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Workshops
Why are you much more likely to experience chronic, stress-related problems than Suzy, your Cocker Spaniel or your neighbor's cat? The answer is that you are highly intelligent and have the ability to use your intelligence to stress yourself out. In a nutshell, we are way smarter than the animals around us, which gives us the edge to do many things with it. One of those things is using our thoughts to give us large amounts of stress; the type that we cannot get away from, which is the type that makes us sick.
Stress: Why It is Bad For Your Health will feature the 'latest and greatest' research about how you run yourself down by running yourself literally into the ground. We will combine cutting-edge research with good humor, roleplays, demonstrations, personal anecdotes, salient demonstrations, case studies and vignettes of your toughest situations that put all of us on edge. Then, we will teach the class about how the nervous system is really extremely devoted to stress, and how well it deals with certain situations. Then, we'll show you how it deals with psychosocial situations and why those things are not so good for you. Then, (what you are here fore), we teach you how to deal with tough situations and what effectiveness means, given different contexts--- how those physiological and psychological responses can be controlled.
Why do you think your 8-year-olds come in, week after week, with their theory not done, telling you that they 'forgot?' Then there is the 13-year-olds who have been performing flawlessly since age 3, who suddenly have stage fright like no other students and cannot seem to pull out of it despite all of your best efforts. Whatever explains this phenomena? Video games? Too little time to practice? Too many sports? These explanations may be partly true, but even if you had students who had none of these problems in their daily lives, it is likely that the 8-year-olds would largely not do their theory and that most of your early teens would still experience massive stage fright. These and other phenomena are perfectly predictable from Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience and physiological studies being conducted to aid in the understanding of the interaction of the experience of growing up and being a child physiologically. There is an entire literature out there, untapped by music teachers, waiting for you to read, that would supply you with a plethora of answers that you never receive right now (unless you read the Child Development journals and books). Knowledge of CDL (Cognitive Developmental Level) is crucially important for anyone who works with children. We hope you can attend this important workshop and learn how to read and access this important literature for yourselves, but better yet, allow us to teach you as much as we can in the time we have you with us.
Social Cognitive Theory is just as important, since it has everything to do with being an artist. Even though we are teaching "budding" artists, SCT tells us that people would come to piano lessons from a fantasy in their head--a fantasy about playing the piano, and that fantasy would be extremely strong at the onset of lessons. The problem for the teacher is to keep that fantasy alive so that the child can actually learn to play, since we all know that people come to lessons to play, not to learn to play! This part of the workshop explains SCT, and gives you many interventions (ideas) about how to alter your teaching so you can still teach them AND keep the fantasy alive! This is a very cute trick, but is do-able. It took Marcie the better part of 20 years to figure it out, so come and learn! Dr. Schleser runs his lab for graduate students at IIT this way, so has many suggestions as well. He is a SCT expert.
We hear the words Mind-Body in music circles all of the time; so much that it seems that no other group is more aware of what it is than musicians. Well, mind-body is psychophysiology. If there is anything I have learned at all since starting all of this is that musicians (including myself) are frustratingly hypersensitive (I'd like to be less hypersensitive at times, so I wrote frustrating, and I'll bet you'd like to give it up sometimes as well). The hypersensitivity is one of the key features of mind-body interaction. Another feature is the ability to put the self into a light trance easily (flow state) but one of the negative "side effects" is the ability to block pain until there is tissue damage done, or there is a lot of inflammation which could lead to tissue damage. In other words, the very thing that makes you into an excellent musician can undermine you if you are not careful. So, we will discuss that and make you aware of it.
Then, we will learn about basic neurology, child development, neurophysiology of the stress response, and, of course, we will do a lot with biofeedback and you WILL get your brain mapped! That is quite fun. You can find out, once and for all, if you are really right-brained! We hope to see you, and the workshop will fill up quickly, so sign up soon!
Now, in the new milennium, it is no longer enough to "just teach piano." We continually see new and innovative piano methods, digital pianos which really do equate real, acoustic pianos and a whole host of teaching materials at conferences. With Dr. Zinn's background in Child Psychology, we know that the true edge in Piano Instruction is not WHAT but HOW. This workshop will change your perspective and put you on the cutting egde of instruction.
Marcie and Mark Zinn have written over fifteen articles, given numerous presentations at scientific and arts conferences, authored one video and are currerntly authoring another video on piano technique. Having both trained in physiological psychology (neurology), and EEG, they started the Subspecialty of Performing Arts Psychophysiology and recently founded the Society for Applied Research in Performing Arts Psychology. They are the forerunners in developing actual protocols in biofeedback for instrumental technique. For the first time, they have codified what they know and are presenting it here in a five-hour workshop for all musicians.
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