With 20 plus years of experience, Amy Choi’s instructional experience spans a full spectrum from toddlers music and movement classes to college non-piano major private piano instruction; her students’ capacities range from recreational music-making to state convention performances; the selection of instruments she teaches vary from simple classroom instruments, to piano, to most orchestral and band instruments. From infant to retirees, her students cover every school age and span every stage of life.

As a certified Kindermusik educator, Amy worked with toddlers and their parents in music and movement classes. For preschool to lower elementary students, she used the Musikgarten: At the Piano TM curriculum to teach music literacy through keyboard playing. As a school band director, Amy taught classroom music to 1st and 2nd graders and Beginning and Intermediate Band from Grades 3 and up. She has also taken her students to choir competitions where students performed college-level works (re-arranged by Amy herself to fit the elementary voice), brought the house down in tears and received awards.

Middle and high schoolers are at the heart of Amy’s teaching. As the Music Director, Amy taught the long-year course of Music Appreciation, led the Middle School Choir, Band, String Orchestra, and Percussion Ensemble. Besides directing these groups for concerts and competitions, Amy is never shy to re-write and re-arrange music, tailoring pieces to fit the group. She also supports these groups on the back end by giving private or small group piano and various instrumental lessons.

Amy had one of the toughest jobs in her teaching career in high school when she was asked to assist to high school marching band. When the University of California made its first high school Visual Performing Arts requirement (the VPA in the UC's A-G requirements), Amy designed the school’s first A-G approved Music Theory and Appreciation course and taught it the first two years of the course being offered.

Amy is a lifelong learner, she is interested in stretching herself in different capacities, both as a learner and as a teacher. As a pianist and chorister, Amy changed up the musical scene for herself by expanding into instrumental music. As a Music Education major with a piano proficiency, she continued to stretch herself by taking on overload course work every semester in order to take advantage of various private instrumental lessons. Because of the strong musical and theoretical background already obtained in piano studies, after just a couple of years of instrumental studies, Amy found herself regularly performing alongside other instrumentalist colleagues in small and large instrumental ensembles, bands, orchestras. In fact, Amy was the only member in her class who was selected to lead an orchestra as a pianist when fulfilling her student-teaching requirements.

As a teacher with a wealth of knowledge and experience, there is no sound pedagogical means that Amy would not tap into or integrate for the purpose of reaching a learner. She would re-write a standard orchestral work for her middle school string group or create a new part altogether in order to include a beginning player into an advanced group; just as well as she may integrate an early elementary music literature curriculum to fit the learning style of a high school student with learning differences such as dyslexia. Basketball goggles, painting tape, Barbie doll shoes… nothing is off-limit to use as long as learning and the learner are the outcome. As a mother of 2 gifted children, one of which previously diagnosed with severe delays, Amy is well-versed in special education, on the challenged and gifted ends, and a mix of both.

Educational and musical training did not take a back seat after Amy finished her post-graduate education. She took on further training in classical piano and technical studies, jazz studies, and piano pedagogy courses at the doctoral level. She is often found attending workshops, conferences, and webinars. She is a musical pedagogical junky, actively training and keeping up with the latest pedagogical trends. Amy’s latest pedagogical interests include incorporating GarageBand in private piano, using improvisation and composition as a means to teach note-reading, effective teaching approaches for the neurotypicals, the dyslexics, the gifted and the 2Es. During the health pandemic of 2020, Amy started a journey with the Russian school of piano pedagogy with Irina Gorin and discovered an effective way to develop a strong technical foundation in young beginners. Among her musical teachers through the years, she considers Dr. Stewart Gordon of the University of Southern California and internationally acclaimed music educator Irina Gorin two of the most influential in her musical life.