Goals for Online Music Teachers

1. Listen more, inform less

Many teachers (myself included) listen to our students play and our thoughts jump right to identifying their difficulties and brainstorming possible solutions. Similarly, when students describe challenges - technical, balancing practice time, performance anxiety, etc. - we're eager to share common experiences and propose various solutions that worked for us. Of course, resolving students' difficulties is part of our job.  But it often pays to listen longer and more deeply to our students' playing and concerns.  Teachers know that many students face common challenges.  From the student's perspective, however, their learning experience is fresh and unique, and they need to be heard and understood as they work through difficulties.  The more students talk through their experiences, the better they understand their challenges, and the better our advice sticks with them.

Whether your student is playing or speaking, listen with complete attention until they finish, and wait to see if they have more to add.  Propose one or two carefully-selected strategies rather than everything you can think of.  Thoroughly explain and demonstrate the strategy and guide the student as they begin to implement it.  A great way to end a class is to have the student summarize out loud the main points they need to focus on during practice. If the student can't remember and articulate everything you told them, you told them too much for one lesson.

2. Follow through on goal-setting

The new year is the perfect time to reassess a students' interests, progress, and objectives.  Take advantage of the season and devote some lesson time to discussing music goals for 2020.  But remember that setting goals is the easy part. What's harder is checking in regularly and honestly on how things are going.  As any seasoned musician knows that advancing on an instrument is not as neat and tidy as ticking off a checklist.  Goals often need shifting, tweaking, and thorough re-working.  Check in every 3 to 4 months with the goals you made at the start of the year.  If little or no progress has been made on some items, figure out why and re-evaluate your approach.

3. Leave your comfort zone

If you've been a professional for a while, it's easy to forget having ever felt clumsy on your instrument.  Remember that students - not teachers - have the harder job in lessons.  As teachers, getting out of our musical comfort zone refreshes our empathy and patience with beginners. The better we can relate to their position, the better we can help them.

Take lessons

If it's been a while since you've had the student-teacher role reversed, now is a great time to renew the experience.  You might study seriously with a musician you admire in your field.  Or you may prefer to branch out and learn a new instrument or skill such as composition, improvisation, or recording.  The subject doesn't matter too much as long as you're the one being taught.  You'll remember what it's like to face difficult new concepts and to feel clumsy with unfamiliar techniques. Not only will you gain new respect for and patience with your students -- you'll also grow as a musician yourself.

Share your music in a new way

Like taking lessons, this is another great way to put yourself in the student's shoes and inevitably learn something new for yourself.  Find a new context for sharing your music, preferably one that makes you a bit uncomfortable.  If you perform regularly, you might be a pro at handling stage nerves and reacting quickly to resolve the surprises that occur in live performances.  But perhaps the idea of recording a song or album is daunting because of the meticulous perfection expected in recorded works.  Or maybe you nearly always perform in a large ensemble, and have forgotten what it's like to be alone on the stage.  Or if you're used to sharing thrilling clips of your best live performances, consider sharing a video of yourself practicing or composing a new piece in your home studio.

Switch hands

This may sound silly, but for guitarists and other string players, it's guaranteed to deliver an instant jolt of empathy.  Find a left-handed version of your instrument and play a piece you usually teach beginning students.  Remember to keep your fretting-hand fingers round and press down on the tips of your fingers, right behind the frets!  Suddenly, the things you have told beginning students thousands of times are not as easy as they sound.

4. Practice what you preach

Listen carefully to the advice you give.  Do you follow it one hundred percent?  Is your practice process as orderly and methodical as the productive practice you describe to your students?  Are you as kind to your inner musician as you instruct students to be towards themselves?  Do you let yourself relax and have fun on your instrument, or are you always working productively towards your next project?  Whatever you find yourself emphasizing to your students, remember to apply it to your own practice as well.

5. Talk to other teachers

We all have occasional difficulties explaining ideas, solving particular technical problems, and managing certain learning styles.  Also, while we can relate to many of our students' struggles, sometimes students have to overcome challenges that we haven't faced.   Experience and experimentation are excellent teachers, but they take time to acquire.   Talk to your teaching colleagues whenever you can about strategies and useful resources.  Lessonface's forum is a great place to connect with the online lesson community.  If you have questions and information best suited exclusively to teachers, start a thread on the teachers-only forum.

What goals do you have as a teacher for 2020?  Would you benefit from any of the goals I mentioned here?  What would you like to add to the list?  Jump into this teachers-only forum thread here.