Over the years while teaching, I’ve had to adjust my way of teaching on so many occasions. It’s completely fine, and even mandatory, to have lesson plans and outlines in place, yet we as teachers need to constantly adjust our lessons according to the student we are teaching.

When you start teaching new students, it takes a little while to understand how best to teach them. As you get to know their strengths, how they best take new information in, what they most like doing during the lessons, it is much easier than to balance the enjoyable parts of learning with the parts that they find more tedious and boring. For example, I have some students who love to practice scales and other technical exercises, but then I also have students who find such exercises very boring. So, it’s all about balancing it out with songs and pieces to learn, with making their own compositions and improvisation.

What many students find the hardest is learning to read music. Even this can be made fun and rewarding with flash cards and little games!

What I sometimes find challenging is making sure that students are learning all skills and musical knowledge while adjusting the lessons so that they still enjoy them an stay motivated! It’s all about having fun songs to play at the end of the lessons, sometimes teacher- student duets are the best! Although some students always refuse to play any duets…! So then you need to adjust and do something else instead…!

Hope you all have a lovely weekend!