Confidence Building - The Ultimate Teaching Strategy

In today's customer focused world a private music teacher faces a big challenge. A customer oriented world means the customer rules. What the customer wants the customer gets. What the customer wants is to find the best solution to their problem at the price they can afford. Almost every successful business today is customer focused. As teachers we offer a service. The customers are our students. What they initially want from a guitar teacher is a method of learning guitar. They want to know we have the best solution within their budget. Now here is where it gets complicated. The hope of every student is you have the magic pill. They really want to believe you have the secret or at the very least a method that gets some degree of a result. This means when their progress seems too slow they will look for alternatives. An better path if you will. For the student, learning guitar is like standing at the foot of Mt Everest hoping that the summit is only a few hours away with an escalator and a nice choice of restaurants and shops along the way. The role of the guide is to prepare them for the reality of the journey. The guide needs to be honest. "I want to say that at times the climb will be extremely difficult. You will want to give up and turn back at times. This is to be expected. In fact 80% of people want to give up in the early stages but those who push past this difficult point will usually end up reaching the summit". By preparing your students for the climb up guitar mountain they are more likely to complete the journey. Your goal as the teacher is to get 100% of your students to the summit by preparing them for the journey. A common misconception amongst teachers is that the goal of each lesson is to make it fun. We could say the same about the mountain climb but the guide knows his/her mission is to get the climbers to the top. Making lessons fun is a great way to help students enjoy the process (journey) but you need to be careful that you are are not confusing the purpose of the lesson. Fun should be like the bonus track on the CD. I am certainly not saying your lessons should not be fun but fun should not be the main aim. Let me explain. There are many teachers who have lots of students and are very popular with their students yet most of their students make little or no progress. This teacher earns a reputation of being fun and can often become popular in the short term. Overtime as with any business that does not produce the results promised (to be able to play guitar) they will simply not last in business. Students and their parents are not always aware that it is the teacher who is the problem but they know something is not working. After 6 months or a year of lessons and very little progress they will usually quit. Making the lessons fun only acts as a deception which is eventually revealed. Why do so many teachers focus on fun? You will find this fascinating I am sure. When a student turns up for their first few lessons they are excited. This makes the job of the fun focused teacher easy. But as the weeks pass and the student realises the difficulty of learning guitar their enthusiasm begins to disappear. So in effort to turn a negatived somewhat defeated looking student into a happy one they focus on injecting some fun into the lessons which can serve as a distraction. This usually puts a smile on the student's face and helps them to relax and enjoy the time spent with their teacher. They may even go home feeling excited about the whole experience for a few hours. Children might even say to their parents 'Guitar lessons are so much fun' so their parents feel the lessons are worthwhile. The real problem is the teacher is misinterpreting the situation. The fun focused teacher does not realise that when a student shows signs of boredom, disinterest, restlessness, anger, frustration or even resentment the student is in fact losing confidence in their ability to play guitar. When a student loses confidence making the lesson fun so to speak is just an attempt from the teacher to rescue the student. Injecting fun in the moment is often a good strategy but it is not a long term solution to the real problem of diminishing confidence. The reason students lose confidence is actually no different to why anyone loses confidence. Confidence is simply believing you can and lack of confidence is believing you can't. Our role as teachers is to build a case for students to believe they can. The way to build confidence is to keep each challenge or step within their reach. So often I have seen teachers getting frustrated because they are teaching a student a song and the student just doesn't get it. The teacher will say something like "Just watch my hands... Okay now you do it... No not like that. Watch again... You try... No please watch me closely this time..." and so on. The teacher keeps doing the same thing and somehow expecting the student to get it. Each time the student attempts and fails and hears the word "No" or "Wrong" their confidence drops a little. Before too long the student feels defeated and would rather give up then have to go through another 30 minutes of watching his/her teacher getting frustrated. So what should the teacher be doing?. Firstly the teacher needs to accept that they are in control. The teacher's job is to work out the appropriate challenge for each student. If the student isn't getting it so to speak it is because the teacher has set a challenge that is mismatched to the student's current level. This does not always mean level of skill as a student may well have the skill. This desired level of the challenge should match their current level of confidence. When students walk out of a lesson with a feeling of 'I can do this' they feel good. The main aim is for students to improve a little each week in confidence by setting small achievable steps. They will in turn want to practice more and practice means progress. The critical part is getting them into the game early. They need to feel they are winning at all times no matter how small the achievement. E.g. Clapping 4 beats in time with a metronome is a small achievable step. Next try adding a rest. With chords begin with one finger only using the first 3 strings. For more information please visit our website. David Hart - G4 GUITAR SCHOOLS Program Director. Join us on FACEBOOK - http://bit.ly/G4FACEBOOK. Visit the G4GUITAR METHOD Website - http://www.g4guitarmethod.com.au.