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VMT003: Keeping Music Parents in the Loop All Year Long

 

It’s so important to keep expectations and goals aligned so that parents are happy in our studio, sign up again next year, and their children have a great musical experience.

What can we do to make sure parents are on the same page as us?

VMT 003 - Keeping Parents in the Loop All Year Long 2

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Full Transcript

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VMT003_ Keeping Parents in the Loop All Year Long.mp3

Welcome to the vibrant music teaching podcast I’m Nicola Cantan and you’re listening to Episode 3 where I’m going to let you in on my secrets for keeping parents up to date and their expectations aligned with yours.

Hello there beautiful teachers. Today we’re going to be chatting about keeping parents in the loop or how to keep parents up to date on what’s going on with their child’s music education. What’s happening in your studio and all that good stuff. This is actually super important for several reasons. And it’s something I’ve gotten better at in the last few years and I’ve seen a huge benefit from it as a music teacher. You essentially have two different customers because you generally have to keep the student happy and their parents happy. The parents are the ones paying you for lessons and the students have to be happy too. Because if the students are unhappy the parents won’t be happy. But you do have these two different sets of interests and set of expectations about what lessons they’re going to be like and what’s going to happen to contend with. And this can be a little bit tricky to navigate but when you do it right you get much better retention in your studio and retention is one of the most important things in your marketing arsenal. Basically the longer students stay in your studio the less they cost you even if you’re doing quote unquote review marketing still costs you in your time and chances are depending on your location and how things are going for you you can’t afford to be losing students left right and center if you have a leaky bucket. If students are falling straight out the bottom of your studio within the first year or so then you need to keep recruiting new students new students all the time apart from any of that in any marketing and business considerations.

It’s also just better for you if students stay longer. I’m sure many of you like me and that you enjoy lessons more with students you already know the ones that you already get along with or you’ve already found your groove together. It’s much easier to teach those lessons than with the brand new student although I like teaching new students transfer student and beginners. It definitely requires more effort and more focus for me before the lesson. And as we go on it gets easier and easier and more enjoyable to teach those lessons because we already have a relationship and a rapport established so retention is great for your business and in general it’s great for you too. The other reason it’s really important to keep parents in the loop is that otherwise they start to push for things. From my experience. And if you’re in UK or Ireland where I am or Australia and New Zealand Canada even where parents can be a little bit pushy for music exams and sometimes before the student is really ready we get pushed into it or at least they try to. I’ve found this has completely disappeared when I’ve properly explained where we’re at and where we’re going.

At all stages of the student’s journey it makes a massive difference when we’re all on the same page and they know that I have a plan. They don’t start to push for things like exams or competitions or the next book or a certain piece because I know I have a plan and they’re on board with it. The happier your parents are too even if they’re not on the verge of quitting. If they just think lessons with you are okay they’re much less likely to recommend you to others to put in the time to leave a review on your Facebook page or your Google my business or whatever. So keeping the parents in your studio happy is super important and the best way that I know to do this is for them to know what’s going on. Now how do we do this. Well a big part of this for me is the discussion that I have with the parents at the very start so we arrange a meeting before they start lessons. And at that meeting I explain to them things like that I am going to decide when their child does an exam and I’ll recommend it when they are. It would be beneficial for their child but don’t expect it every year. Don’t expect us to get on the exam Express and if they’re concerned about that or if they maybe grew up through the exam system I think it’s just the way it’s done.

I explain to them why I feel that way about it. My philosophy on it that I understand that exams can be beneficial but that the way we use them in this country kind of need to change and it doesn’t lead to lifelong musicians and usually they’ll agree with me that that’s what they want for their child. They want them to enjoy playing music and to continue it for as long as possible into their life and have it as a musical escape from stress or jobs or whatever is going on. So we’re on the same page on that. Exams are talked about in the beginning and I let them know why I think they should be used sparingly and only at points when it’s beneficial to the student. Also at that interview we’ll talk about practice expectations their goals for their child or the goals for themself or if they’re an adult student of course we’ll talk about what they want to learn. Let’s talk about their musical interests especially their transfer student what have they been learning already. What are they interested in learning. Is there anything in particular they want to work towards so that at the very start that’s when we have all of that discussion and we get everything laid out. Now the mistake is that a lot of teachers make and I certainly made is that we go forward and we think we’ve had that chat.

Now they’re on the same page. We all know where we are and that’s just going to continue. But you need to check back in with these things you need to keep revisiting things to make sure nothing has changed and that we’re all still on the same page and we know where we’re going. I also make it a big point now to keep my parent in the loop with what goals I have for the student especially young students. They’re not going to express that themselves. They’re not going to have any particular goals for themself and their parent isn’t going to be too specific about it either because they’re not a music educator. But if you don’t express the goals to your parents in your studio or the students themselves that’s when they start trying to take control of the reins. So I make your very clear where we’re going where I’m trying to get them this year and where we’re up to and anything they can do to help us. Parents at home. The way I do this is with a well it used to be purely with regular emails and this is how a lot of teachers do it that they make a point to write an email every so often to the parents in their studio and that’s great especially if you’re someone who will do them at regular intervals but it’s really easy to leave those off when everything’s going smoothly and to only email when there’s a problem or an issue or a lack of practice or something like that.

And if that’s the case it kind of feels like you’re just giving it to the parents when they’ve done something wrong and that’s not so good. That’s not a good feeling to associate with your studio. So I make it a point to keep my parents in the loop. Now using a system of reports in google docs so I enter the details at the start of the year what goals I have for the student what I want them to get done this year and any particular goals they’ve expressed to me. I’ll also write in there what method books they’re in or are there books or supplemental books what theory is going on and also some links to relevant resources like links to piano safari reminder videos if they’re in that method or audio downloads or a listening playlist or something like that. Underneath that is where I write the regular updates progress reports or whatever you want to call them so I’ll write the date and every 10 weeks the date in and a quick update of where they’re at where I want them to be going how they’re getting on what challenges we’ve come across and what they’re doing really well with just a few bullet points on how it’s all going. This really helps to alleviate parents concern about where their child is in their music study and how they’re progressing and whether they should be at this level or that as long as you make it extremely clear.

Most parents actually won’t push back against that. It’s when they feel that you don’t have a plan and I’m sure you do have a plan but they need to know it. They need to be in on the plan because otherwise they’re going to come up with their own or they’re going to drop out because they think it’s not going anywhere because let’s face it learning to play a musical instrument takes a crazy amount of time and effort and commitment. It actually takes so long to get to a level of any kind of proficiency. And while we can provide great music along the way and make it seem like they’re in a more advanced level than they are in all of this stuff there’s no disguising the fact that it takes a huge amount of practice and commitment and it takes a long time and therefore it does cost the parents a lot of money. Fees for music no matter where you live they are not cheap and you should not be charging too little so they shouldn’t certainly shouldn’t be cheap so it does require a significant time and financial commitment from parents and they need to know where it’s going. That doesn’t mean that they need to be able to decide things.

It means that you need to let them in on your plan that you’ve made as the expert. So as you go through make sure you explain why these things are happening not just what the plan is not just we’re learning this study so that they can play Bartok whatever it needs to be more specific and more of a thought out explanation than that I recommend just giving them a little bit of background on why this is important especially if you’re doing something that might be considered a little bit odd like getting them to improvise with backing tracks at home or learning rote pieces or anything else that’s going on getting them to play theory games as I do lending them theory games. I make it very clear that in the lessons and at home they will be playing games and there’ll be a whole mix of stuff going on and I explain why I do that. Why I think it’s the best way for them to learn in a lot of cases and the benefits it has when they understand all these things are going to be on board. But if they just walk into my studio and they haven’t been told any of this and we’re just sitting there playing a game it does look a little bit like we’re skiving off right. If they don’t know anything about education and game of flying things and all of this I mean and how would they unless they are their teacher themselves.

They’re going to think that we’re just basically wasting time and they don’t have time to waste. And they don’t have money to waste on piano lessons that don’t consist of anything that they couldn’t do themselves at home. So be clear and position yourself as an expert by showing them how much thought goes into this planning. This also helps with things like the perception of our industry in general and the fees that we should be charging when they’re fully understanding everything you put into prepping a lesson and all that goes along with that without you telling them just by showing them through how well planned out everything is and by them seeing how long a journey this is that you have been through to get to this point again without talking about it or explaining why it’s you know why the fees cost this much. Just by showing them through how much of a quote unquote expert I don’t love that word. But there is no better one for this at the moment and we need to be perceived as expert as professionals. And this goes a long way towards that. So whatever your system is trying to put something in place whether it’s just that you get a reminder on your phone every eight weeks that you should e-mail such and such and you stagger those out whether you have a system like mine where every 10 weeks you do a report for every single child in the studio and that is sent through to the parents or you use my music staff and their inbuilt notes or you do something.

Make sure you’re making an effort to keep the parents on the same page as you and let them know where their child is going and what the plan is going forward. You can get the show notes for today’s episode at vibrant music teaching dot com slash episode 3 and I’ll leave some links there to relevant stuff such as a link to their report template that I use for my piano parents and also some other relevant resources and the full transcript which is clickable so you can jump to particular words if you miss something I said. You can jump through it and quickly find what you need. So head on over to vibrant music teaching dotcom splash 3 and you’ll get that and add on over to the Facebook group as well and let me know what you think of this whole parent updates. E-mails phone calls. What is it that you do and how do you make sure that parents are on the same page as you in the loop with what’s going on in your studio. Head on over to Vibert music teaching dotcom slash community and join the facebook group. If you’re not already a member I’ll see you there. Bye for now.

If you enjoyed this episode why not head on over to VMT dot ninja and learn more about vibrant music teaching membership. There’s courses a whole library of fully organized and easy to use games and activities and a fantastic community. Go to VMT dot ninja to find out more today.

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