Lesson Delivery

Teaching Different Skill Levels

The one-size-fits-all approach rarely "fits" anyone. To get the fastest results for your students, you need to know how to approach lessons for beginners, intermediate students, and advanced students.

Depending on the skill level and experience of the student you're teaching, you're going to approach how you teach in a variety of ways.

This short lesson will help guide your approach for teaching students at different skill levels.

While you should aim to give all of your students small successes constantly, with beginners you need to do it right away.

Top Priority: Get them playing.

Give them something cool but super-achievable to do first thing, so that within a few minutes they're doing it. Something that has very little going on with one hand and something very easy on the other hand is a good example, like an open string arpeggiated pattern where the notes move around on just one string.

This is for a few reasons:

1. Being a beginner just kind of sucks. Guitar as a topic is the MOST exciting at this stage, but actually playing the damn thing is almost 100% a struggle & everything they do sounds like crap, and they know it. So having you provide something they CAN do and praising them for doing it gives them the confidence to go on.

2. Especially in the very beginning of playing, people often aren't even sure they can learn the guitar. Chances are they've picked it up, tried to do something, recoiled in horror at how bad it sounded and just how much they have no idea what they're doing. So it's super important to feed them a few successes right off the bat, which don't require much coordination.

Another general guideline, especially for beginners, is to avoid introducing too much music terminology. It's more important that they DO things on the instrument than that they memorize a bunch of terminology. 

This means that some "standard" first lessons like learning the parts of the guitar, at least as a dedicated lesson, can be mostly skipped over, in favor of getting to actually play something. 

You can always refer to a part of the guitar within the request to play whatever you're giving them, like "You'll do this picking pattern down here by the bridge [point to it], and then your other hand goes on the neck and your put your fingers between the frets [the frets are actually the metal wire going across, but we put our fingers in the spaces]." 

This tells them the parts of the guitar they NEED to know to play, but doesn't delay getting them to actually play in favor of spending their lesson time giving them an unnecessary tour of the guitar that a free diagram from Google Images could achieve just as well.

This is sort of "Teaching Beginners Part 2," but there are some differences here, so I feel it deserves its own section.

There are some things that come along with teaching kids that are unique to them, namely:

1. Short attention span, so keep the sessions short (1/2 hour sessions are great for kids).

2. They possibly haven't learned multiplication & division yet (or possibly even any math, depending on how young they are), so complex rhythms may be a challenge if approached mathematically ("mimick what I play" is a viable alternative, though).

3. It absolutely MUST be FUN. The whole thing is about fun at that stage, not goals. Your whole job with kids' lessons is finding fun things to do on the guitar and entertaining them while you show them stuff they can do.

4. 99.9% chance their parents made the choice to enroll them in guitar lessons, not the kids themselves. So the motivation is not their own. (Another reason it MUST be FUN). And this also means you'll need to give practice assignments to their parents because the child themselves will most likely not follow through on their own.

So you're still giving them easy successes, just like with beginners, but it's also largely entertainment. The more you can keep it fun all the time and give them fun things THEY can do, the more the kids will keep coming back.

Now while it might seem that all 3 of the skill levels would require their own approach, really it's just the beginner stage that needs its own approach. 

Once the guitarist can do some things reasonably well, you can start building on those strengths. Of course first you need to identify their strengths, but once you do, it's a matter of using those strengths as a starting point and introducing 1 or 2 additional challenges. Their area of strength will provide an anchor of stability for them to return to as they tackle the new challenges.

From there though, it doesn't really matter that much if they're intermediate or advanced. You simply take the topic at hand, and either simplify it or complicate it to match the student's skill level. 

For this, I generally identify not only their strengths, but their areas of weakness as well, and the challenge will be in their weaker areas. Often I'll set them up to fail just the first time they play it, so they can experience the built-in difficulty, and we can identify what's causing it together. But after that I'm STILL setting them up to succeed. 

In fact, sometimes I'll set a challenge I think will trip them up, and they ACE it on the first try. And that's when I adjust the difficulty and try to find where their limit is on that particular skill, because there IS some degree of diagnostics involved in this. So don't worry if you don't nail their difficulty level on the first try. 

With less advanced players, I often introduce the complicated version of something first, and then simplify it to match their skill level.

One final note about different skill levels...

When teaching groups, on the surface it would seem that you would need everyone in the class to be at the same skill level, but in reality this is not true at all. The only time it's ever true is for a beginners' class, where the whole class is specifically FOR beginners.

But even with beginners, they don't have to be relegated to a dedicated "beginners'" class. You can teach beginners alongside intermediate and advanced students right in the same class.

As I mentioned above in the previous section, the key is to present the advanced version FIRST. Advanced students will be more self-sufficient and know what they're doing, and will generally need less hand-holding along the way, so getting them set up first frees you up to help the intermediate and beginner students. 

In fact, as the advanced students are playing, you can use what they're doing to demonstrate to the less advanced students how it's done — OR, to really test your students' knowledge, have them TEACH what they've learned to less advanced students in their own words. Remember, while they're all paying YOU to teach them, one great way to test how well you know something is whether you can teach it to someone else, so don't shy away from getting students to put their knowledge to the test and see if they can convey it to the other students in the class.

Plus, by doing this, you're also introducing other perspectives, and someone else's way of explaining the same topic might even resonate better with some students than YOURS, so students get even more value out of your group classes.

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