Part of Spike Cello Festival 2022 Workshop Series

Teach me how to practise, and you teach me how to play is an engaging, interactive workshop based on Tara-Lee’s Tool-Time Kit, a systematic collection of intentional practising tools and methods that enable each student to be an informed, aware musician and their own best teacher.

In my teaching, I encourage my students to ask themselves every time they practise, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? How am I doing this? How can I break this down? Could I explain this to a younger version of me? Through this journey of consistent self-questioning, students develop a greater sense of awareness and a clearer personal understanding of what they are doing, how they are doing it, and why they are doing it. It is not coming from their teacher telling them to play it like this, it should look like this, and it should sound like this.

As teachers, our responsibility is to nurture and inspire our students to find their voice from the very beginning of their musical journey by providing an integrated toolkit of practising techniques and skills. Tara-Lee’s Tool-Time Kit are kinesthetic, intellectual, auditory, sensory, musical, physical, and emotional skills that facilitate each student to establish a consistent practising approach that can be successfully applied at grade 1 or conservatory level. Gifting our students with these skills enables them to develop their own personality, tone, and style, thus generating a genesis of independent thinking, conscious musicians.

This workshop is primarily focused on string teaching but can be adapted for piano, woodwind and brass. Tara-Lee’s Tool-Time Kit methods are easily accessible and can be taught to students of all ages and abilities, from complete beginners to degree music students who are learning how to teach and teachers looking to further resource their teaching methodologies.