55: Celebrating a Year of Rock School Proprietor Insights

Join hosts John Kozicki (Michigan Rock School and RockSchoolProprietor.com) and Mandy York (Music Time of Milford) as they celebrate a year of conversations on the Rock School Proprietor Podcast. In this special episode, they reflect on their journey of over 50 episodes, sharing their top takeaways from conversations and listener interactions.

Mandy and John both share their top 3 most insightful episodes and why.

Whether it’s discussing the gap between traditional music method books and students’ desires, promoting practical learning approaches, or exploring the innovative world of AI in music education, John and Mandy cover the spectrum of topics that impact music educators and studio owners.

Tune in for a rich discussion that balances education with community-building, offering valuable insights for instructors and music lovers alike. Celebrate a year’s worth of growth, challenges, and exciting content, and look forward to what the future holds for music education!

Your ratings and reviews on Apple Podcast and Spotify are always appreciated!

Join our private Facebook group, “The Modern Music Schools,” a community for like-minded professionals to connect and share insights.

 

Episode Transcript:

John Kozicki (00:01.47)
Welcome to Rock School for Pride or Podcast. My name is Jon Kozicki.

Mandy York (00:06.53)
and I’m Mandi York.

John Kozicki (00:08.706)
Mandy, this is a big deal for us kind of today as we’re recording this. Today we released our 52nd episode. So why 52 is significant? Because that means we’ve released an episode every week for an entire year. Big congratulations. Kind of a big milestone. mean, I am impressed that we’ve

Mandy York (00:11.854)
Kinda.

Mandy York (00:27.438)
Yes! Yes! Good job! This is cool!

John Kozicki (00:38.806)
like been that consistent, which is really cool. So little minor celebration for us. So in reflecting back on a year of doing Rock School Proprietor podcast, I guess number one, what do you remember what you kind of expected going into this versus what the podcast is now?

Mandy York (01:03.866)
Gosh, I mean, I was kind of surprised. was like, hmm, okay. Taking our conversations and putting them into a podcast. Is that something I can do? Will that work? You know, I was totally game. I thought, let’s go for it.

John Kozicki (01:17.824)
right. Yeah.

Mandy York (01:26.298)
So that was my expectation. Like, I don’t know, jump in and we’ll see what happens. But it’s been, it’s been really great. I feel like I’ve learned a lot more than I expected I would, you know, and that we’ve been able to continue these conversations for a whole year. Like there’s just so much to talk about. So many people to interview. It’s been, that’s been really beneficial to me in my studio, I’d say.

John Kozicki (01:37.079)
Okay.

John Kozicki (01:52.685)
Yeah, the motivation originally, I think when we talked about the idea was we have these conversations. I mean, we have them more regularly now, to be honest, but we used to have these conversations regularly just in passing through our friendship about your studio and my studio. And the thought was, well, maybe we just share these in hopes that we can help other people. And I know for me, my focus has

definitely been less about, hey, let’s just take these conversations into an arena where other people can listen to them and hopefully they get something from it. And more about, I guess more focused on how can we help people. And I mean, I think we’ve done that. I hope we’ve done that.

Mandy York (02:44.994)
Yeah, some of my favorite episodes and discussions we’ve had come from when people submit questions. That’s cool. I like that kind of community building and sharing of ideas.

John Kozicki (02:53.137)
I love that.

Yeah, and we’ve had a few of those Q &A episodes, which have been great. You mentioned guests too. We’ve had some really cool guests. Top of mind, mean, like one of my, for me, one of my favorites that sort of sticks out is Tim Topham, in part because I’d never met Tim, Tim from Top Music. And I know you weren’t able to be involved with that conversation, but.

Mandy York (03:03.321)
Yeah.

John Kozicki (03:24.396)
That was episode, that was 36 and Tim’s, for one, he’s smart, he’s a kind of more of piano player, but he’s got this really cool, unique outlook on how to teach piano that’s a bit more progressive versus the old traditional style. And he’s Australian, so that was kind of fun. We’re like, we’re going international with the podcast, you know? So that was cool.

Mandy York (03:51.576)
Yeah. So that is great. I love talking to Sam Ready.

John Kozicki (03:53.838)
Other guests, yeah. Sam, yes, shout out to Sam.

Mandy York (03:59.566)
Yes. It was just, you know, that was a realm, the whole AI aspect, you know, AI and music, like music learning and his software. I learned a lot. did not know, you know, what was happening in that realm. And that was really eye-opening. it, well, the more you know, right? It made me a little less like weirded out about AI stuff.

He’s harnessing technology to help people teach lessons and to give people really great tools for teaching and learning music.

John Kozicki (04:29.933)
Okay.

John Kozicki (04:41.131)
Yes. And Sam Reddy is the founder of Musi.live, which is, it’s like Zoom for music lessons, but better because it’s for music lessons and the audio is good and the AI tools that he has built in are like really helpful for music instructors. And he really like in building Musi.live, he really focused on functionality for

music instructors and learners. So let’s see, he was on twice to talk about AI. And let’s see, that was episode, if I’m looking at the list real quick, 17, and then another episode, which was 31. And what surprised me about that is episode 17, we invited Sam on to talk about AI and music lessons. Like, is it gonna take our jobs, right? And the general consensus,

Mandy York (05:37.562)
You

John Kozicki (05:40.974)
on episode 17 was, nope, we’re good, at least for a while, know, things are going to change. Yeah. But then like literally a couple of weeks later, he was like, AI is advancing faster than I thought it was. And it might take our jobs quicker. So

Mandy York (05:57.932)
That was a really crazy experience. That was funny.

John Kozicki (06:01.261)
Yeah, so that’s why we had him back on on episode 31. So that was pretty quick. All right. All that said, in reflecting on this, I thought what might be fun is if we shared some of our favorite episodes or like favorite takeaways from the episodes and our conversations. So I chose three, you chose three. Let’s go reverse order.

Mandy York (06:10.618)
you

John Kozicki (06:30.349)
and we’ll list out the three and maybe talk a little bit about each one.

OK, why don’t you go first? You’re number three.

Mandy York (06:40.184)
My number three, I enjoyed talking about why music lessons are losing to sports. All right, it’s something, 18, yes. It’s something that we’ve talked about throughout the years, right? This is on a lot of teachers and studios mind, this happens all the time. I really enjoyed like breaking it down and it was just so helpful to articulate what was happening.

John Kozicki (06:48.557)
Episode 18. Yeah.

Mandy York (07:09.258)
And since then, I feel like I can have like more productive discussions about this topic when it comes up, either generally in life or at my studio with parents, right? Because we, it’s just, in the past, it’s been like, gosh, know, there’s all this competition in the sports. Parents are leaving us for sports and sports are taking over.

John Kozicki (07:15.117)
Mm-hmm.

Mandy York (07:37.53)
haven’t had like a really good conversation or sit down about, okay, why and what do we do about it? So episode 18 was that for me, that was great. And the most beneficial thing I think was kind of taking a step back and breaking down what people, what parents, caregivers were saying like, well, my child just isn’t practicing at home. So I think we’re going to drop, you know, the lesson, the music lesson, right?

John Kozicki (07:46.42)
Mm-hmm, right.

Mandy York (08:07.734)
or, you know, well, you know, they’re not able to play this whole song yet. Things like that. Right. And comparing it to sports. That was something I hadn’t really thought about before comparing it to sports. Okay. Well, what is your child’s requirement for practicing their sport every day? they don’t have one. Well, what, you know, like kind of like.

John Kozicki (08:14.625)
Mm-hmm.

Mandy York (08:34.878)
leveling the playing field a little bit.

John Kozicki (08:37.835)
Right. Yeah. So you’re saying, and I agree 100%, the choosing sports over music is largely because they look at those two metrics that you mentioned. How much is the kid practicing their music material? How are they advancing and improving? And when they say like, they’re not practicing. they’re not really improving. I guess we’ll just

Mandy York (08:59.919)
Yeah.

John Kozicki (09:07.017)
switch over to sports where those two things aren’t factors. Right? So yeah, yeah. So largely that self-imposed like we built this in a way that gives parents a reason to choose something else other than the activity that we are providing. So yeah, looking at it from that perspective and getting creative to figure out, okay,

Mandy York (09:11.418)
All right.

John Kozicki (09:36.119)
how do we lighten up and shift the focus away from those two things and shift the focus more on community and teamwork and building other skills that are lifelong benefits to the student rather than are they succeeding by practicing or seeing like marked improvement in their lessons? Yeah.

Mandy York (10:01.806)
Yes. And a big part of that is kind of educating the, especially quote unquote non-musical parent, right? They just don’t know better. So it’s our job to help them realize what these goals are in music. The goal isn’t 20 minutes of practice every day. yeah, so that was a helpful episode in learning how to communicate those things.

John Kozicki (10:10.763)
Right.

John Kozicki (10:19.307)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

John Kozicki (10:29.034)
Okay, so that’s episode 18 where we dive deep into that perfect segue into like, again, we’re each doing three. My third was episode number 21. And that was a Q &A that we received. So Q &A episode where we received a question about how to shift from private lessons to group classes. And maybe not coincidentally,

shifting over to those group lessons, what ends up happening is that we do have a lot of those same elements come into play that parents see in sports, right? There’s interaction with other kids, there’s that community, there’s that sense of responsibility to your teammates. Now we talked about the nuts and bolts of how to shift away from the private lessons, again, which are easier to quit.

right? And shift into group lessons. There was a lot in that episode. I’ll be honest, I didn’t re listen to it. But what I think is so beneficial are the things that we just talked about.

I think we get hung up and caught up as music educators, as private instructors. We also get hung up on that idea of seeing progress. And we also believe, well, I can be way more effective as an instructor if I’m working one-on-one with a student. And if I can be more effective, then the student’s going to get more from that experience.

Maybe, maybe not, but the benefits that come with that group interaction oftentimes cannot happen in the private lessons. And when you’re looking at…

John Kozicki (12:34.506)
kind of these bigger picture things and what parents are really looking for their student. I mean, how many of them are looking for their student to become like this amazing piano player versus how many of them are looking for them to be a well adjusted human who can work with other people and have maybe an appreciation for the arts and music and understand how

music connects us all to other people. I think, right, when you shine the light on those benefits, then you see, okay, that stuff can happen in group lessons, or it can happen in private lessons. So let’s be real about what those benefits are.

Mandy York (13:08.196)
Yeah, finding joy.

Mandy York (13:25.72)
Yes. Yeah, you’re right.

John Kozicki (13:27.468)
Okay. All right. Your number two.

Mandy York (13:30.842)
Number two, this was fun for me. Number two for me is the nope list. And I actually don’t know if that’s the title of the episode. Maybe it is, but it was episode 39. Taming your nope list, all right. Because I’d never heard you use that term before, but I loved it and I think about it now. And it’s really helped me. So the nope list was, we were talking about running our studios and…

John Kozicki (13:41.086)
Yeah, it is taming your nope list.

John Kozicki (13:47.902)
Uh-huh.

Mandy York (13:59.938)
Or is it organizing ourselves to help us, you know, delegate and as a studio owner, make your note lists so that you’re not wasting your time on those little things, right? Basically, that’s quick. The anti-list, yeah. Yes.

John Kozicki (14:11.03)
Yeah, it’s kind of the anti, it’s the anti to-do list, right? We have to-do lists, but we never even consider like on those to-do lists, maybe this one I shouldn’t do. Maybe I should delegate this. So that would go on the nope list. Yeah.

Mandy York (14:27.7)
Mm-hmm. And I loved the idea. It was so great. It was so helpful.

John Kozicki (14:32.62)
When you mentioned that to me, I laughed because that’s actually like of all our episodes, 52 episodes at this point, that is like in terms of download numbers, it’s at the absolute bottom of the list.

Mandy York (14:50.9)
That’s so funny. I just, I mean, even with a title like that, Nope List, why wouldn’t I click on that? I want to know what that means.

John Kozicki (14:58.348)
Well, maybe this will reinvigorate that maybe people will be like, Oh, I gotta know. I gotta know about the note list. I agree. I mean, I thought I thought the things that we talked about were from an organizational standpoint, I guess, and in like running a business standpoint, like really, really good info, maybe not had very little to do with teaching music lessons, right. But I agree. I thought it was

Mandy York (15:22.148)
teaching. Yeah, yeah. But we wear many hats and we have to think about these things too. Yeah.

John Kozicki (15:29.836)
Yes. Yes. So taming your note list, that was episode 39. All right. My number two. This actually was a very popular one and it was an early episode. Episode number 10. Prioritizing, prioritize playing over teaching in your in your lesson studio. You know that I am all about the

Mandy York (15:36.57)
39.

John Kozicki (15:59.104)
the playing and experiential learning and learning by doing. So for me, and I don’t, you know, I don’t teach that much anymore, but I do coach our bands and I absolutely love just getting in there and just playing with the students. And if I recall correctly, one of the things I talked about in that episode was

taking the pressure off ourselves in terms of what we believe we think we should be doing every week. We think we should meet this goal every week. We think we should meet these goals every month. We think we should see this type of progress every year. And that usually translates into, I gotta be teaching. I gotta be teaching, teaching, teaching so I can see this progress. And kind of,

lightening that pressure a little bit and instead of trying to teach just get in there and do it and have fun. Students are still going to learn.

they’re gonna be more engaged. We’re both having more fun. It’s mutually beneficial in my opinion.

Mandy York (17:19.054)
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, in my world of early childhood music, that’s exactly what we do. That’s almost all that we do. We’re just learning through play and doing. Yep. Creating positive experiences.

John Kozicki (17:28.585)
Right, and how often do you have parents say, Miss Mandy, what should my kid be practicing at home? Because I really need to be on top of them, making sure they’re practicing however much you say they’re supposed to practice every week.

Mandy York (17:37.752)
Yes.

Mandy York (17:46.562)
Mm-hmm. Yep. It doesn’t happen. I mean, there’s a few. There are some parents that will ask for more details like this. And some have asked about like actually playing instruments in the classroom. But that’s your opportunity to educate the parents about, we are learning through play. This is what we’re doing. are, if you want to reinforce what we’re doing in the classroom, these are the things you can do, but we’re not teaching, we’re doing.

John Kozicki (18:14.603)
Right, right. And I’ll add that it’s pretty rare that I hear it too. I mean, on occasion, but overall, I think when parents see that their kids are excited, and they’re happy about what’s happening in this activity, music lessons, group classes, whatever it is, then that’s a good sign, you know?

Mandy York (18:23.767)
Yeah.

John Kozicki (18:44.683)
They’re happy, they’re continually going, they’re not complaining about it, right? And going back to the practice thing, man, easy way to make them complain is give them a task that they have to do, right? So yes, take that attitude and put it into the lesson room, into the classroom, prioritize playing over.

teaching those episode number 10. All right, and your drum roll number one.

Mandy York (19:19.864)
My number one, yeah, all the way back to episode two, parents are the real students, parent education, because I love this stuff. I love it. And as I was reflecting on the year and thinking about this, it’s like, this is something that I just need to keep coming back to and be reminded of like how important it is and ways to educate parents in the classroom.

John Kozicki (19:28.799)
Mm-hmm.

Mandy York (19:48.154)
We talked about this in different ways, right? mean, earlier in this episode, we talked about educating parents, like non-musical parents, to set expectations. Well, you know, maybe you have this assumption that they need to be practicing 20 minutes a day, but actually, let’s talk about what our goals are and how we can achieve those goals, you know, for everybody. And the goal may not just be learning this song by X date.

John Kozicki (20:11.914)
Mm-hmm.

Mandy York (20:17.742)
Right. So those are different ways to educate in my realm. You know, I’m educating parents as to what, what we’re doing in the classroom, because yes, it is all play. It’s learning through doing, but it’s intentional. Like the activities that I’m doing, that I’m planning have a purpose. And so cueing the parents into what that purpose is and then how they can replicate that at home.

John Kozicki (20:33.001)
Yeah.

Mandy York (20:43.834)
It enriches their experience in the music lesson and thereby enriches their child’s experience. And thereby, you you usually hold on to those students longer when the parents are kind of cued in and educated on what’s going on as well.

John Kozicki (20:58.76)
Yeah, because oftentimes, and we talked about this a lot in that early episode, we’ve talked about it a lot in subsequent episodes, oftentimes parents just don’t know what success looks like when it comes to music lessons. So their default is, music lesson, I guess they’re supposed to practice, right? So I guess I’ll use that as my metric to determine success.

Mandy York (21:14.414)
Yeah.

John Kozicki (21:26.334)
Right? And if they’re not practicing, well, obviously there’s something wrong. Or, well, I’m just not seeing progress because I expect that like they’ll improve as if this is school. Right? They completed book one. Now they’re on to book two. Well, why did it take them this amount of time to complete book one? And it’s taking them way longer to complete book two. Something must be wrong. And parent education.

maybe that’s not what we should be focusing on. Maybe we should reframe what success looks like in music lessons. And you do a great job of explaining that in that episode and explaining how you’re constantly working with parents on that to educate them. If I remember correctly from that episode, I talked about how that re-education

for in my studio starts really early, even before kids start lessons. We on the on that initial phone call, the inquiry call, I have specific questions that I ask to help understand, well, what is the state of mind that this parent is in when they’re seeking out music lessons for their kid? And if I get the sense that that’s what their expectation is focused on practice and progress.

then I shift that conversation to.

get them thinking about, what are the benefits that they want to see when they put their kids in lessons? Is it really that they want to see their kid practice every week? Is it really that they want to see the kid go from book one to book two? Most of time it’s probably not. Most of time it’s they want their kid to find their thing. They want their child to understand and I…

John Kozicki (23:27.708)
I love how you phrase this all the time, that music is part of the human experience. And when we talk about those things, even as early as on the phone in that initial phone call, then that plants that little seed in their mind so that as they progress through through lessons, they’re not as concerned about practice. They’re not as concerned about progress. They’re really enjoying the experience for what it is.

So.

Mandy York (23:59.032)
Yes, it’s really fun when you have, when you can see a caregiver have a light bulb moment too. I has that ever happened to you? You know, when I’m in class and I’m explaining. So if you notice when I’m, when I do this, you know, when I stop the phrase, we’ll hear some of the kids finish it or you’ll hear some of the little, the little ones babble on a resting tone and just kind of talk about that. they go, like that’s why you do that. Or, or next time we sing a song like that. I.

I don’t finish the phrase and a child finishes it for me. And a parent will point like, oh, they just did it. Or if you’re having that conversation with the parent of an older child, okay, they’re not practicing 20 minutes a day, but what are you hearing? And the parent may come back, may think about that and come back and say, oh, I hear them experimenting with this. Or they’re telling me all about this thing.

John Kozicki (24:32.148)
Yeah.

John Kozicki (24:55.134)
Mm-hmm.

Mandy York (24:57.966)
They kind of tune in to what’s exciting their child rather than, they didn’t practice for 20 minutes yesterday and they should have.

John Kozicki (25:06.952)
Yeah, or in my studio because it’s performance based in the rock school. When a student finishes a concert. And they’re like, they say something like. I made this mistake and this mistake and this mistake in this song. But you know what? No one noticed and I had fun. How big of a win is that right? Because so often students get hung up on their mistakes because

Mandy York (25:28.058)
Yeah. Yeah.

John Kozicki (25:36.978)
in private lessons, those mistakes are pointed out and not necessarily in a negative way. I’m not saying that, but in again, in the instructor’s mind, if a student’s making a mistake, I’m going to point it out so that we can work on that and improve it. Whereas in the rock school, oftentimes what we say is, know what, if you’re playing in a band and you make a mistake, number one,

you’re probably the only one who’s gonna notice. So it’s not really a big deal. Number two, the rest of your bandmates are there to cover for you and keep that song going so that it doesn’t train wreck, right? That builds that confidence. I made a mistake, I kept going, not a big deal. Huge, huge life lesson, yeah. Okay, so that was…

Mandy York (26:26.008)
Yes. Yeah. So cool.

John Kozicki (26:31.593)
Episode number two going way, way, way, way back. Our parents, the real students in music lessons. I was like, I agree. That was a good one. My number one. And honestly, it’s like it’s was hard to choose like three. And if you ask me tomorrow, I’d probably choose a different number one. But this one is kind of top of mind as of late for me. But episode number 33, future pew.

Mandy York (26:33.29)
Mm-hmm. Way back.

John Kozicki (27:01.319)
future-proofing music lessons in the age of AI. Which, it was kind of dark. It was kind of…

Mandy York (27:10.042)
Yes, I’m not surprised that’s you chose.

John Kozicki (27:14.345)
Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s hard. I was never I mean, emo, the term emo was not a thing when I was a kid. But I probably would have been branded emo. Had it been a thing? Yeah, I kind of went on a rant about AI and how it could potentially replace music instructors and how

Mandy York (27:28.12)
Okay.

John Kozicki (27:43.055)
Our online lives are really just kind of fake and fabricated at this point. And it was all doom and gloom in the beginning of that episode.

until I said, what that does for us as music instructors is it sort of clears that pathway for us to say, well, what is music really about? What is really important about what we’re doing with music lessons? And we’ve sort of alluded to this in this conversation as well, but it has the ability to connect us on a personal level with other people.

Again, I’ll say it again. You your phrase is music is part of the human experience. And regardless of what happens with technology, what we are doing in providing this this peer to peer music experience is we’re creating something that can never ever be replaced by AI or technology. And yes, while the episode started as Doom and Gloom, I think in the end,

What it really did for me is it helped me to realize that what we are doing is that important, but how we talk about it now has to change because information is everywhere. If you want to learn something, you go online and you learn it. If you are even too lazy to do a Google search and learn something,

you can just ask ChatGPT, hey, how do I do this? And it will tell you. So that makes things really easy from a learning perspective. And I think one of the things I said in that episode was we as music instructors are sometimes a little bit slow to shift. And if we’re still thinking about our jobs as

John Kozicki (29:51.562)
a transfer of information, that ship has sailed. But if we look at our jobs as being a guide and showing how that this experience music can improve your life, your lives, our lives collectively, game changer, right? Then we have future-proofed our existence. We have future-proofed our ways of making a living in our studios.

Mandy York (30:20.674)
Yeah. Yep. And I, like I said about our conversation with Sam, it opened my eyes about technology that I hadn’t really thought about, read about, looked into and realized we can’t close our eyes to it. Right. We need to know, you need to know what’s out there and what’s going on and harness what you can and differentiate yourself.

John Kozicki (30:34.409)
you

Mandy York (30:49.356)
in a positive way so that you stay relevant and exciting.

John Kozicki (30:55.229)
Yeah, yep. And it’s really the most basic thing, you know, like we’ve literally been doing this for centuries. You know, we’ve been sharing music with one another and communing around music and it’s just going back to basics, I think. And people appreciate that. Maybe it’s not for everyone, you know, maybe there are people who would, yeah, just rather learn from from online videos or whatever. And that’s great. But

we can’t think about what we do as just giving information to people. So I think that really clarified in my mind as I move forward with my studio, how to change my messaging and my marketing and really hit on those things that honestly seems to be kind of a running theme with all of our, maybe not all of our top three, but.

I mean, for you, parents as the real students, you’re educating them. Music lessons, learning to sports, right? Again, we’re shifting the focus of what we’re talking about. Let’s see, prioritize playing or teaching was my number three, right? That’s that common theme. And then the AI stuff.

Mandy York (32:03.642)
community.

John Kozicki (32:20.124)
Man, so a year’s worth of talking about how to not talk about music lessons as education.

Mandy York (32:27.61)
Community building and sharing. Yeah, that’s what it is.

John Kozicki (32:33.19)
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, probably no surprise. Even before we started this podcast, that’s a lot of the stuff that we talk about. In the description of our podcast, there’s a lot of talk about how to build a community and create this amazing studio and where people interact. so, yeah, no surprises there, I guess, right?

but a year’s worth of episodes, that’s pretty great.

Mandy York (33:06.938)
There it is. Yeah, it is. It’s been awesome. And we have some great episodes coming up too. We’ve got some good things lined up I’m excited about.

John Kozicki (33:09.682)
Yeah.

John Kozicki (33:13.224)
We do, we do lots of cool guests coming up. And by the time this airs, maybe some of those have already been out. Well, so Mandy, thanks for a year of these great conversations. Yeah, congratulations. Cheers to another 52 episodes. We’ll do this again at 204 maybe, or sorry, 104, yeah.

Mandy York (33:29.284)
Congrats.

Mandy York (33:39.258)
Here we go. Cool.

John Kozicki (33:41.882)
All right, okay, well, we’ll see you next time. Thanks, Mandy.

Mandy York (33:45.54)
Thanks, John. See you.

 

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