Denver School of Music

The 4 Mistakes Parents Make When Looking For Music lessons… And how you can turn these realities to your advantage…

• Mistake # 1 - Choosing the wrong teacher or music school.

Sure, all music schools and lessons are pretty much the same…right?
Experts now know and agree on the simple answer “No”. They also agree that your children’s success is almost 98% based on the teacher that you choose in the student’s first year. “When you choose a teacher based of off price or location you are basically saying that your not concerned with the outcome of your child’s success” says Gordon DeBroder, Dr, Concert Pianst NYU.

The way to have success is to use teachers that teach a time tested winning curriculum.
“Most teachers teach they way they learned, and that is like fitting a square peg into a round hole.” Curriculums that have been tested to work well with all students has specific contents that others don’t.

Effective learning materials build off of each lesson and have checkpoints for the students success. 95% of the books for beginners have no system for tracking their success. It makes it impossible for teachers that have 40 students to keep track of their progress each week. “It’s great that Denver School of Music has made a 7 level curriculum for each instrument, so every student no matter the teacher will lock in their learning and will be evolve into a well rounded and independent musician.”says DeBroder.

• Mistake #2 -Choosing a school that doesn’t have an weekly ensemble program for students.
  

By nature of being a musician. you have a tendency to learn a lot of information but never or rarely get a chance to show what you know. “80% of being a musician is playing shows or concerts with your friends and 20% learning by lessons”, says DeBroder.

It’s essential to motivation and growth when students show what they know. IT gives students a monthly goal they can shoot for and it means students playing their instruments their whole life instead of quitting after high school or college.

Playing show is now possible if you find the right music school, at DSoM (Denver School of Music) it’s the main focus of all the teachers to get each student in the program Rock Star Club and get students to perform live every other month so their learning is locked in and totally secure. This is a major reason why your son our daughter has the best chance possible of playing their instruments for a lifetime and not the average of 8 months in most schools.

• Mistake#3 - The instructions that teachers give their parents and students on how a student should practice.

Before you choose any school talk to the student advisor or teacher before starting lessons and ask them this one simple question. Based on how they answer it you will know if they are in the now or stuck on the non working traditional teaching bus. Here is the question. “How long should my students practice each day.” If they tell you 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, they are setting your students up for failure.

Let me ask you a question. Let’s say your teens are in sports. When they are at practice how is the practice operated? It’s by repetitions. They have you do 10 laps, 20 pushups, 5 plays over again. They give you numbers. It’s a lot easier for younger people to count to 10 then it is then to keep track of time.

Try this experiment out: Tell your son or daughter to pick up after themselves for 15 minutes a night every night for a week, each night secretly time them and see if they do the entire 15 minutes. Then for a week tell them to pick up 30 things in their room each night. I promise you that at the end of the week you are going to have one clean room.

The other and most important reason is accountability. It’s easy to practice for 30 minutes a day and get nothing done. you can star at a piece of paper and fumble thorough it or even take your time and do one thing at a time, but then you’re loosing progress. Or you can take what your teacher gave you and do it 30 times. The great part about this is how easy it makes practicing and how much more focused the students are.

Denver school of Music’s methods are all based on repetition and variety, meaning many different examples to learning the same techniques so there is no boredom.

• Mistake # 4 - no coaching during the 6 days between lessons.

Most sports have practice 4-5 days a week after school. There are obvious reasons for that and a lot of not so obvious benefits as well. Music students need to be supported or pushed during the week to have the most progress. What is essential is play along CDs that students can use each week during their practice schedule.

Denver School of Music’s levels have CDs for students to do just that. Each level they can play along each day and make tiny improvements each day, at the end of a week the student can see where they were last week and also how much they improved that week. It will give them more confidence and also motivation to see how they grow from week to week.

If you are interested in seeing what’s possible for your children then call and setup a time to come in.
Denver School of Music 303-420-7952 or fill out the information below and a student advisor will send you an information packet by email as well as call to set up a time to come in.

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Tags: Arvada Guitar Lessons, biggest mistakes, Denver School of Music, Free CDs, free lesson, Mistakes Parents Make, Music Coaching, Musicianship, practice, Practice CDs, Rock Star Club

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 5:56 am and is filed under Showcase. You can leave a comment or a trackback from your own site.