VMT 007 – What to Do in Your First Lesson with a Transfer Student.mp3

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: You’re listening to Episode 7 of the Vibrant music teaching podcast. I’m Nicola Cantan and today I’m going to help you with your transfer student conundrum.

: Welcome wonderful teachers to another episode of the vibrant music teaching podcast. Before we get going with these transfer student first lesson essentials today I want to make sure you have an opportunity to sign up to my webinar. It’s on this Friday. If you’re listening to this as it goes live which is the 7th of September and you can sign up at vibrantmusicteaching.com/transfer. It’s all about transfer students and how to make them successful in your studio. So if you’re interested in today’s episode then you definitely want to sign up for that. If you listen to this just a little bit late to sign up anyway cause you’ll get the replay and you’ll be able to watch that there. And of course VMT members can catch the replay as soon as it goes up in the VMT site and it will live there for ever whenever you want to watch your back. First of all today I just wanted to explain what I mean by a transfer student because I’m aware that this is one of those terms that’s come to be fairly accepted in the online community but if you haven’t heard it what we mean by a transfer student is anyone who has previous experience with another teacher so someone transfers to you they change teacher and they’re there in your studio and you need to take them from where they are wherever they were doing with the previous teacher and move forward from. The difficulty with transfer students. And why a lot of teachers em complain is maybe the wrong word but have difficulty with Trent his students is mostly stems from the fact that we don’t know where they’re up to right so we don’t know what the teacher previously taught them. Unless you are literally getting them from a teacher you know in your community that’s different.

: You might know exactly what they taught them but in most cases we don’t. We don’t know where they’re up to. We don’t know where they’re going and they can tell us but it doesn’t really give us a proper measure because saying you’re at level 5 means one thing to one teacher and one thing to one student and another to another. The other difficulty is that we have to establish a relationship with this student and it’s more difficult when they’ve had a relationship with a previous teacher. We don’t know what their expectations and goals are for lessons and we don’t know what they’re used to. Right. We don’t know the environment. The previous teacher had different teachers teaching very different styles and in different ways. And they have completely different set ups as well and format for their lessons. So they may be assuming you are going to be the same in fact they probably are and you might be quite different. So that rate relationship can get after a bit of a difficult start. And no matter whether the student really loved their reviews teacher or didn’t go down so well it still comes with a lot more of baggage then a newbie piano student who’s just walking in the door and he has no idea work the animal lessons are going to be like the best. Very different story for me now when we combine those two difficulties we get to the crux of the issue because we don’t know where they’re up to and we need to build a relationship and those things two things come together to form a very difficult situation because we need to have some kind of assessment of where they are because we need to know.

: But at the same time we don’t want their first experience in our studio to be a test or what feels like a test or would feel like a judgment against them because it’s not most likely if it is a judegment and if we are getting judgey, it’s normally about the previous teacher. But they don’t know that. So they’re going to feel like it’s them like they’ve done something wrong if they’re not doing what you’re expecting. And if that assessment doesn’t go well in inverted commas. So we need to balance those two things and that’s where it gets really tricky for us teachers.

: I have taken on a lot of transfer students and I have taken a lot of them after the exam train so they have been doing exam after exam after exam and then they almost quit. And a parent Googles something and realizes that there’s such a thing as creative teaching and they reach out to me and they come in to me. So that’s a huge amount of extra baggage actually because if they had been rushed through exams whether the teacher has done it or the student has done it or the parent has done it doesn’t matter they have been moving through exams normally too quickly or without enough balancing work in between. And another a well-rounded curriculum which makes for a lot of gaps in their learning. But it also provides me with an opportunity. You see most of these students have never been exposed to improvisation am composition exploring different things playing games to learn theory and possibly even great foundational technique and reading abilities. So this might sound like a lot to cover but I find it to be an interesting challenge so I actually really enjoy taking on transfer students like this. And when I managed to save them from quilling it feels pretty good as they go forward in their studies. Now gonna say I managed every turn because that is exam burnout is extreme but most of the time I do manage to save them from quitting music altogether. So I have four elements that I like to include in the first lesson and the first lesson is really what it get us off on the right foot.

: Gets things started and gets the flow going. With new transfer student you know you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression as they say. So so important to get this right and to balance these different elements here so my first of the four things I include is something comfortable I’ll ask the student to bring along a piece they previously played that they love anything. Now for a lot of these exam transfers there’s going to be an exam piece cause that’s all they’ve played so they’ll bring along their favourite exam piece for other students. It might be a previous recital piece or just something they loved to play. Why do you play for fun. What do you love playing and what do you feel successful at. So I’ll suggest this to the parent and they’ll come up with something to bring along. Now I will say that even with this suggestion of anything they want still of the time when they bring along they can’t really play them as they come in to me in September and they been off all summer. They tend to have around their exams he says and they haven’t played they haven’t touched a piano and therefore they might stumble through this. So I’ll try to give them as much space as possible to play this for me at the start of the lesson. I’ll assure them that this is just because I want to see what kind of music they like and what their style is so it’s not about assessing their playing they shouldn’t think of it as me sitting there in judgment of them.

: I just want to see them enjoy some music as well as having a conversation and chat about that and trying to reassure them. I’d also like to try and get out of their eye-line so I’ll scoot back on my chair (I have a rolling chair in my studio) and try and get out of the way so that they can feel a little bit more like they can focus and get into their own world to play and their piece for me. Now if they’re seriously struggling with it and might interrupt but I try not to. I have had students like I say who really cannot play that piece that they brought in and I’ll try to say oh no worries. Don’t worry about I know it’s been the summer or whatever and give them an out that way so that they don’t have to feel like they have to produce something. If it’s too tricky for them. Well it is such a good opportunity for us as a teacher to get some idea how they move at the piano or at their own instrument. What their reading ability is like even because if they’re staring at their hands that’s a sure sign to me that they’ve been memorizing things without I mean probably unintentionally we don’t require memorization for exams here. So it’s an exam piece and they are staring at their hands. That’s not really a good sign for their reading ability most likely. I’ll show you though dynamics are expression and no technique and just give you some idea of what they like and how their playing is going.

Now it also gives you some insight into what they like. They pick out a piece that they say is their favorite. That’s a good indication of what style they like for us. Each day is coming off an exam syllabus a lot of students favourites will be either Christopher Norton which is there’s usually Christopher Norton on the first few levels usually from microjazz and that a lot of students favourite so that’s a good indication.

: Maybe I put them in that book. They could explore tons more. Christopher Norton stuff. Or if they loved a Baroque piece that’s great too, if they really gravitated towards Sonatina, it doesn’t really matter. It gives you a sense of what they like and what their playing is like. So after they played theres something comfortable that when we’ll do some sight reading. Now I have gone back and forth myself about including sight reading in this first lesson with the transfer student because I know it’s difficult for them and it’s difficult for me to watch them but I need to know whether they can read or not and they’ve learned this from experience because I get lot less students who just cannot read a another. They haven’t been reading but they haven’t been really reading. It’d be different if I got a student who actually learned to play by ear. But that’s not what these students are doing. They’re sort of vaguely understanding the notes they could probably name the notes for you using a mnemonic but they’re not really reading and they can’t really flow through piece no matter how easy it is on the first go. So if that’s the case I need to find out about it and maybe their sight reading is fantastic. I need to know that too. You need to know where students strengths are and where the weaknesses are and what’s been left out of their education.

: So some form of sight reading is great. Now having said all that I do know how hard it is for the student and I would have been the student who was shaking with nerves in this situation. As I transfered through teachers throughout my teens as well so I know what it’s like which is why I start with the very easiest thing I can come up with. Like literally with a student who’s in grade 2 or 3 am I’d still take out a primer level book. My go to actually in the beginning with new transfer students is to take a Piano Pronto prelude so piano Piano Pronto prelude it’s a first book meant for slightly older beginners but it’s the first book basically a primer and I’ll go towards the end of the book when it starts being hands together so it doesn’t look ridiculous. And the good thing about piano Pronto actually is it doesn’t look kiddie at all. And actually this shouldn’t make a difference but it does. It’s a portrait book. Like it stands tall not wide so doesn’t look like a beginner method book which is great. So I go towards the end of that book. Open it up on a song that hands together but is you know just chords and the like maybe even just this open fifth C and G in the left hand over and over.

: You know something like Westminster chimes. Just get them to play it. Some students will surprise me and they’ll be able to play it. I’d like to say that they’ll surprise me and not be able to play it. That should be the surprising thing but sometimes they do surprise me and they complete successfully and that’s great and we move forward. Sometimes they will really still not be able to play fluently at such an easy level which is you know warning sirens going off in your head right. The flashing red light going oh my gosh. It doesn’t mean that they can’t read stuff at a higher level in the same exact way either. It just means they can’t read fluently full stop. So if that’s the case it’s really good to go. My idea of that but I start as easy as they can to hopefully give them some opportunity for success. I’ll jump forward a few songs depending on how they did see how they did with that jump into the next book in Piano Pronto movement one and often with transfer students say between grade one two maybe even three we land in movement one. So because I want the book that they use going forward as a reading book to have them feeling successful with a piece in one or two weeks and that’s…

: One of my top priorities. So like I said these books do not look babyish they don’t sound babyish. And so students don’t really know that we’re stepping backwards at all and it works very well. But regardless of what you’re going to do going forward make sure you see some form of sight reading preferably not an actual sight reading book just an easier level book that they can read through after oocyte reading we’ll have a little chat about their goals.

: It’s very important to me that my students especially older students no that I want them to do what they want to do with music. I want them to play pop if they want to play pop. I want them to play Beethoven if they want to play Beethoven. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to expose them to other stuff but we need to establish that trust. That feeling that we are on the same page we’re headed the same way and we can be open and honest about what it is we’re trying to achieve. So I’ll have a little chat with them about what they want to do what kind of music they like and what was their favorite part of lessons previously and all that stuff.

: After we’ve had a little chat only moving towards the end of the lesson we’ll come up with some kind of a quick win or I will hopefully this will be based off of their goals that they expressed to me. So if they say they love Coldplay amazing teach them the riff from clocks. If they say they’ve always wanted to learn Clair de Lune maybe take out a really easy arrangement of that and teach them a little bit by rote if they don’t say anything like that that you can use some go to ideas would be to teach them a chord progression just you know 1 5 6 4 or something like that or to teach them a rote piece. I love the ones from piano safari even if you not using Piano Safari as a method to grab the pattern pieces one and two and teach those by rote because it’s going to be a feeling that they’ve never experienced before. They haven’t learned in that way. They’re going to be making really rich full sounding music using the whole piano and it’s going to feel easy too. So I love to give them a quick win something that they can go home and practice or play at the piano just for fun. I won’t give them any big assignments this week. Absolutely not. Just something simple that they can go home and have some fun with.

: And then the last section of the lesson are reserved for improvising. If you haven’t improvised with your students before. It doesn’t have to be scary. I promise. You can find tons of tips for improvising on my blog. Colourfulkeys.ie just do something simple get the create first. Books by Forrest Kinney to use his teacher duet to support them or play a simple chord progression and have them improvise on the white keys or the Black Keys especially if they’ve never improvised before this is going to feel like magic. They might be hesitant to do at first but just encourage them say listen there’s nothing wrong you just pressing random keys. I promise it’ll sound fantastic no matter what you do. Just give it a go and just keep going until they join in. It’s really such a wonderful thing to see the look on students faces when they can make music in the moment that sounds great. They’re actually listening to themselves and not having to read anything and not having to struggle with something. It’s amazing. So I love to finish out my transfer students first lesson with that great moment of improvisation and discovery. So there you have it. Those are my four slash five sections of a first lesson with the transfer student. I’ll have them play something comfortable something that’s easy for them and that they loved to play do some sight reading in a book add an easier level have a goal’s chat and then lead that into hopefully some kind of quick win rote piece or chord progression for them to play this week at home and then improvise together so that they can get inspired about music and what can be created.

: You can find the show notes for today’s episode at a vibrantmusicteaching.com/7. That’s the number 7 for Episode 7. VMT members who are listening now can access the transfer student training was just released a week or so ago in the courses section on VMT and there’s a webinar all about teaching transfer students coming up this Friday so if you’re listening to this bang on time then sign up at vibrantmusicteaching.com/transfer and if you’re listening just after Friday or just a tiny bit late sign of there anyway and you’ll get access to the replay VMT members can access the replay at any time under the videos menu and then webinars and workshops. Next week is going to be a Q and A podcast episode I’m going to be taking questions from vibrant music teaching members so if you’re a member up into the VMT club house Facebook group and leave your question for me there. I’m open to questions about anything that you want me to chat about. So hop on over there and leave your question or if you want you can email me or write to me on the site. Whatever suits you best I’m looking forward to answering your questions then and helping you and everyone else who’s listening to some of your burning teaching problems. Chat then.

: Bye for now.

: If you enjoyed this episode of The vibrant music teaching podcast then you should definitely check and vibrant music teaching membership. Go to VMT dot ninja and discover how you can get access to whole training about transfer students as well as a whole year’s lesson plans for preschoolers and a chord Crash Course and tons of games and creative activities to spice up your teaching. Make it more effective and more fun. Find out more at VMT.ninja.

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