Longer lesson or more practice?

by kschoen on January 18, 2017 0 Comments

Where should I spend my time?

I recently had a parent ask me if she could pay for a longer lesson time. This surprised me for two reasons:

Parents are usually trying to find the most inexpensive way to get music instruction, not looking for ways to make it cost more!
The student was not at a level where I usually recommend a longer lesson in order to cover the amount of material.

So I began to think:

This parent obviously values the time I spend with her child in the lesson.
Because the child is still very young, we spend a certain amount of lesson time drilling spots to establish physical coordination and kinaesthetic memory.
If the parent took the extra lesson time that she wanted to purchase from me, and spent it doing a few more repetitions in a slightly longer daily practice, then the student would not need to do so many repetitions in the lesson.
This would leave more lesson time available to introduce new things.
Therefore, it would be more economical for the parent and more enjoyable for the student to increase their practice time instead of their lesson time.

That was the best solution in this case. But when do we need to increase the length of the lesson?

When the student has prepared the practice assignment well, but we run out of time in the lesson to hear everything that was assigned.
When we have enough time in the lesson to hear a well prepared practice assignment, but we run out of time to include a necessary next step (such as music reading, or scales, or supplementary study material).
When the student and his family struggle with finding enough time to practice consistently, and cannot come to the lesson with the practice assignment prepared well enough to leave time for anything else. In this case, their lesson may be the only time in the week when they can focus on their practice points for enough time to be able to notice improvements. So instead of teaching the same lesson over and over for many months, we can create some slow steady progress by ensuring at least one careful practice session each week as part of the lesson.
When a student’s learning style is such that she just needs a bit more time in order to absorb the necessary information. This is where a teacher needs to examine her approach to the lesson. Sometimes this situation is better dealt with by teaching in smaller steps rather than increasing the lesson length. (This approach can also help when there are economic barriers to lengthening a student’s lesson.)

So my equation for lesson length calculations might look something like this:

L(Lesson length) – P(practice assignment assessment) = T(time available for new material)

When T = 0 then we need to make the lesson longer

P is affected by two things:

Changing the value of P can allow more to be accomplished in a short lesson before it needs to become longer.