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.