Starting out as a violin teacher is a very exciting time! After the years spent studying, the countless hours practising and playing the music you love and will teach, greeting the first nervously smiling students and their parents feels like a dream come true.
You’re all so eager to begin, it’s tempting to accept every potential student, just because they ask you. For a time, I did take everyone, and the interesting consequences taught me some important lessons. As we refined our new student induction process, the positive repercussions for our violin programme and students were dramatic.
As you’ll see later in the post, we realised that how you choose students and who you select is critical to the overall success of your violin studio. Why? (Hint: it’s not only the student you are choosing.)
When you’ve organised a good studio space and put together the scores and equipment needed to start teaching, it’s time to find new students. Actually, attracting them isn’t so difficult. As you and I know, learning to play violin is a very desirable activity, and as a school principal once told me, a rather prestigious one. Selecting the right students from those who apply is another matter, the subject of a later post. Today we outline some of the more successful ways to build up class numbers until the time when word of mouth becomes the trusted primary source.
Advertising
A short advert in a weekly local newspaper for a few months will usually produce a trickle of inquiries, which I’d have to rate a limited success in our case. It has the advantages of being inexpensive and likely to draw people from the surrounding areas. We specified beginners in an age range from 3 to a maximum of 6 years old.
Two or three choices become clear when you decide to become a violin teacher: take a job, set up your own studio, or have a mix of both.
Photo courtesy of Reuben Hustler
Each choice has its own advantages, benefits and challenges. A teaching job in a school or institution has the security of a regular salary and usually a prescribed curriculum, although you may sometimes feel that you follow someone else’s agenda and conditions.
Setting up for yourself and becoming successfully self employed entails more work and has less financial certainty in the beginning, yet you gain complete control over your time and energy and have the opportunity to create a flourishing violin programme founded on your ideals and vision.
Founding your own studio practice is an attractive and exciting adventure that will take you on an enjoyable and fulfilling lifetime journey.
Take into account the time needed to assemble enough students to make it viable. During this period a part time teaching job can be a good option, allowing time to build up numbers for your own studio.
Whatever you decide, setting up for future success means putting in place the right structure and systems.
“I’m so lucky. I have a fantastic profession, which I love. My work life is fulfilling and rewarding, and I’m excited by the opportunities and creative challenges it brings me.”
How often do you hear expressions of happiness and contentment like these – about work?
They are the words of a successful violin teacher running a flourishing studio of enthusiastic students who are all making great progress.
That’s the golden goal. How do you make it become a reality?
How to Set Up and Run a Successful Violin Studio
In the new series on TSV Gold,How to Set Up and Run a Successful Violin Studio, we’ll show you how to do it. You’ll learn from our greatest successes – and from our worst mistakes.
You’ll find out the important things to set in place to make your teaching life happy and productive, providing you with a healthy income and proper holiday periods to sustain a balanced life – while your students enjoy exceptional progress.
Here’s a brief list of some of the topics we’ll cover:
Gearing up for a successful studio teaching practice;
How to set your fee structure and get paid fairly and appropriately;
How to develop and organise the Teaching Schedule;
How to attract and select new students to make your programme accelerate;
The initial phone call and qualifying newcomers;
The interview, the offer and how the process of choosing of students is critical to the success of your programme;
Important issues about accepting students who have been studying elsewhere;
Where to find and how to use the right venues for group classes and concerts;
How to keep up with the boring stuff like accounting, taxation, insurance and record keeping;
Accreditation – for you and your students.
If there’s a topic or question on setting up and running a teaching studio you’d like to ask about, let us know! Go to TSV Gold Support on the Gold Dashboard.
One of my biggest interests in the arts of teaching and learning is the power of the group to get things done and get skills learned. I would even go as far as saying that individual learning leaves most students in an unmotivated no man’s land where not enough learning happens. In Suzuki group classes, it’s great to see children (and parents) learning from each other. It looks like the child is thinking, You can do it, so I must be able to do it too. And bang! They work it out.
And one of the best things I have seen was a child at the end of Book 1 as she sat entranced, watching some Book 4 players. At the same time she had her violin half way up attempting to follow the fingering. I was very impressed by how close she came.
Another time I noticed a four year old student intensely watching some advanced students rehearsing a piece for concert. The group session for the younger students had finished and her mother desperately wanted to go home, but the little girl dug in her heels and absolutely refused to go. This little violin player turned herself into a very quick learner and was more in control of the learning process than her mother could fathom.
The group has what I call an enormous unseen learning effect on the individual.
A significant moment arrived in our violin school when we decided to create a fast incubator for violin progress and practice – without the pressure. Our students were doing quite well and some very well, however we believed everyone could go much quicker and learn new music easier. We wanted better results, greater success and faster progress for all students. Ultimately, it worked. How did we do it and what did we achieve?
Photo courtesy of David Becker
How to Build a Powerful Memory
One of our initial steps was to focus on how to build memory. To work successfully with their children, parents need to understand how memory works, how it is built. This topic formed the basis of several talks I gave at our group classes. The Talk came after a short break following the second session, where everyone – parents and children of all ages including the three year old students – came together to listen and participate in the discussion. I aimed to keep the talk short. To my amazement even the youngest students would listen and sometimes have great answers to my questions about how to study violin at home.
Previous teaching experience had taught me how to wait until everyone was quiet before starting. It is quite reassuring and fun in such a mixed group to watch the calm tide of quiet go through the room as people and children realise you are ready to start.
At group classes we illustrated clear learning pathways for parents to understand how their child could consistently master and retain new steps. This pattern meant that children could progress through the pieces in the Suzuki books much faster than usual. Once children had mastered Twinkles and all the early learning needed to get to Twinkles, we came to expect two books a year as normal progress. Beginners were able to learn Twinkles in about three months.
Mozart composed the Sonata for Violin and Piano in E minor, K.304 in 1778 while he was in Paris, during the same period when his mother, Anna Maria Mozart, died. The mood and intensity of this piece clearly reflects the emotions of this time of his life. The sonata is the only instrumental work he wrote whose home key is E minor.
Sonata in E minor is a relatively easy recital piece for students at Suzuki Volume 7 level and beyond, and provides an especially good opportunity for advanced piano students to partner them in performance.
Both instruments play the opening theme in unison, to continue in a heartfelt expressive partnership of poignant beauty and drama, returning often to darker and softer emotional colours. The sonata is another of Mozart’s creative wonders, with his unique colours of light and dark, matchless melodic invention within a harmonic landscape that is somehow both seamless and unexpected.
TSV Gold members can now download and print the scores from the Gold Resources page.
The Main Study Points
Tempo
Due to the Allegro marking, we’re tempted to begin the first movement too quickly, which I think can lessen some of its dramatic power. In measure 8, for example, the strong contrast between the rather plaintive voice of the opening theme and the ascending staccato line following sounds better at a slightly slower tempo. Try it and see what you think.
From the activities and enjoyment of the Play Through and Teaching Session 2, the group class is now buzzing with energy and enthusiasm. Parents and students are chatting with each other, exchanging ideas and discussing points from the sessions. It’s a good time for the teachers to take advantage of the heightened concentration to share their knowledge and experience about important areas of learning to play the violin. It’s Session 3: Welcome to The Talk!
A relatively short session of about 5 to 15 minutes, The Talk is an opportunity to engage and educate parents and students about topics such as how to implement morning and afternoon practice in order to learn new pieces quickly, infallible techniques to securely memorise the music and how to create fluent musical ability.
In the video below in this post I present my talk on the keys to daily practice. It’s particularly interesting to see how the students themselves contribute to the discussion.
Within our violin school The Talk also grew into a kind of interactive forum about how to work together successfully.
What do parents do at lessons? Everything! And how does that work?
We’ve all heard it before: Parents are the key to their children’s success. And it’s true. If a child has lost motivation or is not moving through the pieces, the missing link is parent involvement. But parents need to know what to do. I’ve experienced Suzuki Violin first hand as a parent and as an educator. My role as a parent was far more challenging, every day at home with my children grappling with ways to ‘get’ them to play their pieces.
At the heart of the problem is the western tuition model’s narrow focus on the child and the student in the lesson. I too sat silently, a parent at the back of the room while the teacher expertly taught my children one-to-one. Occasionally during the lesson, the teacher nodded over at me to make sure I had made a note for home practice. Despite my diligence, I felt disconnected and superfluous. Being the parent at your child’s lesson can be an excruciating experience and it is no surprise some mothers and fathers wonder why they have to be there.
Problems of the Parent Disconnect
I’ve watched classes where parents bring magazines to read during the lesson, or slip outside for long conversations on their mobiles, and see they were going to be quite unable to work with their child during the week. I imagined they’d go home, tell their child to practice and wonder why there is so much resistance. In the very early stages of violin playing, young children need an enormous amount of home teaching. Violin is a very challenging instrument to learn. We’ve all heard a parent say, “I don’t think my child is suited to violin, they have lost interest, we are thinking of giving up.” In other words the parent is giving up.
My own experiences and observations of the parent disconnect in the lesson made me think about how it could be different. I began with the lesson structure, what the ideal outcomes should be, and how parents could communicate and work in depth with their children about the study points in question.
In this post on Group Class Success Series we look at the second teaching session, which focuses on violin pieces and points within the levels. For violin programs based on Suzuki’s principles, Session Two is the mainstay of group work, violin workshops and summer schools.
Photo courtesy of Michel Catalisano
In many areas of violin studies, especially for achieving big advances in playing style, tone control, performance presentation and musicality, these classes are more effective than one-to-one lessons. Students learn skills about the quality of their playing and sound from watching and studying with other players, and the persuasive social proof principle comes into effect, creating the sense and conviction, if the others can do it, I can too!
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