Better Practice Blog- 3 Back-To-School Tips to Supercharge Your Studio
3 Back-To-School Tips to Supercharge Your Studio
For those of you who are starting a new school year, we wanted to share 3 great tips to help you gain some momentum that will help carry you and your studio through the school term.
1. Develop A Practice Habit
Want your students to practice every day? Studies show that it takes 21+ days to form a habit. So why not simultaneously bring your studio together and encourage daily practicing by starting a Practice Challenge? It’s simple - the student(s) that practices the most days in 21 days wins a prize.
With Better Practice, running a Practice Challenge is easy! Here are some tips:
Preparing for the contest:
Set a date for the competition to officially start (so everyone has a fair chance). When the time approaches, set a countdown on the app to the start of the competition so there’s no confusion about dates.
Hype it up! Make sure you hype up the challenge well before you start it, so everyone is anticipating and excited for it. This can be months in advance (“I’m holding a big contest in the fall”) or a little less (“We’re going to have a Streak Challenge at the start of next month!”).
Inform the families. It’s important to inform the parents so they are engaged as well. Let them know the specifics of the contest (start date, that the days practiced must be consecutive and recorded to count, etc.) and that the winners will receive a prize!
Running the contest
Remind students in studio announcements every time they log in. It can be something as simple as “The 21 Day Challenge is on!”, or include info about the terms (“Remember, your practice must be recorded to count!”).
Highlight the finish line by using the countdown to set the end date of the contest.
Let Better Practice do the work by using the Streak Tool to keep track of your students! On day 21, go to Scorecard and view your students and their practice stats. You can click 'Day' to reorganize the list by number of days practiced and view the winner! You can also sort by minutes or assignments to award other prizes.
Beyond
You can encourage Streaks (consecutive days of practice) by giving small prizes every X number of days. For example, every 30 days the streak is kept up, they win something. Practicing every single day for a month is no small feat!
2. Set Goals With Your Students
Set goals for your students for more learning opportunities and provide valuable feedback along the way! When the student has a set of concrete goals to work toward, not only do they become more engaged, but so do the parents. It allows parents to be able to get more involved - much more than when the homework is simply “Learn this Beethoven sonata”. Some parents may be limited in their ability to help their child learn music, much less walk them through the process. Setting good goals will help the child hone in on what’s important, and make it easier for them to get help at home.
Making Good Goals
Be inclusive - Make the goals with the student and involve the parent. This is a good opportunity to get an understanding and appreciation of what the different parties want and to align. This can also be an easy way to get the parents involved: they can feel less like a bystander in their child’s music-learning experience, and instead, more like a helping hand.
Give it variety - Have short-term goals as well as long-term, easy and challenging. Have different goals focusing on different areas (e.g. technique, emotion, listening, etc.). Setting up concrete goals in different areas trains the student’s mind to always be mindful of the different aspects involved in playing music.
Make them specific and measurable - There’s a big difference between “Learn this song” vs “Get the tempo up to 100bpm, hands-together, with no stops”. Providing measures of success can influence how a student will practice, and now they will know when they have reached the goal.
Add some fun! Many teachers have goals such as “See at least 2 live performances this quarter”, or “Actively listen to at least 15 minutes of music every day”. Even small things such as these, when set as goals, can be a boost to remind the student to stay involved in music on a daily basis.
Better Practice makes managing goals very easy. It can help set goals, visually show progress, and provide feedback as needed. Students can see their goals in one place and how much farther they have to go. It also keeps a history of them. Seeing all of the goals they’ve accomplished in the past can be a great motivator too!
Better Practice also provides progress reports as an opportunity to break up the teaching year into periods (if you don’t already) and give thorough feedback to your students. Our progress reports cover students' practice trends, recent repertoire, average practice time, and total assignments practiced - among many other things! We’ve found that students respond greatly to being able to visually see their progress, and this is a super quick way to give it to them. Breaking up your teaching year into periods also makes it much easier to set goals. Now, you can give them goals like, “This quarter, let’s aim to up your average practice time from 30 minutes to 45” - then see how they fare in next quarter’s progress report. Goals you hadn't given before (because you had no way of measuring the components) are now just one tap away!
3. Plan Out The School Term
Want to make it easy on yourself during the year? Like a slow cooker, do a little work upfront and then sit back and relax. Take an afternoon to lesson plan! Whether it’s for the upcoming quarter, semester, or even the entire year, planning ahead will make your life loads easier when the teaching season begins (hooray for less thinking!).
Lesson planning is a breeze with Better Practice and the great part is it's flexible if you want to define multiple paths or if you need to deviate. Here’s how:
Schedule future assignments with expected dates. Put in a variety of choices and try to align with the student’s motivation type. Then in the middle of the lesson, you can simply decide what is the best next project for the student given their progress and motivation level and tap to assign.
Plan a whole curriculum using the library of music book assignments. Say you have a student on Alfred’s Premier books, Level 2A. You can go ahead and add all of the books (already in the Better Practice system) Level 2A and on to said student. Now, add in other supplemental materials, maybe a Hanon or Czerny. By adding the books, Better Practice dynamically creates the curriculum so the entire course is laid out already. Now all you have to do is choose the assignments as you go. It makes your work in-lesson so much easier!
Enrich the curriculum using custom books. Do you have activities you’ve created to supplement your teaching material? Or maybe you have students think about certain questions at the end of every level? Things like these can easily be integrated into your lesson plan by creating a Custom Book, whose assignments will show up alongside your main curriculum.
Say you have students do a fun, extra assignment of your own within each level. You can create a book to house these extra assignments and enter the corresponding levels for these assignments. Now, when you go to give assignments in Level 2A, you’ll see the student’s course books (in this case, the Alfred Premier 2A books) as well as the extra assignments for that level from your custom book.
Custom books are very powerful and some teachers are using them very creatively. The book you make doesn’t even have to be for assignments. You can make, say, a book of questions you want each student to think about after each level. You’ll be reminded to do this when you see it in the curriculum.
These 3 tips will provide you and your students a boost and provide some organizational guard rails to make the start of the school year a smooth ride. If you have other tips you’d like to share with others, please add them to the comments below.