Better Practice Blog- Why It Is Harder For Music Teachers To Be Successful
Why It Is Harder For Music Teachers To Be Successful
The traditional model of music lesson isn’t working anymore. But why not?
Music lessons, for the most part, have followed the same format for decades: meet with a teacher once a week, then go home to practice for the rest of the 6 days. But we’ve launched into the 21st century with more changes than ever, including the way children think. Attention spans are shorter, they’re more connected, and they’ve got the world at their fingertips with smartphones, tablets, and the like! Schools are encouraging more and more extracurriculars and there are a gazillion after-school programs for kids to take. Most likely, if you have a child taking music lessons, they are also doing other activities like sports and tutoring as well. It’s also very common today to see families with both parents working, providing less opportunities for guided practice at home as well.
Schoolwork and other after-school activities (like sports and tutoring) are the top competitors I see to music practice. These activities usually meet more than once a week - many times being 4-6 days a week. And, well, that makes sense. What kind of baseball team meets up only once a week and then tells the kids to go home and practice on their own until the game? More meetings means more engagement, more socializing, and the skill is more easily maintained when they’re required to practice under the guidance of a coach/teacher for multiple days a week. Once-a-week music lessons for 30 minutes a week cannot compare.
It’s not just how much they meet, either. It’s about how much guidance they’re receiving overall. Take sports, for example. You have lessons for swimming separate from swim practice (where you just repeatedly practice what you learned in lessons). Both are guided and watched by a coach. Even with sports, like soccer: your lessons are built into practice, but you still practice and run drills with the team, under the coach’s supervision. That’s really what sports practice is: guided practice.
You can see this model in college courses as well. The professor teaches, then the teaching assistant (TA) works through and analyzes with the class in detail in lab/discussion. That’s really the chance to ask questions, dive deeper, and really learn the material with a knowledgable guide at hand. This is what after-school tutoring does for students as well.
But traditional music lessons? It’s currently stuck in a model of once-a-week lessons - nothing in between. So, the student only gets 30min to an hour of guidance the whole week. The vast majority of a student’s time is spent, unguided and solitary, out in the void of ‘practice time’, like an astronaut floating away into space untethered. This is really where I think the models of music lessons is failing, and why it’s so hard for music education to compare with other extracurriculars the student is busy with.
Other extracurriculars have set a standard up front that the student will need to be at practice/class X number of days a week - and when it’s required, people go with it, and the students improve and get engaged a lot more because of this model.
So, what are some ways we can change the music lesson model?
- Have you considered meeting with students more than a week? One day could be a lesson, and a midpoint could be a lab/guided practice session. Or, students can have individual lessons one day and group lessons another day later in the week. Of course, scheduling can get a bit hairy, so it’s best to lay it out as a requirement upon signup if you’re serious about it (and if parents are as serious about it as they are with other after-school activities, it should be no problem - especially if you mention the why and benefits).
- Going off of this idea - you can hire other teachers (college students would be perfect) to run the labs or guided practice sessions. Now, these can occur while you give your usual lessons, perhaps even in another room nearby if you have the space.
- Provide performance opportunities more often than the biannual recitals. Say, a weekly ‘mini-recital’ opportunity in your studio. If you have 4 different nights open a month (one every week), students can be required to sign up for at least 1 time a month to show up and play with/for other students. This is another good point - students are often so motivated to go to sports practice because they often have games. Music is missing that drama/exciting element in the early stages.
If you don’t have the time to spare for extra lessons, you can use Better Practice to stay connected during the week. You can use it to send encouragements, reminders, and even change/add assignments from home. Here are some other ways you can change lesson structure from home:
- Providing secondary classes over FaceTime or Skype. Or, guided practice sessions this way. You can use a practice app to update all of their notes and assignments from home as well.
- As I mentioned above, using other teachers to run the secondary meetups would be ideal. Using Better Practice will also make this easier, because everyone in the system will be updated on where the student is and any changes to their assignments.