Learning how to interact during that critical moment when you meet with parents and children will maximize conversion from interest to involvement.

Even though many music stores provide marvelous guidance for sizing, your role in helping students acquire equipment that will lead to their success is equally as important.

Learning how to set up your room so that students focus their attention on you and the board behind you is critical to successful student engagement.

Maximize effectiveness and efficiency when planning your lesson for the day’s classes, which should relate to the previous day’s topics and progress before moving on to new concepts or skills.

Print your lesson structure and make it visible to the entire class, as it should resemble the same sequence daily to reinforce repetition during practice.

Learn to use score study to identify typical tripping points/obstacles in each student’s path to success. Then, structure your lesson plan to include the scaffolding for these skills, allowing for a simple to complex reveal of the concept.

Expose the bowing rhythms and bowing styles [using open strings], key centers, and necessary finger patterns [including extensions and shifts], being sure to model appropriately and challenge the students to rely upon aural memory quickly.

Learn how to create an environment that facilitates the consistent development of passion and persistence with every action you take.

Ensuring each instrument section has daily routines will maximize the progress of each individual student in relation to their peers.

Due to potential cognitive overload, memorization is the best way to teach students to discriminate their efforts. Turn off the reading requirement, and turn on the aural perception and the sense of touch, and you won’t believe what happens next!

Understanding and clearly articulating the geography of the fingerboard is one of the most effective ways to accelerate your student’s progress.

The “show me how” method is the foundation of successful instruction. Learn how to demonstrate [on each instrument!] at a mastery level of example…students will immediately have the “I get it, let me try it” response/urge.

Learn to master the art of believing in every student’s ability to move forward, and convey it every day with genuine verbal reward.

Teaching the pursuit of beauty to every child ushers them into a moment of inspiration, power, intensity, subtlety, complexity, and all those incredible reactions we have that language can’t describe.

Movement is a visual cue for everyone in the ensemble, coordinating rhythmic activities while helping each student to find greater muscular freedom by avoiding rigid posture.

Refining this skill is your primary task and most direct route to assisting your student’s struggle to overcome obstacles. Students will come to welcome your honest and precise evaluation of their efforts, as they know it is ultimately bringing them closer to mastery.

There is no shorter cut to mastery than repetition that has as its motive the refinement of the skill, concept, or passage in question. Research has proven that the successful repetition of the skill with a minimum of three accurate reps is necessary to secure ownership.

Remember that “slow and steady wins the race,” as glossing over problems makes them permanent. Learn how to go slow while keeping your students engaged.

Movement is the great unifier, so it’s important that you teach students how to keep their eyes above the stand as well as on their music at all times.

Don’t forget that instrumental forms of music evolved from song, and if you want to raise your student’s perception of pitch, they must sing/hum the material in question…you will be amazed by the progress they suddenly will make.

Learn to assure your students that the greater their struggle, the nearer they are to the goal. Avoiding the problem delays progress and causes frustration to increase, leading to greater muscular and psychological tension.

Learn how to teach each student to believe in their innate ability to succeed to help silence the negative voices within their minds—their body is listening.

Learn to determine points along the way to mastery that deserve a reward to enable daily recognition of genuine progress, a major motivator for students.

Take an interest in your student’s hobbies and be a patient ear to their occasional bumps in the road. Showing empathy for your students is a huge investment and creates trust.

Remember your mentors, and trust those you respect for their proven success. Reach out to those people when you encounter frustration or doubt in your abilities to teach; invite them to your classroom, or visit theirs and observe. You will take away new gems every time.

Envision you and your students achieving marvelous things together in your mind’s eye, and do so with the accompanying emotions that would be present in such moments….it is simply incalculable what powers there are in dreams and imagination.

Learn the power of the spiral curriculum, which is simply presenting one concept at a time, accompanied by daily modeling and repetition, and securing that concept/skill before layering another skill upon it.

Learn to help your students realize that their eyes see blocks of information on the printed page of sheet music, not just single notes at a time.