STG 004 : Designing Lesson Policies That Work

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The Start Teaching Guitar PodcastIn this episode of the Start Teaching Guitar podcast, I’ll be explaining how to design effective lesson policies for your teaching business. There’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach to creating your lesson policies…you need to ask yourself some important questions about how you want your business to look, and then create your lesson policies based on the answers that work best for you.

For this reason, the topic of lesson policies goes hand-in-hand with the topic of lifestyle design. In this episode, I’ll be taking about both and how they work together to help you have the kind of life you really want as a guitar teacher. One of the cool things about teaching guitar is that it gives you the freedom to design your life almost any way you choose!

I go into MUCH greater detail about each item in the podcast, but here’s a rough outline for you:

Designing Lesson Policies That Work

1) Lifestyle Design

  • What do I really care about? What things are really important to me?
  • Why do I want to teach guitar lessons in the first place?
  • What makes me feel happy and fulfilled more than anything else?
  • What are my top 5 values?
    • Donnie’s top 5 values

2) Lesson Policies

  • Payment
    • How much am I charging for lessons?
    • What methods of payment will I accept?
    • How often will I require payment?
    • Will I give refunds or not? Under what circumstances?
    • Will I offer any discounts for buying lessons in bulk?
  • Scheduling
    • How will I schedule my lesson times?
    • What will I do if a student doesn’t show up?
    • What will I do if a student is late?
    • Should I do “make up” lessons or not?
    • What days do I want to take off?
    • What’s the best way for students to communicate schedule changes with me?
    • How will I communicate schedule changes with them?
  • Expectations
    • How much should my students practice every week?
    • How long should my lessons be?
    • What’s my general approach to teaching guitar?
    • What sequence of concepts will I take my students through?
    • How will I judge what level they’re currently on?
    • How will I decide when they’ve reached the next level?
    • How will I reward/recognize them for that accomplishment?
    • How will I discover and then work toward my student’s goals?
    • How will I discover their definition of “results” and make sure they experience that?

If you have any additional lesson policy suggestions that I didn’t mention, feedback about this episode or questions about anything I talked about, please call in and leave them on the Listener Feedback Hotline or leave a comment below.

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Items Mentioned In This Episode:

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Posted on August 20, 2011 by in Podcasts, Where Do I Begin?

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4 Responses to “STG 004 : Designing Lesson Policies That Work”

  1. Lukas August 22, 2011 8:54 am
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    #

    Hi Donnie,

    great stuff you ve got here. I really like it. I discovered you yesterday and since then I am reading all the articles.
    I am huge fan of Tim Ferris and his life-style design ideas. Your implementation of these into guitar teaching business is awesome.
    Today I am going to create a website for my business using Bluehost. I always wanted to have own website but I thought that it is much more expensive and difficult to create one. You showed me a way to go.
    Thank you for your great site and keep the good stuff coming.

    Thanks again,

    Lukas

    • Donnie Schexnayder August 22, 2011 9:19 am
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      #

      Thanks, Lukas! Tim Ferris has been a huge influence on me…it’s good to find someone else who feels the same way.

      If you use my affiliate link to sign up for your Bluehost account, please shoot me an email so I can thank you personally!

      Donnie

  2. Kyle May 11, 2012 12:49 pm
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    Donnie,

    After listening to this podcast and having things further crystallize, I’m thinking more and more that it’s possible to make a living doing this. This knocks out a lot of vagueness about lesson plans. Next up is marketing. Thanks again for another great podcast!

    Cheers,
    Kyle

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