MAPLETON, UT – Candice Holyoak, owner and piano teacher at Holyoak Music Studio, began incorporating The Art of Learning principles into her teaching with a focus on helping her students develop resilience and a growth-minded relationship to learning.

Holyoak explores the concept of Valuing Process Before Results by teaching her students a specific process to follow when learning a new piece of music that breaks the practice into smaller chunks and builds proper technique and accuracy over time. She also offers her students opportunities to include a variety of additional practice elements of their choice to build a sense of ownership of the process of learning the piece.
Holyoak introduces her students to the concept of The Middle Way through a metronome exercise that encourages them to stretch their boundaries and push the limits of their current abilities. As they progressively increase the speed at which they play a given piece, students develop an understanding of what they are capable of today, and what they need to work toward moving forward. In addition, this exercise allows students to practice Investment in Loss by examining the points at which their playing broke down and planning for how to improve.
An exploration of Beginner’s Mind starts with a discussion of a baby’s approach to learning and the curiosity and joy they have for the process of discovery. Holyoak expands on this principle with her students by bringing out their own curiosity, helping them ask questions about “what if” and “why” as they play new pieces of music.

“What I love about The Art of Learning”, Holyoak explains “is that Josh has broken down the mystery of mastery, making explicit the “things that can’t be learned” – the principles that great achievers have known and learned implicitly. I want my students to have the opportunity to be consciously aware of these principles for learning, so the doors of mastery will be open to them as well, if they choose it.”