SECTION ONE: Getting your Studio Up and Running
CHAPTER 1: Understanding your Studio’s Life Cycle
One problem people have when they begin a music studio is simply not knowing where to start.
To make life simple, I want to start by showing you the 4 broad stages your teaching practice will go through.
I’ve given you a nice big picture of it on the following page, and there’s a reason for that: I want to you to print it out! Go ahead and do this now, or at least take a peak.
Nifty right? I won’t go into too much detail about this graphic right away, but I want to present it here before we get into the nitty-gritty of everything. It’s important just so that you have a general overview of what’s going on.
This might seem like a simple chart, but please print it out if you can! It will guide you when you feel stuck in your teaching. And when you need some new direction, it just might get you back on track.
As you can see, the process of growing your studio is cyclical. If you continue with this process, your practice will evolve and become better and better as the years progress. Imagine how boring it would be to do the exact same thing over and over again for the rest of your life. By constantly evolving, you’ll become known as the teacher who is always looking for new ways to teach and inspire, and not as the person who torments little kids.
The Teaching Studio Cycle:
In this book, I’m going to guide you through each part of this cycle. But first let’s take a quick overview of each element:
1. Building Blocks
Building blocks is just the “stuff” of your studio, the things you need to get going. This is everything from pencils and paper and an instrument (if you teach music), to a website, studio policies, etc.
This also includes you – your teaching abilities, your expectations, your mindset. As you grow, your building blocks will include your reputation as a teacher, your involvement in the musical community and so on. Sometimes you’ll hear people refer to these things as “assets”.
As your business grows it’s helpful to think of growing your assets, so that you aren’t just teaching individual lessons but growing a business, connections, reputation, online presence, client base and so forth.
Think of “Building Blocks” as the core of everything. This is where all the other elements come back to. It is “the studio” and everything in it. A big portion of this book – the first three sections in fact—will be devoted to all the different building blocks you need to get going.
It’s important to think about exactly what your building blocks are early on because you will need time to cultivate them. For example, your teaching reputation develops over a period of years – something you want to understand before and not after that reputation has been formed.
2. Attract Students
Attract students means what you think it does: get them to your door!
For the first iteration or so of your teaching practice, attract students will simply mean “Attracting Any Students.” Not only will you probably need the income, you’ll also need the experience and the momentum of daily teaching. A teaching practice isn’t much of a practice without people to teach, and you won’t learn anything from not teaching. In fact you’ll learn a tremendous amount by teaching students far below the best.
As you refine and mature your studio, this turns more into “Attracting The Right Students.” We will deal with this more later on.
3. Teach
Sounds simple doesn’t it? It is, but it’s also the center of your activity.
Teaching is how you learn to teach, and no amount of books or artificial scenarios will totally prepare you for the real world “thinking on your feet” needed in teaching. I once asked a distinguished teacher how she came up with a particularly ingenious technique and she told me: “Out of desperation!”
You’re going to learn a lot by just being face to face with a student. Whether it’s the very first lesson, or trying out new techniques after years of practice.
Now this isn’t a pedagogy book (I’ll write one someday!) – but I have to at least acknowledge that getting face to face with your students is perhaps the biggest psychological barrier many teachers face. I’ll give you a few hints on the “how” of getting started in Chapter 12.
4. Reassess
This is perhaps the least obvious stage of development but actually the most important to your long-term success. The minute you stop learning and growing is the minute you start decaying and dying. A lot of teachers grow stale because they forget this element.
Here’s an example for pianists:
As the piano grew as an instrument, the action became far heavier that it was in past centuries. Many popular teaching techniques based upon these older and lighter instruments emphasized little or no involvement of the arm in virtually all piano playing. This meant a tremendous over-exertion of the small muscles on the heavier newer action, leading to many thousands of injuries. How much suffering and injury could have been prevented if these teachers had simply reassessed their teaching and realized that the old techniques weren’t suited for the newer instruments!
Reassessing doesn’t just have to do with your teaching techniques either. It can include things like materials, scheduling, policy. On a more philosophic (and very important!) level, it can include your motivation and goals as a teacher. I deal with this element of teaching, especially some of the more philosophic ones, in Chapter 16. Don’t disregard this crucial part of your teaching practice!
So there you have it. The “Master Plan”. Like I said, print it out. It might seem too simple or abstract at first, but I promise you it will be food for thought as you and your studio mature and grow.
Continue to Chapter 2