Developing as teacher
Hello everyone, I'm starting out teaching guitar. I've taught other things before such as English as a foreign language, and I'm aware of how much I have to develop and learn in order provide my students with great guitar lessons.
My question to the forum is:
What things do you do to develop and maintain your teaching?
I'd be interested in hearing any ideas, no matter how small. :)
Some things I'd be interested in are:
- Learning new teaching techniques
- Acquiring or creating appropriate materials for students
- How to find what a student needs together with what they want
Thanks!
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Just found this thread and decided to add my thoughts
I actually learned a lot by visiting classes by teachers who are really succeed in developing great students. I have the great honor to work in the same school as Eduardo Inestal, who is an incredibly dedicated teacher, he already gave some lessons on tonebase on pedagogy as well where he talks in depth about his ideas.
It's not that you just learn new ways of interacting with your students and discover new repertoire, you also can put everything that you've done in context. I was always convinced that my way of teaching was the best (of course, haha), but seeing how other people were doing that made rethink my various approaches.
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martin That's a good idea, it might be a bit tricky at the moment, especially with the 1.5m and what can be quite small rooms, but I might see if I can suggest it or ask around. Seems like a good thing to do once I get settled into it a bit more. I'm basically drawing from my musical knowledge and pedagogical knowledge from language teaching (and being in my own teachers' classes and reading up of course), which is in a process of merging, and hopefully I can try and observe a teacher.
I did also watch both Tonebase live streams with Eduardo Inestal and I really got a lot from them - and it's probably fair to say that it was him who gave me that necessary inspiration and knowledge to get me to start teaching, I often do things in lessons that I learnt from him. Say a big big thank you from me to him when you see him!
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Roni Glaser
Yes, at the moment it's indeed tricky, but finding a style of teaching is a long journey anyway! At first, I took a more coach-like approach, but as I got more and more experienced, I was a tiny bit more certain of some aspects of my pedagogy, thus my teaching was more self conscious.
Although I still have doubts and usually have no problems to share those doubts with my more advanced students. I'd like them to know that there are less and lesser black-and-white-yes-or-no-this-or-that-answers once you reach a certain threshold.
I will do that, he'll be happy to hear that!
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