teaching tricks/tips thread

[n8tron]

Inspired by a thread I created a week ago in which I had a bad lesson, I thought I would create this thread where we can discuss tips on teaching styles, what to teach and things like that. Teaching is an art and since this site is devoted to that I figured it would be a good place for vets to share there wisdom and newbies to get advice, as well as students to find out if there teacher is doing a good job or not.

First off, my lesson this time went very well, I took an hour before to prepare for it to make up from last time and it paid off. Instead of teaching guitar technique or a song, I taught more song-writing and arranging, in fact we really didn't play the guitar at all. But this student is very interested in song-writing and it's actually why they are learning the guitar. Anyway, I had the whole lesson mapped out and covered over why we should chose some voicings over others depending on the song style/instrumentation/sound, and gave examples of everything. By this time they had plenty of questions and by the time the lesson was done I felt like I had got across a lot of tips and the student had plenty to think about in a completely different perspective as far as how to use the guitar as a song-writing tool.

Anyone else have experiences on ways to really change up a lesson if it is getting monotonous? ie: learn some scales, learn some chords, learn some songs, repeat.

Also, I am fairly new to teaching, and while teaching chords and scales very much seems like "teaching" this lesson did not at all. I was just talking about things that I like to talk about, so in a way I felt guilty if my info was worth the money, but this is probably just because I am new to this.

[Andrew Sa]

This sound slike a great idea.
I'm pretty sure it will get moved to another forum when a mod reads it...not sure where it belongs tho...but they'll know.

I'm in favour of this...when I was teaching, I found that the best way to ensure that a lesson went well, was up to the student...if they hadnt worked on the stuff they were given the week before, the whole thing was pointless, and just spent with them working on a piece they could've worked on at home.

[Akira]

This seems like a good idea.

I'm gonna start teaching a friend soon, (and anyone else I can find) as a. I need the experience, and b. I need the money, once I start this degree I will be a very poor student. :p

He's already been playing for 4 or 5 years, so I wont be teaching him from scratch.

My plan is to go to his house, and ask him to play some chords, scales, and then some stuff that he would normally play when he practices. From this I'll hopefully be able to build up a mental list of his strengths and weaknesses. Then I'm going to ask him which things he would like to work on the most; what does he want from the lessons.

Hopefully that'll enable me to make lesson plans that are suited to what he wants to learn as well as extra things that could help him along the way (theory!)

Is this a good way to do things or not?

[n8tron]

yeah, i definitely agree that you have to make the lessons suited to the student. but I do find times when they really need to know something, even if they don't seem to like it. For example my student is great at chords, and thats mostly what they play, so I to change it up we were working on this simple solo to work on single note stuff and they just couldn't do it, we worked on it some more and no real progress was made. The thing is when they need to play that sort of thing along with the chords they need to learn to pick well. I have the student practice scales, but theres got to be a way to relate it better.

Also, depending on the abilities and just general intelligence of your student the pace of the lessons are key. to fast, which is the easiest thing to do...and you will lose them. Always always review the next week what you were working on, and if they don't have it down work on it some more. It might seem tedious but if you keep learning something new each week and then review it all later nothing will have been learned!

[Akira]

yeah, i definitely agree that you have to make the lessons suited to the student. but I do find times when they really need to know something, even if they don't seem to like it. For example my student is great at chords, and thats mostly what they play, so I to change it up we were working on this simple solo to work on single note stuff and they just couldn't do it, we worked on it some more and no real progress was made. The thing is when they need to play that sort of thing along with the chords they need to learn to pick well. I have the student practice scales, but theres got to be a way to relate it better.

Also, depending on the abilities and just general intelligence of your student the pace of the lessons are key. to fast, which is the easiest thing to do...and you will lose them. Always always review the next week what you were working on, and if they don't have it down work on it some more. It might seem tedious but if you keep learning something new each week and then review it all later nothing will have been learned!

Good tips there, I'll keep them in mind.

I'll report back to this thread on how it all goes; I'm gonng start teaching after my exams finish (end of this month) so it'll be sometime after then.