Today’s question is a good question that a lot of teachers struggle with when starting out - how to structure a lesson so that the student isn’t overwhelmed, but you still cover the topics that you need to cover.
Here’s the question:
How could/should I structure a lesson including warm up, music theory, fingerstyle, comping and strumming without overloading the student? How to structure it correct with the appropriate portions (or percentage)?
This question comes from a reader who was expecting to teach intermediate to advanced level guitar players, but is finding most of his enquiries are from beginners.
Here is his question in full:
In starting out, I feel more confident to teach intermediate adult players, but in “testing the water”, it seems that the greater interest is coming from parents for their children, and complete beginners / individuals returning to guitar having forgotten everything.
This question came in from a reader - it’s a great question because every guitar teacher struggles with this when they’re starting out:
I am struggling to judge how much to cover in a single lesson - both the lesson itself and itself and the homework / practice assignments. I don’t want to overwhelm a student, but I would also like to offer variety of areas to work on. I recognise that a lot of this is down to the individual, but wondered if there were any general pointers.
When it comes to teaching guitar, a lot of teachers are very worried about exactly what they are going to teach. This week I had the following question from a beginner teacher:
When starting to teach, it takes a long time to prepare learning materials. This might include chord boxes, neck diagrams, tab / notation, backing tracks and written guidance / explanation. What can I do to ensure a student has some documentation relating to the lesson and something to practice, without infringing copyright or having to work several hours to put something together?
With the new year coming round, you might be planning some resolutions regarding your guitar playing. Many people make new years resolutions with the best of intentions, but never stick to them. Let’s explore how you can set resolutions that you can stick to and achieve.
What Type of Resolution Should You Set? There are many ways you can set a goal for your guitar playing. Any goal needs to fulfil the following conditions:
Back when I was teaching locally, I would sometimes have students who said that they wanted to develop their own style, and that they did not want to sound like other guitar players.
The first thing that we need to clear up is a bit of honesty: We are always going to have influences from other guitar players and musicians. We are not going to create a genre of music that is completely unlike anything ever heard before - even if we create something unique, we are going to be using scales, techniques, structures and harmonies that have been used for 100s of years.
It was an odd weekend… towards the end of last weekend I get a text from my landlady saying that she was no longer going to pay for a TV licence, so I guess that means no more Law & Order (original series of course) reruns at lunchtime…
Then the internet went down, with a problem occuring with the fibre optic cable that comes from the street. An engineer couldn’t come out until Monday to fix it, so for the last weekend there was no internet and no TV…
When teaching students, there were five things I wanted to make sure every student could do. Sometimes I would be teaching a student from scratch and we would go through these, and sometimes students would start who had been playing for years and knew some of these things and not others, so we would go over their weak spots before moving onto more advanced material.
So without further ado…
1) A Few Riffs 99% of guitarists will start with this, but I’ll mention it for completeness.
After the last article on how to measure improvements in your guitar practice a reader emailed with the following question on improving their practice:
Hi Sam ,I’m learning a fingerstyle piece called struttin rag by stefan grossman. I’m struggling to even slightly increase the tempo a few beats to get a tiny section at the same speed as the rest of the piece which i can play no bother.It needs this tempo to bring about a lively performance.
A concept that we explored in How to Practice Guitar was making small improvements each week. By making a 1% improvement each week, we know for a mathetmical fact that as long as we’re consistent with our guitar practice, eventually we will reach our goals, whatever they may be.
It’s an important, and I think, very motivating concept.
It’s something that we’ve discussed several times in various posts on this blog.