It’s the start of a new school year on my side of the world, which means that it’s time to reflect on my goals and plans for teaching in the coming year. The first thing I do when making new goals and resolutions is to first look backwards at the year just finished. In order to create realistic goals for 2012, I need to assess what worked and what didn’t in my teaching in 2011. Read more…
Posted in Financial Business, Professional Development, Teaching Tips
Yes. By all means, YES! Here are 10 reasons why I thoroughly enjoy the opportunity to teach those who are 18 and above and even those who might be considered “chronologically challenged.”
Posing proudly after a No-Worries Workshop
1. Lesson Time: Adults are able to schedule lessons during those hours when most K-12 school students cannot attend.
2. Income: Because adults can come during “off hours” weekly income is expanded.
3. Friendship: Every time a new student enters the door a new relationship is established and inevitably a friend as well.
4. Variety: Each adult student arrives with a unique and distinct musical background and agenda. While some desire to master Mozart, others want to learn note names, while others wish to play current pop hits. Because of time limitations, I have not initiated a Recreational Music Making (RMM) class but this could be a possible option for your studio. This program, that emphasizes recreational and not traditional lessons for adults, continues to grow in popularity. For more information check out the Recreational Music Making Handbook. Read more…
Posted in Promoting Your Studio, Studio Management, Teaching Tips, Using Music Teacher's Helper
In one of my earlier posts, I discussed the benefits of having students participate in music auditions, festivals, and other assessment-type programs. Most of my students participate yearly in the National Piano Guild Auditions, and it is this time of the year that I assign their audition program. The National Piano Guild Auditions offer a very flexible audition experience – students can perform anywhere from 1 – 20 pieces, and the choice of repertoire is entirely up to the teacher! While Bach, Mozart and Beethoven will always be staples, I am a big fan of incorporating music from contemporary composers. I would like to share some of my most recent audition-music-gem finds:
Posted in Product Reviews, Teaching Tips
Got Facebook? A guide to social networking for your music studio.
January 10th, 2012 by Amanda Furbeck
I am completely fascinated with online networking. It’s such a fun way to interact
Are you a social media expert?
with people you know and meet people you don’t. In fact, social media is all the buzz in advertising in today’s market. It’s free, it’s fast, and you can hit a large market. Big companies are even hiring social media experts whose full time job is to tweet you, text you, and message you about hot deals and cool stuff. It’s the next big thing in marketing. But should you use it for your private music teaching studio? I do.
Posted in Customer Support, Music & Technology, Music News, Press, Promoting Your Studio, Site Announcements, Studio Management, Uncategorized, Using Music Teacher's Helper
My favorite quote from a Yogi Tea Bag said “If you want to learn something, read. If you want to understand something, write. If you want to master something, teach.” I saw this quote several summers ago, and it really hit a nerve. Suddenly, it became clear that teaching made me more skilled as a musician than any other practice. In order to understand a musical concept, I could not simply feel it like I normally do, and hope the student would understand. I had to grasp it from every direction. Teaching well means having the ability to explain a difficult concept in a manner that makes it appear easy. Read more…
Posted in Teaching Tips
Do you use the invoicing in Music Teacher’s Helper? Below are some tips if you do, and a bit of encouragement to try it if you don’t. Managing a studio means running a small business, but who becomes a musician in order to run a business? MTH provides built-in guidance for the business end of a teaching studio, and invoicing can be a big help.
Tip #1: How to find the invoicing function.
Invoicing functions are found under the Billing tab, where you can select Invoicing and view Invoice History, Create Invoice(s), or work with Automatic Invoicing.
Tip #2: Preview everything.
Any time you make use of invoicing, first preview your invoice(s) by clicking the “Preview or Print” button. You need to see what the student will be seeing – does the invoice show the right dates, the right events, and does it add up to what you expect? If not, see Tip #4. Also, make sure only the invoices you want to create are showing – if there’s more than one invoice, there will be more than one page to preview.
Once you take a look at the preview, click “Go Back to Invoicing Creation” at the top of the page, so you can either revise the invoice or send/print/record it. But beware! When you go back to the Invoicing Creation Read more…
Posted in Financial Business, Studio Management, Using Music Teacher's Helper
I am writing to see if anyone else from the Music Teachers Helper community is going to the Music Teachers National Association 2012 National Conference held in New York city from March 24-28. This will be my first time attending a national conference for music teachers, and I am super excited!
The Conference Schedule is packed with workshops, masterclasses, exhibition showcases, and there is a very strong focus on the business side of teaching music, with a whole day dedicated to PROFESSIONAL STUDIO INSTITUTE: Building a Successful Studio in Any Kind of Economy. For those that already have a thriving studio and may not be interested in studio marketing, there is an alternative session called Teaching Artistry, where “Attendees will learn strategies for teaching artistry to students of all levels. Four tracks will explore the topics of technique, basic essential repertoire, advanced repertoire/competition preparation and developing artistry.”
Read more…
Posted in Music News, Professional Development
Especially as singers, we HAVE to think, as that’s the only way to affect our instrument. Questions I ask are: “What was the difference between that time and the time before?” “What are you going to do to try to change XX; How successful was what you tried and why?” “What did you think about that sound?” “What did you do differently?”
Overall, I have banned the words “good” and “bad” because neither tell you what to continue working with and what to try to fix. I also try to always use only positive directives. We’ll identify both what behavior we want to replace and then what we want to happen instead. Focus is then on what we WANT to happen, rather than what we don’t want.
Posted in Practicing, Studio Management, Teaching Tips, Using Music Teacher's Helper
Happy New Year! We hope your year is off to a great start. We’re continuing to work hard to make your music teaching studio even easier to manage with Music Teacher’s Helper.
The native iPhone app is almost finished and we plan to submit it to the Apple iTunes store by the end of January. Please see below for our the latest updates and changes.
- We improved the Daily Summary report. It now gives a detailed view of each lesson’s participants and it includes global/studio-wide events.
- The social buttons on the footer caused Internet Explorer to popup a security question too often. We decided to remove them for your convenience.
- Good news to all affiliates! We’ve increased the cookie retention time from 60 to 180 days. This will give new referrals more time to decide if they want to sign up for a free trial. Remember that if there is no time limit on how long they take to upgrade to a paying account after that point.
- Fixed a rare bug when calendar events were not showing up when viewing day view.
- On the studio website’s contact form, parents needed to Read more…
Posted in Site Announcements
R&B vocalist Kira Small and her husband, bassist Bryan Beller, was in our area this summer to perform at a house concert that I was hosting. After the concert, Kira was selling CDs at the merch table. She was taking credit card purchases with this tiny white box that plugs into to her iPhone.
She told me about Square, and I decided I would test it out and see how it worked for my teaching studio. At this point all my credit card transactions were happening through PayPal, so it seemed wise to develop some alternatives.
Square has been fantastic so far, a huge step up from Paypal in many respects. The transaction fees are lower (we will look at data shortly), I have the ability to take payments anywhere quickly, I can provide receipts on the spot, and all the money is automatically deposited overnight in my bank account.
Read more…
Posted in Financial Business, Music & Technology, Studio Management