Seeing as James has reviewed “How To Make A Living Teaching Guitar” today on Guitar Noize I thought I would post a review of the accompanying eBook “Fifty Flexible Lesson Plans for Teaching Guitar” also by Nick Minnion. One of the biggest problems I had when I was teaching was the lack of planning and preperation I used to do before the lessons, I would generally rock up with a few ideas and just try and think of stuff on the spot, no wonder my students lost interest. This book is not meant as series of lesson plans that you simply follow week by week but as a series of lesson frameworks that you can adapt to suit your students various levels of knowledge and skill.
My advice is to start with the contents page and home in on any section of the book that takes your interest. It may be that just reading through a few objectives will, in itself, fuel you with enough ideas to meet the needs of a particular lesson. Another approach is to effectively put yourself in the student’s shoes and work through the lesson plans yourself line by line.
Some of these lessons plans may actually challenge your own music theory knowledge or maybe your chord knowledge but this is a good thing, you see you don’t need to know everything in order to teach you just need to be able to learn it in order to pass on the knowledge. It is very similar to programming, I couldn’t possibly remember everything about every language I program but if I get stuck I have enough knowledge of say php’s syntax in order to look up a function in the online help and understand the usage.
I think this is probably a more useful book than “How to Make a Living Teaching Guitar” but you may need to read that first in order to get the inspiration, business tips and encouragement to teach in the first place. If you are already teaching but feel you need some sort of method to improve your lessons then this book could be just the thing.
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