to help you become the best tutor possible
Teaching songs is a big part of being a guitar teacher. Regardless of what type of student you teach, at some point you will want to teach songs. This guide will provide you with different approaches to teaching songs and reasons why you may want to take one approach over another. There is no right or wrong way to teach songs but there is likely to be an approach that suits you and your student best. This guide will help you find the best approach.
This guide will help you deal with students who seem to have low or no motivation during lessons. If a student lacks motivation in one lesson that's fine as they could be simply having a bad day. But if you have a student who regularly lacks motivation, it's something you need to deal with. This guide will help you identify any causes to the lack of motivation and will provide suggestions on how you can deal with these students.
Your effectiveness as a guitar teacher depends on your knowledge of guitar as well as your ability to use effective teaching methods. To be able to use teaching methods effectively, having a good understanding of learning in general will help out. This guide will explain several learning myths that can cause problems with your effectiveness as a teacher.
Many of these myths are mistakenly believed by a large majority of people so it's likely that you believe some of them right now. These myths can throw your teaching off course and can impact the quality of your lessons. Read through each myth to make sure you can avoid the problems associated with the misunderstandings they bring.
Our current understanding of how we learn is shaped by centuries of experience. Unfortunately, most of this experience is based around misconceptions on how our brains actually work. As more and more researchers study how we actually learn, it has become clear that a lot of what we thought we knew about learning was wrong. It can take a long time for results from studies to reach the mainstream so a lot of what we hear about learning is either outdated or not based on actual studies. As you will see in the below myths, learning isn't as straight forward as we believed in the past.
The reason myths are so common is that a lot of them make perfect sense. It's only when we learn more about brain science or from studies that we discover that they're incorrect. So if you see a myth below that you thought was accurate, it's only because other people passed on incorrect information.
There is a lot of misunderstanding on what it means to be introverted. As a teacher it's important you understand what introversion means and how to properly teach an introverted student. This guide will explain how to identify if your student is introverted and how to give them the best quality lessons possible.
Regardless of how long you've been teaching guitar, you constantly make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes and that's fine. It's how we learn and develop. It's practically impossible to give a perfect guitar lesson. That means in every guitar lesson you give, you're making mistakes. The good news is that you can put those mistakes to work to help develop your skills as a guitar teacher.
This guide will explain how you can learn from your mistakes and develop your guitar teaching skills. This is extremely useful for guitar teachers just starting out but it's also helpful for experienced teachers to pick up on bad habits. Unless you learn to identify the mistakes you're currently making, you're guaranteed to repeat them in the future. This guide will help you prevent mistakes from repeating in your future lessons.
In this guide you will learn how to structure your lessons in such an effective way that your students will stay motivated during the lesson and retain more information after the lesson is over. This structure is very flexible and provides you with a 'blueprint' you can use for all your lessons.
For new guitar teachers this guide will give you a great starting point to make sure your lessons are effective straight away. You won't need to go through the long trial and error process most teachers go through to figure out how to structure your lessons effectively. By the end of this guide you will know exactly how to structure your lessons.
For experienced guitar teachers this guide will help you refine your lessons and give you ways to improve the structure of your lessons. You will already be loosely following this structure but may not fully understand why the structure is effective. This guide will explain why along with provide suggestions on ways you can improve your lessons.
Consistency is important in a learning environment. From a student's point of view it helps if each lesson is structured in a similar way so they know what to expect. Having consistent lessons improves the learning process for your student and makes your job easier. You still need to be flexible in your approach and this structure will still provide you with flexibility as you need it.
A student who arrives at each lesson not sure of what is going to happen or why they are learning the material will have trouble developing. On the other hand a student who arrives at each lesson knowing roughly how the lesson will be structured will be able to focus 100% on the actual content instead of being confused. A well thought out structure can make a big difference to the learning experience.
Points of failure is a topic that most teachers have never heard of. This is a problem as one of the main reasons why students leave teachers (even good ones) is due to points of failure. In this guide you will learn what points of failure are as well as how to identify points of failure you currently have in your lessons. You will then learn how to eliminate these points of failure and improve the quality of your lessons.
This guide is essential for all new guitar teachers as well as experienced teachers with decades of experience. By the end of the guide you will successfully identify and eliminate many points of failure in your lessons and retain more students.
An overlooked area some guitar teachers neglect is body language. Understanding how to read a student's body language can tell you a lot about what the student is thinking and feeling. An effective teacher can take body language cues and use them to improve the quality of the lesson.
By the end of this guide you will be able to accurately identify body language cues and use them to improve your lessons.
Your student may be bored or doesn't like what you're teaching but won't say anything because they're too polite. In this scenario if you don't pick up on the fact the student isn't happy then it can lead to problems. Although a student may not say something if they're bored/tired/uninterested/etc their body language won't lie. Our bodies give signals to our true thoughts and many of the signals we can't control.
Once you learn how to identify these signals, you can figure out if the student is bored or unhappy in anyway and adjust your lesson. Quite often a student won't tell you if they don't want to learn this topic or they don't see the point in the exercises. Their body language will tell you. As soon as you pick up on these signals you can correct course. Then you can start looking for signals that the student is happy and engaged in the material. These little signals can have a dramatic impact on the quality of your lessons.
This guide will give you everything you need to be able to accurately assess your student's needs at any point in time. This is an important skill because it allows you to structure your lessons so that the student's needs are always being considered. Many teachers (even experienced teachers) run into problems simply because they don't understand how human needs work and how to structure your lessons to meet the student's needs.
Understanding needs will help you motivate your students and keep them happy.
Instead of studying a psychology textbook, this lesson will give you all the important points you need to remember and gives examples you can use as a guitar teacher. You need to understand how our needs work to become a great guitar teacher. This guide will help you understand your student's needs.
This guide will share best practices from experienced teachers on what topics you should avoid in early guitar lessons. The first few lessons you give a new student will determine whether the student stays with you or not. Teaching certain topics will increase the chances that the student stays with you. There are some topics that if taught in these first few lessons will decrease the chance that the student will stay with you. Having a firm understanding of these topics and why they might put students off future lessons is key to growing your student base. This guide will help you retain more students and improve the quality of your first few lessons with new students.
It's important to keep in mind that every student will react differently to any given topic. While some topics will turn some students off, they may actually encourage other students. Keep this in mind when reading through the topics below as there will be times when it's perfectly fine to cover the topic in the first lesson. The whole point is that these topics decrease the likeliness that a student will stay with you. Think of the topics as 'high risk' topics that could potentially turn students away.
Remember that everything doesn't need to be covered straight away and in the first few lessons you're actually better off to cover less topics and go into more detail on the topics you do cover. You can always cover these topics at a later date.