What makes a good piano teacher

Parents usually ask me this in the first two minutes of a phone call: how do you know whether a teacher is any good? It is a fair question and a hard one, because the visible signals — a conservatory diploma, a full studio, a shelf of competition results — tell you a great deal about the teacher and almost nothing about what happens in the room. I have known brilliant players who could not explain a single thing they did, and I have watched modest pianists teach with such clarity that their students improved faster than seemed reasonable. After years on both sides of the piano bench here in Zurich, my answer has narrowed to one sentence. A good teacher is not the person who catches the most mistakes. A good teacher is the person who is slowly, deliberately making themselves unnecessary.

Correcting mistakes is the easy part

Anyone with a working ear can hear that a note was wrong, that a rhythm sagged, that the left hand covered the melody. Hearing it is not teaching — it is the entry ticket. The trouble with a lesson built entirely on corrections is arithmetic: the student leaves with thirty things to remember and no way at all to produce the thirty-first on their own. Next week the same thirty problems reappear in a new piece, because nothing underneath them changed. Worse, a student corrected relentlessly for long enough stops listening to the music and starts listening for the teacher's reaction, which is a different skill and a much less useful one. Correction is necessary — I correct constantly — but it is the surface of the work, not the substance. The question that matters is what the correction is attached to.

Diagnosis comes before instruction

The interesting part of teaching is working out why something goes wrong, because the cause is almost never located where the symptom is. A passage that rushes is rarely a rhythm problem; more often the student is uncomfortable and hurrying to get out of it, and the real fault is a fingering that forces a scramble. A melody that sounds dull is rarely a lack of feeling; usually the arm is doing nothing and the fingers are doing everything. A memory slip in the third line often begins with an unclear harmonic picture two pages earlier. A teacher who treats the symptom prescribes "play it slower and louder" and the problem returns. A teacher who diagnoses changes one thing at the root and five symptoms disappear at once. This is also why good teachers ask so many questions. "What did you hear there?" is not a rhetorical device; it is the fastest way to find out whether the student cannot yet do the thing or simply cannot yet hear it, and the two require completely different lessons.

Teaching the ear, not just the hands

A student practises alone roughly ninety-five percent of the time. Whatever the teacher's ear can do is therefore almost irrelevant between Tuesdays — what matters is the ear the student takes home. So a good part of every lesson should be spent transferring that ability rather than exercising it on the student's behalf. I ask students to sing a phrase before playing it, to record thirty seconds on their phone and tell me what they notice before I say anything, to play a passage twice with a deliberate difference and choose which version they prefer. These are small, almost trivial habits, and they change the nature of home practice entirely: instead of repeating until the time is up, the student is repeating until something specific sounds the way they decided it should. That is the whole difference between practising and playing through.

Guidance, and then room to decide

This is where the balance gets delicate, and where I think teachers most often go wrong — in both directions. Too little guidance and a student flounders for years, rediscovering solutions the tradition worked out two centuries ago. Too much, and you produce a very neat performance of your own interpretation, played by someone else's hands. The technical foundations are not negotiable: how the arm transfers weight, how to sit, how to practise a difficult bar, how to read what the score actually says. But once those are in place, a great many musical decisions genuinely belong to the student, and a teacher has to be able to hear a phrasing they would not have chosen and say, honestly, that it works. It costs something to do that. It is also the only way a student ever develops a voice you can recognise. My rule of thumb is that if I can predict exactly how a student will play a new piece, I have been talking too much.

What to look for in a trial lesson

Practically, then: sit in on one lesson, or take one yourself, and watch for four things. First, does the teacher explain why, or only what — "use the fourth finger there" versus "use the fourth finger so the thumb is free for the top note". Second, do they demonstrate at the instrument? Hearing the intended sound once is worth several paragraphs of description. Third, do you leave with two or three concrete things to do, rather than a general instruction to practise more? And fourth, the one that matters most for children: does the student look like they are allowed to try something and be wrong? Warmth is not the opposite of high standards. Fear makes hands stiff, and a stiff hand cannot learn. Finally, be honest about fit. A teacher who is excellent for a driven teenager preparing an audition may be the wrong choice for an adult beginner who plays for pleasure after work, and neither of them is a bad teacher — they are simply teaching different people.

The test I apply to my own teaching is uncomfortable but clarifying: if this student stopped having lessons next month, could they keep improving on their own? If the answer is yes, something real was transferred. If the answer is no — if they would simply stall without someone to tell them what was wrong — then I have been correcting rather than teaching, however pleasant the lessons felt. Every good teacher I have had understood this. They gave me tools, opinions, standards and a great deal of patience, and then they gradually got out of the way.