What's In An Exciting Lesson?

Happy new year and best of luck for 2023!

At Glendora Music and Art School, we are excited about the year ahead, and happy to start up with our big roster of students to get them on their way toward music mastery…

Today, let's talk about one of the things that we mention on our website – we talk about students having exciting lessons. But what does that mean?

An exciting lesson is engaging, and a source of interest to the student. An exciting lesson takes work and deliberate thought by instructors and others. An exciting lesson requires a good environment for learning.

Beyond that, here are some more components of creating lessons that really engage students.

Pacing

In order to really interest students, the lessons have to be placed in the correct way. You can't just expect people to sit down and practice scales for an hour. Nor can you try to get them to do complex tasks before they've mastered the basics. In addition, some of the technical music theory is not appropriate for beginners. That's all something to think about when you're putting these lessons together.

Familiarity

It is tempting for music instructors to only focus on classical aspects of music theory. But in that sense, you just don't get the relativity and engagement on the student’s part. So we put the work into appropriate pop-culture references and familiar music for our students to make the lessons more relatable to them.

Allow Improvisation

There's also a sort of rut that some instructors get in when they don't complement classical music theory with an approach to improvisational work.

That’s something to work into lessons as well. Something to think about is that you can have the meat and potatoes in the lesson (of music theory) and still make it exciting. You'll have the scales and everything else, but it just won't dominate the entire lesson and overwhelm the student, making things tedious and difficult.

So, in a sense, there is a line to balance, and our instructors are experiencing knowing how to do that.

Then there's also kind of the intuitive idea that you work with a student at their own level. Doesn't this sound like common sense? But sometimes it takes work. It takes deliberate thinking about how that is done.

Know the Student

It's essentially important to customize lessons according to the student. Some people are visual learners, and some learn with their ears. Some learn on paper, and want to master sheet music early. We get that. Not everyone is the same, and that's something to keep in mind as we go.

The exciting lessons mean we can do more for our families in the Glendora area, to offer music instruction that's above average and opportunities for better learning journeys through the exciting world of music. Contact us!