How I Use The Archive and My Music Staff to Create Engaging Lesson Notes

For the last 10 years, part of my teaching practice has been to develop a system of sending engaging digital lesson notes to my piano students that will help them to understand what they need to practice on a weekly basis. These emailed lesson notes help students become accountable to both daily practice and their musical goals. Having lesson notes pushed to students and parents via email has been transformational for my teaching practice for several reasons:

1. Students can’t use the excuse that they lost their lesson notebook if they fail to meet practice objectives

2. I can type faster than I can write by hand, and with much greater legibility

3. Students and parents receive lesson notes in their inboxes at the conclusion of every lesson

4. Students will have an archive of lesson notes going back months that they can study for details that might have been missed previously

5. I can create greater value for all my students, given the cost of music study

Studio management and what I need during the lesson

For the last few years I’ve been using My Music Staff as a one-stop solution for handling the day-to-day activities of a studio, whether it be for marketing, scheduling, invoicing, or repertoire management. MMS also handles lesson note management beautifully, and is handled within the attendance page for each student. When I made the jump to digital lesson notes a decade ago (here’s an earlier incarnation of my system), I needed to find a system of typing notes on my laptop that was non-intrusive during the lesson, that allows me to create and send new documents quickly, and an archive that allows me to very quickly search for past lesson notes when lesson planning.

I would rather not point-and-click so much during the lesson, and when I type I prefer the smoothness of a separate note-taking app, with no clutter, that allows me to type in a minimal environment with the current line at or near the centre of the screen (aka Typewriter Mode), create new files in an instant, and search previous files. I’ve used several other apps, most notably Byword and iA Writer, and what I like about these markdown-based apps is the stripped-down look that allows me to focus on just creating words with no visual clutter.

However, my specific need is for a seamless transition between several times of activities. When I’m teaching I need to be able to do all of these actions:

1. Create new files very quickly

2. Very quickly switch from typing to searching previous files, then switch back to the current file to continue typing

3. At the end of the lesson, copy and paste into the MMS lesson notes pane

4. Accomplish all of these on the fly, with keyboard shortcuts, in an absolute minimum of time

The Archive

An app that I discovered a few months ago which fits very smoothly into my lesson notes workflow is The Archive (macOS only), a project of Christian Tietze and Sascha Fast based on the Zettelkasten note-taking and retrieval system that aids academic research with an emphasis on the organic growth of seemingly unrelated notes (or cards in Niklas Luhmann’s original system).

The way that a Zettelkasten system works is that individual notes are added into the system at the same time that a mechanism for storage and retrieval allows connections between notes to become apparent. Where this is useful in piano pedagogy is that it allows a teacher to create a seemingly endless number of files for student lesson notes (these are sent to students and parents at the end of the lesson via My Music Staff) which can be searched later, not just for an individual student, but throughout one’s entire teaching practice. Here are a few things that you could search for within the note archive:

• Individual repertoire (for example, 4 students at present are playing Für Elise, 2 students are playing Tan Dun’s 8 Memories in Watercolor, and 6 students are learning Bach fugues)

• Upcoming performance opportunities (in a studio with over 60 students, this is really important when managing recitals, auditions, festivals, and exams)

• Lessons taught for an individual student

• Individual snippets of information that can be cut and pasted between lesson notes for several students (such as recital info, links for a specific topic, or practice strategies)

What I particularly like about The Archive is that the search bar at the top of the app is used to both create files and search for either individual files or specific instances of words within the file as a whole. This is in addition to the app’s ability to utilize hashtags as saved searches and create links between notes. The speed of use when using this app helps me to spend my time focusing on my students rather than navigating an interface.

How it works in practice

At the beginning of every lesson, I use an Alfred keyboard shortcut* to create a year/month/date/time timestamp for every note that I create in The Archive, followed by the student’s name. For example, a lesson note for the hypothetical student John Doe created at the time of writing would be “201903070859 John Doe”.

After creating the title I hit Return and type out the lesson notes on the fly as things arise. At the end of the session, I copy the body of the note (Command-A, Command-C on macOS).

Then I go back into MMS on the browser, paste the lesson notes into the Notes pane (Command-V), add any extra notes in the Parent or Private tab, click the parent’s name at the bottom of the page, then hit Save, which reconciles the lesson, saves the lesson notes into MMS along with any changes to repertoire, and pushes out the lesson notes.

The Mac desktop is great for finding quick shortcuts for these types of workflows. I use two separate desktops, the one on the left for Chrome and the one on the right for The Archive, moving between them with a three-finger swipe. At the beginning of the teaching day, I open a separate tab for each student and have the attendance page ready for each (accessible via the MMS teacher dashboard or calendar). The keyboard shortcuts for the entire process are well rehearsed and only take a few seconds.

What students and parents get at the end of the lesson are clear objectives for the coming week so that students know exactly what to practice. Parents know what’s going on so that they can monitor if need be. In addition to a weekly lesson notes archive for each student in My Music Staff, I also have an aggregated (and constantly growing) archive of everything that I’ve recorded in lessons so that I can search for any matters of interest that may develop over time. The system grows organically.

If you have any questions about how I use My Music Staff or The Archive, leave a comment and I would be glad to respond.

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You can join My Music Staff for free with a 30-day trial period. Contact me to get both a 30-day trial period plus one free month once you become a paid user. The Archive offers a 60-day trial period, after which you can pay a one-time fee to activate a license.

A quick disclaimer: I have no relationship with either My Music Staff or The Archive beyond that of a satisfied customer. I paid in full for both services (MMS has a monthly fee while The Archive is a one-time purchase) and find that both are an excellent value.

*For you Alfred nerds out there, the keyboard shortcut I’ve created is [ttime], which activates the ISO 8601 snippet .

On Doing Great Work

Wally Bock on being great at what you do:

There’s no way to make sure you will receive the accolades of greatness. That’s okay. You can be great anyway.

Just pay attention to your work. Do the best you can in the job where you are right now. If you’re a leader, do the best you can to help your team accomplish the mission. Do your best to care for your team members and help them grow and develop. Try, every day, to do just a little better.

That’s what great leadership is about. You may never get the big trophy. You may never appear on the cover of a business magazine. But you can do what all great leaders do. You can make a difference in the lives of others and the world around you. That’s great work.

Inbox Zero: The Basics

Inbox Zero is a practice that helps you get inputs out of the way in order to communicate well and concentrate on the things that really matter. You don’t just get rid of the unread count, you get rid of the mental clutter as well.

See an email. Respond + archive, forward + archive, star/flag/send to task manager + archive or just archive. Or delete.

The first steps will be the most difficult (especially if your inbox count is in the thousands), but it gets easier as you go. Routine is important.

Use folders or labels if you need to, otherwise just use the search function. Gmail’s search is best.

Further reading:

• Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero series on 43 Folders

• Mike Vardy on the ultimate way to get to Inbox Zero

• More detailed tips on how to build and maintain a clean inbox

Snow Day Links

As yet another winter storm heads across southern Ontario, here are some links to keep you occupied:

1. Are we in the midst of an Alban Berg renaissance? Two recent TSO performances showcasing Berg works got me thinking that there might be something in the air. A quick look at the Universal Editions Alban Berg schedule shows that this may indeed be the case, with 38 orchestral performances of his works between now and the end of June. This anecdote by Greg Sandow shows how Alban Berg’s music might be a viable entry point into classical music for younger audiences.

2. Sean Dorrance Kelly writes about how an AI can’t become a genuine artist, arguing that artistic achievement is a much larger idea than mere artificial intelligence:

We count Schoenberg as a creative innovator not just because he managed to create a new way of composing music but because people could see in it a vision of what the world should be. Schoenberg’s vision involved the spare, clean, efficient minimalism of modernity. His innovation was not just to find a new algorithm for composing music; it was to find a way of thinking about what music is that allows it to speak to what is needed now.

3. I really like the way that Penelope Trunk illustrates the Doppelgänger of authenticity and being true to yourself: negativity and mental health.

4. Tyler Cowen on the problem of social media:

My tentative conclusion from all this: Online life is inducing us to invest less in our memories and long-term sense of satisfaction. It is pretty obvious from human behavior that, right now, the internet is doing more to boost short-term pleasures.

The more negative take would be that online life is obscuring our understanding of our own lives. I do not go that far. After all, humans make analogous choices about balancing short- and long-term happiness when they have one child rather than four, or when they sit on an exercise bike rather than get on a plane to Paris. Those aren’t the wrong decisions for everybody.

5. Carl Pullein and Nicholas Bate both offer wise advice: say “no” more often. Your quality of work will improve.

6. From a conversation initiated by Shane Parrish on Twitter: sources of personal competitive advantage.

Finally, the Imani Winds play the second movement of Elliott Carter’s Woodwind Quintet:

(Image courtesy of Aaron Burden)

How I Created a New Ebook for my Studio in 30 Days

After getting back from my January examining trip to Alberta (Red Deer, Calgary, and Lethbridge), one of the first things I did was sit down to practice after a two-week practice hiatus. After a few minutes I came to the realization that I need to create something to help my students practice better. Many of them aren’t listening to my ideas the way they could.

Then an idea came to me:

Why not have the students write the practice tips themselves?

Later that day I got to work. I asked each of my students to compile a list of three practice strategies that they found successful and three strategies that they found not-so-successful. Some of my students responded immediately, and some of them needed a week to think about it.

I created a markdown document to collect everyone’s thoughts and the list quickly grew, with plenty of insights notable for not just my students’ ideas, but for the unique way in which they phrased them. Paring down the list and arranging the strategies in a cohesive order was a challenge, especially with the comedic nature of many of the unsuccessful practice strategies (“Get my brother to help me”).

It was a fairly intense month of selling the idea to my students, collecting information, putting it in coherent form, revising, and creating a finished document. However, the intensity of the last month revitalized my creative process, and I learned that working through a meaningful project in a measured sprint genuinely helped me to move down the creative path.

A huge word of thanks goes out to all my students for their ideas on practicing! Since sending out the finished document to my studio a few days ago, several parents and students have emailed me mentioning that yes, they do use this document regularly and yes, they have highlighted certain strategies to utilize while highlighting others to avoid.

Below is a link to finished product, and I hope that you find it useful.

Five Deep Breaths and a Pencil Behind the Ear (pdf link)