Hadiza S  
Instruments: Piano, Voice, Synthesizer, Keyboard
Styles: Classical, Jazz, Pop, Blues, Folk, Electronic, New Age, Soul, Punk, Avant-garde

My teaching experience started in High School when I would exchange piano lessons for guitar with a musician friend of mine. My formal teaching experience began in Atlanta 5 years ago when I co-taught group keyboard lessons for beginner elementary school students and taught adult beginner voice students through my in-home studio. I took this experience back to my home town of Iowa City where I traveled to teach beginner adult piano and beginner adult voice and taught beginner-early intermediate piano and voice through a local music lessons studio. One of the most important things that I stress is consistency in practice as well as correct practice. Both my piano lessons and vocal coaching emphasize technique but my main goal is to build confidence in performance. Confidence can only come from correct practice, but correct practice can only come if you're motivated and you're having fun! For my younger students I make sure to change things up to avoid boredom while teaching new angles of a certain skill. I also highly encourage my students to participate in recitals and open mics as interim goals.

For beginner Piano students who are young, I teach either from Hal Leonard's Essential Elements or Faber & Faber. Both are great interactive resources that help guide toward mastery of the basics. I also like to include games using flash cards and note names for my youngest students who learn best through a variety of activities. For those that are past beginner lever, the Faber & Faber series works well to incorporate solo repertoire with technique and theory practice. For the beginner voice student who is young, I teach breath control and ear training through solfege. For adults, I take an assessment of what they want to learn and the goals they want to achieve musically. What I've found is in a lot of cases, adults want to learn how to sing a certain song, fix a pressing issue with their voice, or they just want to discover the joy of developing their ability to play. Because they're learning later in life it's important to me to understand their goals so that I can develop a curriculum that will reap the greatest reward in terms of their individual goals. I do like to set a generalized goal for adult students to perform in an open mic after a certain period of time.