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I am doing a lot of research into different method books, and was wondering if any of you have ever written your own method?
I have taught out of several different methods over the past years, and - like every teacher - I have found my favorites. There are two methods that I use right now that I like the most and that I have found to be the most effective in my teaching.
However, I am always finding things about methods books that I wish were different. I've looked at tons of different methods and I tend to find more things that I dislike than things that I actually like. Sometimes I think I should solve my own problem and write my own method someday!
I was wondering if any of you had ever done this or if any of you know someone who has done this. How difficult was this? Was the process worth it? How long did it take?
If any of you can answer my questions that would be great!

Hi,

I feel the same way. I would LOVE to write my own method. I don't have the time to do it and feel I would probably be just doing a lot of what's already been done. I've decided for now to devise my own "system" using materials already out there. I'd prefer to teach from music without a method so I may start students on a method through the beginner levels and move them toward piano lit. and/or any other music they are interested in by using graded material but minus the lesson book. The reason is I don't like to see students putting all their effort into music in lesson books when they could be putting that time into other great music of the same difficulty and I would prefer to teach the concepts from the music without the lesson books. But I feel for the most part, lesson books do a good job presenting basic material, so I decided, why should I re-invent the wheel at least for basics? I think I can pretty well work around a method's weaknesses now after getting to know what the pitfalls are. Here's a thread I started on the subject where you might find some opinions or thoughts: methods - sorry, I can't figure out why this link won't work but the thread is called, "Teaching without method books - using/designing your own system" if you want to do a search - edited, I fixed it.

One thing I would like to do is design my own theory worksheets in a compiled workbook (sort of a "streamlined" approach to theory at least for older students and adults). When I was in college, not for music but for some of my other classes, occasionally a professor would have a handbook or workbook that they personally wrote for the class, had it copied at the copy store with spiral binding and laminated cover and had students go to the copy store to purchase it for the class. That's sort of what I've considered doing for theory. There's some things that take until level 3 in a method to cover on scales and chords, chord inversions, and chord progressions that older students and adults should be able to learn and understand without having to wait that long into lessons to learn.

sarabande,

There was an extra space in your URL:

Here's the link:

methods

DragonPianoPlayer:

Thanks so much. I went back and fixed it.