The Dynamic Studio: How to keep students, dazzle parents, and build the studio everyone wants to get into by Johnston Philip

Author:Johnston, Philip [Johnston, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: www.insidemusicteaching.com
Published: 2012-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

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The Static Studio...

... points out all the problems, and then comes up with all the solutions

The Dynamic Studio...

...helps students scout for problems, and then experiment to discover their own solutions.

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Control over their practice week

I've covered this issue in much more depth in my other books, but there are few issues in music lessons that cause such grief—and such compelling reasons to abandon lessons—as problems with practicing.

The good news is that if practice is what's making students miserable, there is plenty of scope for improvement. There are many, many alternatives to how your students currently work ( Practiceopedia details over 350 pages of options), but for student retention purposes how they work is not nearly as important as ensuring that student feels like they have ownership over that work.

For this reason, the prescriptive practice instructions that so often appear at the end of lessons are not nearly as helpful as they might first seem. Take the following well-meaning example:

This week: Twenty minutes of scales every day, followed by ten minutes of work on your Sonatina. Use the rest of the time to get Elephant Blues up to speed.

For reasons that the Practice Revolution goes into in much more depth, these are terrible practice instructions, but for student retention purposes the relevant problem here is that the instructions mandate how much time the student needs to spend on what . This will leave some students feeling like a worker on an assembly line—do this for this long, then that , then this , don't argue —there's no ownership over the final product, no capacity for them to determine how best to get the job done, no variety, no respite. No point. Practice is a predetermined, automated, eyes-glaze-over soulless snow-covered path to be shovelled.

Much better is to forget about dictating how much and what , and simply to give students a desired outcome :

Your goal: to be able to start next lesson by playing F major scale three times in a row, clean, correct fingering, eighth notes at 100 bpm.

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