5 Ways to energize non-practicing music students

Are you at your wit’s end trying to figure out how to encourage your students to practice regularly? What can you add to your current bag of teaching tricks to keep your students motivated? How can you inspire students to look forward to music lessons and actually care about being prepared and excited to show you their weekly accomplishments?

If you are reading this and you are most likely a music teacher. Perhaps you have experienced the frustration of doing your best to teach students that make progress based solely on the time spent with you at lessons. There is no indication that the student has even touched middle C during the week. So… as a teacher who in the past has had at least one “slow-progress” student each year in the early part of my teaching career, here are five things that hopefully will help you and your students as it has helped me and mine.

Lesson Structure
Monthly Themes
Keyboard Creativity
Activities & Challenges
Performances

Learning piano definitely takes work. It is the job of the teacher to motivate students want to work hard, put the student at ease when they play for you, and to add pizazz to each lesson to keep students exciting about music. Motivating students and maintaining their interest are key elements to retaining your students. The ultimate goals should be to guide motivated capable students towards becoming musical professionals and to instill an understanding and lifelong appreciation for music in others.

Over many years of teaching more than 1,000 music students, I have been consistently adding and testing strategies in order to keep students as fascinated as possible for as long as possible.When my piano-teacher-mom consistently encouraged me to take on students, I said “nah, I don’t think I want to do that”. I was somewhat coerced by a friend to teach her children so she wouldn’t have to drive them as far as they were traveling for lessons. After the third or fourth time she asked me, I finally gave in. During the first few lessons I witnessed that “lightbulb of understanding” going off in their heads. Their demeanor changed for the better and they were open to learning and making steady progress. From that moment on I was hooked on teaching. It was actually fun to create projects to add pizazz to their lessons making piano study more interesting for them. I hope these suggestions have provided you with fresh ideas to motivate your students and make teaching more rewarding for you as well. Please leave a comment as I am excited to hear your thoughts and suggestions.