About

Mindful Music Pedagogy is designed to be a resource for music educators who wish to strengthen the connections between the mind and the body within themselves and their students. As an educator, I became aware of the struggles many of my students faced with self-doubt, anxieties, and insecurities related to music and musical performance. I observed how that impacted their performances and their perceptions of their performances. As I sought to help them, I discovered the lack of developmentally-appropriate resources for music educators and young music students who need concrete, situationally-specific tools to help them learn how to cope with stressful musical situations.

My goal was to create these resources using tools and strategies from a variety of fields such as sport psychology and child psychology while incorporating general concepts of child development. This became the primary area of research for my doctoral work and continues to be a topic of great interest and study to me to this day. My objective is to help teachers and young students develop successful strategies that will result in consistent performances. 

This site and the resources made available here, especially the Practical Strategies for Successful Musicianship, are an outgrowth of this research. What I discovered was that learning how to be a successful musician involves much more than practicing; it requires developing an awareness of the mind and the body, and an understanding of where each musician is at developmentally. These issues and more are addressed here, giving you the confidence that you are providing your students with an excellent musical experience.