this lesson, we will go over how to direct and guide those thoughts in positive and constructive pathways.

One of the greatest human benefits of learning music is that it makes a person stay in the Conscious Competence state for a long, long time. But this state can be very trying! In this lesson, we will go over how to experience the long slog of Conscious Competence with joy.

We are starting to get to a finishing point with this training. How are you looking forward to applying these concepts in your teaching this week? This month? This year?

As we near the end of our work, let’s take time to consider the last stage of competence and sublimity.

Unconscious Competence is such an easy place to be! Why would we need to work in this space?

The truth is, there is still a lot of work for students and teachers in Unconscious Competence. Let’s get started with that work!

Mileposts help us understand where we are, encourage us on journeys, and create plans for ourselves. How well do you communicate the journey of music learning with your students?

Destination matters. If your students believe that technical competence is the end of their road, they will always be missing the incredible psychological and spiritual benefits that music has to give them. Let’s explore how to achieve Sublimity in this lesson.

Most of us will be working with students who are still living in a family context. Almost all of a student’s practice time will be in their home. In this lesson, let’s explore ways that we can “start in the middle” to support our students’ learning lives at home.

In this continued lesson on parent support, we’ll dive in to parent education, effective communication, and how to craft assignments to get the most practice out of your students.

Doctors, nurses, police officers, spiritual leaders - and teachers. These are the people who see some of the most messy parts of other people’s lives. In this lesson, we will go over guidelines for how to “start in the middle” well when the middle is messy.

If you start doing things differently than the people around you, they are going to want to know more - especially when you start getting better results, more consistently. In this lesson, we’ll go over how to communicate about Emotionally Intelligent Music Instruction with other teachers, parents who pay you, and school administrators.

And we’re done! After you’re done with this work, you will have a fantastic resource to share with all of the people you work with.