Hello, I'm Allison Wilkinson.
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Allison Wilkinson is a veteran music teacher, music psychologist, author, and the Executive Director of Making Musicians. Her book, Making Musicians: A Teacher’s Guide to Emotionally Intelligent Music Instruction, published by GIA Publications, has become a foundational text for educators seeking to teach music as a tool for human development rather than performance alone.
My StoryÂ
The first time a student walked into my studio and told me their parents were getting a divorce, I realized something my training had not prepared me for: I had no idea what to do.
That moment — and the thousand moments like it that followed — became the question that has shaped my entire career. How do we teach music to a child whose nervous system is doing something completely different from what the lesson plan assumes?
The answer became EIMI. It is the framework I built across 20+ years of professional teaching, more than 20,000 hours of direct instruction, and the years of music psychology research I went back to graduate school to do. It rests on one core insight from neuroscience: music lives in the midbrain — the emotional regulation center of the brain — and until you teach to that, nothing else you do will stick.
I have now trained more than 6,600 music educators across 20+ states in this approach, plus international partners. The work sits at the intersection of three things most music education programs treat as separate: brain science, classroom practice, and teacher mental health. They are not separate. They never were.
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