Structuring a Guitar Lesson Without Overwhelming Your Student

Today’s question is a good question that a lot of teachers struggle with when starting out - how to structure a lesson so that the student isn’t overwhelmed, but you still cover the topics that you need to cover.

Here’s the question:

How could/should I structure a lesson including warm up, music theory, fingerstyle, comping and strumming without overloading the student? How to structure it correct with the appropriate portions (or percentage)?

You can see my reply here:

Lesson Length

How much we can cover in a lesson is dependent on the length of the lesson. If we are talking about a 30 minute lesson, this is way too much. If we are talking about a 60 minute guitar lesson, this is still a lot of material to cover.

You can split these topics across multiple lessons, you don’t have to cover every topic in every lesson. You will probably find that you want to do the occasional “big lesson” on just one topic, for example, the occasional music theory lesson on a single topic so that you can work through it properly, then following lessons involve applying that theory.

The Perfect Lesson

Just like there isn’t a perfect practice plan, there isn’t a perfect structure for a guitar lesson. You will have to change lesson structure over time.

• Warm up: Maybe five minutes
• Music theory: As and when is needed, not a core part of the lesson. Possibly as an additional lesson, they get a monthly music theory intensive lesson.
• Fingerstyle, comping and strumming: Consider rotating through these topics each week.

You can have “core topics” in your lessons, but you don’t have to cover every topic in every lesson. You could have an AB structure to you lessons. Week-to-week exactly what you do doesn’t matter too much, aslong as over time the student is covering the material that needs to be covered.

Conclusion

Don’t overwhelm your student, and rotate through topics week by week.