The original version of this post is from July of 2020. I had been teaching online lessons for years when Covid hit, but many of my students were new to it.
The advice here is as relevant as ever, both for online and in-person lessons. I’ve made some tweaks so it’s less specific to life in quarantine. I hope you find it useful. -c
Making the Most of Lessons
Preparation -> Productivity -> Progress
Lessons always feel short to me because I love playing music and teaching. I wait all week to spend time with each student, and then we get to hang out and do my favorite things.
But sometimes our time is actually eaten up by other stuff, too: Tuning guitars, warming up, finding sheet music and picks… that’s not ideal.
Here are three tips for maximizing our time together.
1. Show up ready to play
- If you play a stringed instrument, tune it before your lesson. Young learners tend to need a hand with this from a grown-up. (If you’re the grown-up and you’re struggling to help with tuning, please let me know so I can give you a refresher and resources to jog your memory during the week.)
- Once you’re in tune, make sure you have picks and a capo at the ready. Even if we don’t normally use them, they should be part of every guitarist’s toolkit.
- Regardless of your instrument, it’s best when you can take a few moments right before our lesson to warm up. Play anything. A scale, a song, a couple random notes. It helps your mindset in a lesson when you’ve already had your hands on your instrument right before we meet.
- If we’re meeting online, find your Zoom link before the lesson and test out your connection. Is your camera on and pointed the right way? How about the sound settings? You can test those in settings. Students should not wait for me to send the link when the lesson starts. If you need help finding the link, let me know ASAP and I’d be glad to help.
2. Take Notes
- Writing what you learn helps you remembering it, so always have a pencil and paper ready. A pencil is best for marking your music lightly so you can erase those markings when you fix mistakes. The paper could be in a notebook you dedicate to music lessons so your notes don’t get mixed up in something else or lost. Pick a notebook you love to use—it’ll make it more fun to write and read your notes.
- You should have all your materials in front of you when the lesson starts, including all your textbooks and a binder or folder containing your sheet music, any relevant tabs for guitarists, plus paper and something to write with so you can take notes.
3. Use the stuff in your Google Drive folder
Your folder is a space we share for organizing lesson materials. It’s also a place where you can upload recordings of your own playing during the week.
A few things I like to use it for:
- I put notes in a doc there after most lessons, summarizing what we covered and what you should practice. You should treat these notes as a supplement to your own notes you take during our lessons.
- I also keep PDF’s of your music in there, complete with the markings I add during our lessons.
- I’ll sometimes upload videos of myself demonstrating passages of music we’re working on.
- I can also make audio recordings for you to practice along with (feel free to ask me to do this whenever it’s helpful). Those go in your folder, too.
Hopefully these tips make your lessons even more valuable. If there’s something you’ve been doing that has helped your practice, let me know! I’d love to add tips here from students.