Scheduling for Success With anything in life, mastery requires time and dedication. Research has shown that it takes around 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert in a particular domain. In times past, devoting thousands of hours to your craft was simply part of life. But in today’s… Read More

Is Better Practice for percussion students? We’ve gone over the ways band (and pep band, orchestra, etc.), guitar, and piano students use Better Practice, but what about drum students? Drum practice is different from practicing other instruments like guitar or piano. Instead of memorizing scales, fi… Read More

Every student is different, thus every student is motivated by different things. Some are motivated by stickers and prizes - others, not so much. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make it easy for us teachers. Here, we will briefly explain the 6 types of motivation (brilliantly laid out by Royale Scuderi … Read More

Vacation time - it can be a time of relaxation, recharging, and, for a lot of music teachers...reduced income. Many students take breaks from lessons during summer/holidays and sometimes we don’t know if they’re ever going to come back at all! Taking a break (for both teacher and student) is healthy… Read More

For a typical music school, 80 percent of students are youths. This means families are involved. Families are invested (in their child's growth but also... financially). They are the ones who pick up, drop off, sit through lessons, figure out the assignments and make sure their kids practice during … Read More

Whether it is to fulfill a life-long dream, relieve stress, or pursue an interest, more adults are taking music lessons these days. Teaching adults can be a completely different journey from teaching children; there are many differences, some of which are handled by the method books you choose, but … Read More

Whether you’re trying to be eco-friendly or not, going paperless (or using less paper in general) can benefit you in so many ways. You reduce your waste, you’re more organized (stacks of papers vs. an easily searchable database), and children these days are digital natives anyway. Also, students who… Read More

Better Practice isn’t just a practice tracker! We put our main focus in motivating students to want to practice - hence, all of our motivational tools built right into the app! We’ve separated the list below by motivation types - read this article first to see which motivation types your students ar… Read More

Sometimes you have to focus your practice on a few select songs rather than your whole practice list. This might be for things like recitals, exams, or competitions. Or, remember what I said about playing vs. practicing? All of us should be taking time to play what we like rather than just practicin… Read More

A lot of the time, teachers become disorganized. And when we're disorganized, we may do things like forget who’s learning what or what we even taught at the last lesson with this student (what was his name again?). If this has happened to you, there's no shame in raising your hand because we have an… Read More

I often have those “Aha!” moments (or “Duh!” moments) where I think of the perfect assignment for a student to work on, or I realize I forgot to mention a key point - right as they walk out the door, assignment notebook and all. I’ll email the parents about it when the day is done, I note (my next s… Read More

This is a guest post by Ben: parent to two young music students and someone who works closely with music teachers (but is not one himself). We hope to provide a unique perspective that hasn't been provided before, and that it can help all of you music parents out there! When parents are actively in… Read More

Why do we as humans spend so much time listening to music? A recent study by Edison revealed that Americans spend an average of 13 years of their life listening to music. Music is everywhere - you’ll hear it in every store, car, event, or elevator. You’ll hear music in the commercials that segue int… Read More