Our overall goal is to provide our clients with expert self-knowledge about their own brain function, memory and learning capabilities by creating practical and usable strategies that everyone can easily use at home.

We accomplish the following using our unique instructional set for piano:

• Provide music education that combines the best of elite piano playing and scientific disciplines that  come together to make the optimal learning experience for each participant. We utilize research from topics such as memory, emotion, motivation, attention, cognitive development, asthetics, stress and neuro-development. 
• Provide effective programs to teach students to share what they know within their own community and outside of it.
• Continue the design of relevant neuroeducational applications, utilizing modules which are updated to keep pace with the newest research findings.
• Conduct new research and share the findings with the scientific and arts communities.
• Assist parents to understand their own children so they may aid them in their educational growth. The knowledge that is developed through piano instruction is then applied to other aspects of the child's life.
• Converge the most recent research findings onto elite piano instruction.

And we do the above within our program that actively addresses the problems inherent in all private music instruction, especially piano:

• We train you, the parent, to mentor your child at home. The once-per-week lesson model goes against human learning. Many students "fall through the cracks" simply because they are not able to adequately conduct their practice. Said differently, they often don't know what to do, don't see the point in doing certain things, and are not good at time management. The school system is increasingly asking parents to oversee homeework at home, and this is a 1-day turnaround. The most salient reason that piano lessons fail is ineffective home practice. Our teaching model corrects for that.
• We work with the child to help the child learn to understand, and accept, the negative parts of piano. Playing repertoire pieces is fun (we know how to make that happen), but often the parts of piano that support learning the pieces is not fun (theory, sighreading practice, effective problem solving techniques, etc.). We work with you and the child so that everyone undestands the process so that the child learns to accept it.
• We do not use the end-of-year evaluations to "motivate" your child. No one works all year for 1 test at the end of the year, and your child did not start piano to be evaluated. These evaluations are not standardized (like the testing you think of in your school), so there is no way to ascertain whether they are measuring what the test-givers think they are measuring, and there has been NO research to ascertain whether or not the test measures the same thing in all students, across time. Furthermore, the 'testing' turns around your child's focus--from someone doing piano for the pleasure of it, to something that the child must do to prove him or herself. We just don't do it.
• We do use your child's own imagination to motivate him or her. Do not lose sight of the original intent of piano lessons--to learn to play like someone you once saw and were impressed with. Actually, your child has multiple mental models of competency at piano, and that's what your child seeks--competency and ability to play flashy pieces. We never lose sight of that and continually support it. It's the imagination that keeps one in piano.

As a result of our own education in psychology and the arts, we are able to teach children to think in ways that will most definitely surpass simple piano instruction. Then, the child learns these habitual ways of thinking and transfers it to his or her school work, and other aspects of life.

We then combine the above with a comprehensive musicianship approach and computer-based music instruction provide an instructional framework that is truly unique.

Zinn Piano Program is continually updated using major research findings from social, behavioral, developmental psychology, as well as latest discoveries in cognitive neuroscience. In addition, Zinn Piano Program is a research entity (Performing Arts Psychophysiology Research Institute), meaning that we continually test and revise our teaching methods based on the results of empirical research in the field as well as the findings at our learning facility. We are also pioneering a new field within performance psychology referred to as "Performing Arts Psychology." In the same vein as Sport Psychology, we seek an evidence-based approach for finding real solutions and applications to musicians. Performing Arts Psychology involves finding ways to help students optimize their performance level through technique training, education, cognitive coping techniques, biofeedback , as well as stress and pain management techniques.

Below is a short list of the types of functioning we foster with our students to develop Optimal Cognitive Skills:

• Sustained attention: ability to focus attention over a long time period
• Flexibility focusing and shifting attention
• Maintaining good performance over time
• Ability to inhibit irrelevant stimuli
• Initiation of purposeful, goal-directed behavior
• Formulation of plans
• Selection of behaviors
• Sequential organization of one’s approach to the solution of problems
• Self-monitoring
• Staying on task, even in the face of interference
• Ability to switch and stop a behavior
• Working memory (includes long-term and short term memory)
• Emotional control
• Understand another person’s perspective
• Integration of Language
• Anticipation of consequences
• Responding adaptively to novel situations and stimuli
• Keeping track of two or more activities simultaneously
• Self-monitoring: constantly comparing outcomes with intentions
• Inhibition of inappropriate behavior
• Inhibition of impulses

 
The specific framework of our piano program features what is called a comprehensive musicianship approach to learning piano. Comprehensive Musicianship is integration of the major components of the music-making process: performance training, ear training, music theory, sight-reading, technique training. This program then is utilized to enhance every participant's skill level to produce the optimal outcomes that music instruction is known to produce. Among the modalities we use are video assisted instruction, biofeedback, mind-body self-regulatory skills through biofeedback, Cognitive Resource Management and behavioral reinforcement methods, and we are now developing virtual reality systems to train optimal focus states. We also help students achieve "flow state" during performance of their well-learned repertoire by way of elite cognitive skill such as interruption management. In sports terms, we help students to experience being "in the zone." By helping students get into "performance mode" spontaneously, they learn to rely on faster, more efficient brain areas that are better suited to handle higher skill level tasks. Applying their performance skills, combined with their knowledge in other musical areas, students are able to learn music more rapidly and play more reliably than ever, and achieve the same reliable cognitive states in any other venue they attempt.