Hello, studio teacher friends! Welcome back to the Beyond Measure Podcast. Christina Whitlock here, your host and self-appointed Anytime Piano Teacher Friend, ready to share a few minutes of solidarity with you. This summer, I’m featuring a handful of favorite episodes of this show while I sort out some very important stuff of life. Namely, we just put my mom on hospice care and – phew – that’s a lot, friends. Many thanks to my SuperFriends over on Patreon for their continued support financially AND otherwise… and for all of you who listen and cheer me on here at Beyond Measure.

There are two things I’d like you to know about today’s Encore Replay episode: 1st of all, you should know that 109 is my lucky number of sorts. It brings me great pleasure that episode 109 of this podcast has stood the test of time as one of my favorites, and it feels like a good time to re-share it with you.

Secondly, I want to point out that I originally published this episode 3 and a half years ago. In the years since, I have grown increasingly curious about how we structure our lessons. I continue to bump up against the idea that piano teaching in the 21st century hinges on the idea of assigning and passing pieces. It’s not that this is a BAD plan… but if our ONLY instruction and our ONLY assessment comes through this idea of “passing” pieces assigned the previous week, we are missing some things. Not to mention the fact that we are communicating the wrong idea about what it means to be a pianist.

It’s, essentially, the equivalent of “teaching to the test”. Students can pass a history exam without truly retaining the information. Students can pass chemistry exams without truly understanding how to apply the material. Likewise, a student can play a piece with all the correct notes and still not understand the true role of the key signature. A student can imitate rhythm without fully understanding the meter of their piece.
So – YES – the pedagogical collections we teach from are designed to make our lives easier. And, THANK GOODNESS for them. But we have to be very careful that our lessons do not simply default to evaluating our student’s assigned pieces. Our job is to instruct, and that encapsulates a LOT more than assessment. A piece that is ready to (quote) “pass” is not complete evidence that a student understands all included concepts.
ANYWAY – I’m going to stop here before I write another episode. Without further delay, here is Episode 109: Cheers to Examining Your Lesson Structure.

Okay, friends: this is one of the biggest challenges that face us as music teachers…. How do we best use the 30, 45, 60, or however many minutes we get our students for each week? We get such a small amount of time with them; how do we make the most impact in the shortest amount of time?

Well, I have some ideas for you today. But first, I just need to reiterate that I think we are doing our students a disservice if their entire lesson is built around showing you what they accomplished in the specific pieces you assigned them last week. Granted, that can be a SIGNIFICANT PART of the lesson experience, but I think we need to cast a wider net for the goal of each lesson. My primary goal is to make functional musicians who can use their instrument to accomplish whatever they want to in life. And I happen to think there is more for us to do within the lesson to achieve that goal than simply focusing on what they practiced and letting the tone of the lesson hang solely on how much work they did – or did not – do.
If you want to hear more on that subject, there is a happy little trio of episodes I would strongly recommend listening to, if I were you, and those are episodes 51, 52, and 108. Links to those episodes are located in the shownotes for this episode.

Back to TODAY’S episode: let’s talk about ways to structure a lesson. The possibilities are endless here, of course, but I thought I’d throw out a few ideas for you today.
One typical complaint of music teachers – myself included – is the age-old question of, “how do I get everything done in the lesson?”
We all know the pains of wanting to get more done than the minutes on the clock allow. I wish I could solve that for you today, but it’s always going to be somewhat of a struggle. That considered, I do think there are some foundational shifts in your expectations that can help.
I’ve said before – we all have a tendency to get trapped in this lesson structure rut where students arrive, play a given warm up, then we work through the pieces they were assigned for that week.
There are a few issues we consistently run into in this scenario:
(1) Some students – especially those who are strong readers – bring back more pieces than we can get through in our allotted lesson time
(2) When a student doesn’t practice, there is this cloud of despair… lots of heavy sighs… as it feels like you’re just doomed to repeat last week’s lesson
(it doesn’t have to be that way, by the way)
Instead of framing your lesson expectations around this “Assign – Practice – Pass – Repeat” cycle, what if you looked at your lessons as a consistent opportunity to increase your students’ understanding of musical concepts? I mean, it’s not that revolutionary of an idea, for sure, but don’t you think we all get trapped in this idea that the only way we do that is through “Assign-Practice-Pass-Repeat”?

I’m putting on my informercial voice and saying, “There has to be a better way!”
😊
For those students I have who practice a LOT of pieces throughout the week, they know fully well I do not plan on hearing every single one each lesson, especially because I want to spend a good chunk of my time cleaning up a piece or two, rather than hearing them play 12 pieces with the same lack of detail to phrase shape. 😊 My students know they need to come with a ranked-list of sorts… I’ll let them start with the pieces they think they made the most progress with, and usually follow it up with the piece they feel they struggled with the most.
BUT – I do know these students often REALLY WANT to play me everything they’ve practiced that week. It’s disappointing, sure, if you learned a piece and don’t get to play it for your teacher.

So, in order to be respectful of that, on occasion, I will have my students BEGIN with a performance (of sorts) of ALL the pieces they want to play for me that day. Do you ever do this? Instead of working one piece at a time, do you ever have them play everything on their assignment list, just boom, boom, boom?

I actually find this to be incredibly enlightening. Doing so will show you consistencies (and inconsistencies) in their playing you might be more likely to miss.
It also gives them the satisfaction of showing you everything they worked on that week.

And, of course, it gives you a terrific perspective on what MOST needs your help. I don’t think I’m alone in my experience of spending too much time on one piece, only to find out another piece has ENORMOUS issues, and I’m left with only 3 minutes to try to fix them before my student spends another 7 days destined to make all the same mistakes. 😊 Tell me I’m not the only one.

Shaking up the lesson structure is, overall, just a great way to breathe new energy into the lesson. Let your students play their technical skills last. The world will keep turning, I promise.
Immediately begin with some aural skills. Have them stand across the room and sing back patterns you play for them. Sightread a duet that is FAR below their reading ability for a quick-win. See what you can do to catch your student off-guard, in a refreshing way, that is.

One consistent goal I have is that I aim to spend at least 5 minutes on a skill that is looming ahead in the future. What I mean is, prior to a student’s lesson, I try to name what they’re learning now, and what I want them to learn next. Then, I take whatever the “next” concept is, and I plan a watered-down version of it for their lesson.
In most cases, my goal is to have introduced a student to a new concept before they ever see it in print. If you’re working out of a method series, this means you can simply eyeball the concepts coming in the next few pages.

If you are working exclusively in traditional literature, this means you’ll want to plan the next piece or two, and consider what would benefit a student BEFORE laying eyes on the piece.
Before my students see a sharp symbol on the page, they’ve already played sharps in pentascale patterns, and I’ve already talked to them about how sharps and flats work. They can find G-flat on the piano long before they ever see it in their book. It’s sort of an application of Frances Clark’s famous approach of Sound Before Symbol… but it goes a little deeper than that.
I can’t get to far into this idea here, though I will say it’s a strong component of my Studio Foundations course, which is – finally! – officially published! Woohoo! If you’re interested in learning more about this strategy, along with other foundational principles I’ve built my instruction on, check out the link in the shownotes.

I am laughing to myself at the irony of how quickly our time here today has flown. Ah, time waits for no one, does it…

To close out today, I just want you to take a moment and consider what your “givens” are for the way you structure your lessons. Then, after you name those, I want you to consider what you MIGHT be able to change up on occasion for the benefit of your students.
Hear me on this – it’s not that you NEED to reinvent the wheel here, and I’m surely not saying you should mix things up just for the sake of mixing them up. I’m not trying to make things unnecessarily HARDER for you. However, I do think sometimes we get OURSELVES stuck in ruts and in systems that don’t actually serve us as well as we think they do. THAT’S what today’s episode is for, friends.
…and, just like that, you know what time it is! It’s time for a toast. Grab the nearest glass and get it up in the air, friends!

Music teacher friends from all over the world, we are a really incredible group of people, you know it? 😊 You are pretty awesome. I have some amazing friends doing good work in this world and I am blessed to be in this profession with you. I’m all about working SMARTER, not HARDER… and that’s what I hope today has inspired you to do, in regards to the way you set up your lessons. If you want to cover more music, let your students play more music. If you are frustrated your students haven’t practiced and don’t know what to do with them, don’t build a lesson entirely based on the expectation of practice. It CAN be done! If you REALLY need more lesson time with your student, consider suggesting a longer lesson. There’s no reason to finish every lesson feeling breathless and disappointed because there were 20,000 other things you wanted to accomplish. As with MOST things in our profession, it’s OUR OWN EXPECTATIONS that drag us down sometimes, rather than those that come from external sources. Ooooh. Hard truth there. Cheers to you, my ambitious, reflective, self-aware music teacher friends. Here, here.

That’s a wrap on episode 109, friends! By the way, Beethoven Opus 109 is my favorite piece in the piano repertoire, so this is a fun episode number to hit. I’m such a nerd.
For links to related episodes and all kinds of other good stuff, be sure to check out the shownotes for this episode, or you can head to christinawhitlock.com/episode109
Onward and upward, my studio teacher friends! Stay well, stay energized… all good things to you in this week to come. We’ll chat soon.