I’ve been a Facebook user for some time now. When I first started using it in my mid 20s, it was mainly for connecting with friends, keeping up with news and the usual time-wasting social media activities: browsing the news feed, looking at pictures, playing online games and generally wasting time!

In fact, I was quite anti-Facebook at the start (as I know many people still are today). The main reason I actually joined was to make sure I got event invitations!

Fast-forward 10 years or so and Facebook has become one of my primary sources of piano teaching information and networking, now ranking as high for as many of my favourite blogs and piano teaching magazines. Just a year ago, there was only one or two Facebook groups for piano teachers; now there are quite a few to choose from so I thought I’d take this chance to recommend three of the best.

Here are my top 4 piano teaching Facebook groups:

1. Australasian Piano Teachers – closed group established in 2013 by Elissa Milne, this is a great place to get advice and feedback for topics relating to Australian teachers. Currently about 300 active members (current as at Dec 13). Join the group by clicking on the main page.
2. The Art of Piano Pedagogy – by far the biggest group, with just under 4000 members, this was the first group I joined. I believe it was started by well-known teacher Irina Gorin. This is a closed group but open to all piano teachers who register interest. Great in-depth discussions of pedagogy, questions and answers and how-tos.
3. Professional Piano Teachers – this group has over 1500 members, many of whom are also members of the other groups and has similar content and discussions to the Art of Piano Pedagogy.
4. Piano Teacher Central – started more recently by well-known US teachers Jennifer Eklund and Kristin Yost, this has rapidly grown to over 700 members (as of Nov 2013) and includes many of the world’s most famous teachers/bloggers/composers as its members. One of the main differences with this group is that it is open to members self-promoting music, products, etc. which I think is a great way to find out about new offerings and gives this group a point of difference from the first two.

The best thing about these groups is that they offer instant feedback for issues, problems, questions and anything that you might need help with in your teaching. Because Facebook has a world-wide membership, you tend to get a really wide variety of answers from all sorts of different people. Even if you post at 2am in the morning, there is always someone around the world likely to be awake and reading!

All these groups are “closed groups” meaning that you have to be accepted by the administrators as a member. Some of them are only open to piano teachers (another member or the administrators need to be satisfied that you are a piano teacher to be admitted). This is different to Facebook Pages where you can simply click on the “Like” button and get regular updates to your news feed. If you would like to get involved in a closed group, either ask a current member to add you, or request membership by the group’s main page.

Facebook Pages

There are also heaps of Facebook Pages that you might like to follow, including:

1. Diane Hidy’s Piano Teaching Tips
2. Piano Pronto
3. Daniel McFarlane Music

These pages are different to groups in that you only need to go to the page and click on the “Like” button and posts by the author will show up in your news feed. There are plenty more out there – leave a message to let everyone know the ones you like! If you would like to connect with me on Facebook, please use the button near the top right of this blog page.

Stay tuned for a future listing of my favourite Facebook Pages!

Summary

For those readers not currently on Facebook, I would strongly encourage you to give it a go. It’s easy to set up and privacy settings (which are very important for teachers) allow your profile to be completely hidden and not even show in searches if you wish. Once you have a profile, you can easily search for the above piano teaching Facebook groups and pages.

If you have any questions about how to get started or how to find these groups, please let me know.

Have other pages/groups that you like? Let us know by leaving a comment below…