How Much Should You Teach In A Single Lesson?

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.

You can see my video response here, and the article below:

How Much Should I Cover In A Lesson?

Start the lesson off with going through the material from last week and seeing how they did:

• What sort of tempos did they reach?
• Did they understand the material correctly?
• Have they practised well, but maybe there’s a problem with their technique?

In general spend 10% to 30% of a lesson delivering new information, and the rest of the lesson training them on the new exercises/song/information.

Students improve fastest from covering a small amount of new material and practising it repeatedly.

An Exception For Spending An Entire Lesson With New Material

One exception to the above guidelines is going to be when you approach some theory topics.

For example, if you are teaching scale harmonisations, to properly run through the theory and a couple of examples with a student will take most of a lesson.

However, this sort of lesson should be the exception rather than the norm.

Setting Homework And Practice Assignments

You will find every student is slightly different in how much they can do (from restrictions with their schedule) and how much they are willing to do.

In general with new students, I recommend:

• Ages 8-12 practice for about 15 minutes a day
• Ages 13+ practice for about 30 minutes a day

And plan out a practice plan for that student. If they want to do more, they can go through their practice plan more than once, learn a song from a tab online, do some additional improvising, etc.

Conclusion

We don’t want to overwhelm a student, this is the biggest cause of students quitting. Give your student a small amount of new material, and if they get through it quickly you can always give them more.