Wednesday, 27 April 2016

Main Body of the Lesson



The main body of the lesson is where the new learning happens.

I decide in advance what I’ll be teaching at a particular lesson (more on lesson planning in another post).  I’ll then have a technical exercise planned that relates to this.  For example, if we’re working on a piece in D minor I’ll teach some exercises based on the D minor scale and arpeggio.  If we’re playing a piece in D minor and has lots of triplets, then we’ll do an exercise that incorporates all of these things.

If the class is working through a tutor book, this is when we’ll look at it.  I’ll talk more about using a tutor book wisely in another post, but if you’re using a good book, it will be structured in a way that makes logical sense for progression on your instrument.  As a beginner teacher, it is probably best you follow the book until you have more confidence in your teaching.

One occasion I don’t follow the logic of the tutor book is if the students need to learn a piece or new notes for a particular reason (e.g. school orchestra) but treat this as a learning experience, and your students will be so motivated to learn the new notes etc. that it doesn’t matter that it’s out of sequence with the book.

If I’m teaching more advanced students this is where we’ll work on repertoire.  Again, I’ll post later more details about how to work on repertoire in another post.



No comments:

Post a Comment