Why I don’t teach 30 minute lessons
If you look at my website you’ll notice I only teach 45-minute and 60-minute piano and singing lessons. This is true even for beginners and for very young children. This is uncommon, however, there are a growing number of teachers advocating for longer lessons. Here are some of the reasons why I don’t offer thirty minute lessons.
beginners have the most to learn, so we need more time to cover everything
A beginner student who starts piano or singing lessons has the most to learn. Beginner piano students, for instance, need to learn correct posture at the piano, correct hand shape, correct motion of playing keys with arm weight while maintaining hand shape and posture, the position of the black and white keys on the piano, how to keep a beat, the difference between beat and rhythm, aural discrimination between high and low, loud and quiet, same and different… phew! Singers are the same. They have to learn posture, breathing, how to produce high and low pitches, how to match pitch accurately, clear diction, as well as beat, rhythm, and aural discrimination. And this is before either of them have even started to learn how to read notation on the staff, and doesn’t factor in the time spent teaching and learning repertoire. You can see how the time starts to add up!
Given that many primary schools do not have specialist music teachers and may have very limited music teaching overall, the role of the private piano/singing teacher often becomes that of both a general music teacher and a specialist instrumental teacher. 45 minute lessons minimum mean that I can make sure a beginner is getting a really comprehensive technical, aural and theoretical foundation, as well as giving them time to cover multiple pieces of repertoire and address practice strategies for those pieces at home.
students need time to practice in the lesson, otherwise they won’t be able to practice effectively at home
When I was teaching thirty minute lessons (when I was employed by other schools/studios), I was unfortunately often limited to getting to a new song or piece, preparing the student for it, playing or singing through it once, and then sending them off to practice for the week. This meant that students didn’t really get to experience what it means to practice a new piece, they only experience playing it through from start to finish. In longer lessons, we can prepare a new piece or song, and then have the student practice it in the lesson with me, so I can give them practice strategies, and model what practice should look like at home.
Some students don’t have a lot of time to practice, so their lesson needs to cover practice as well
There are very few after-school activities which require as much commitment outside of the lesson time as music. Most sports, for instance, have a once-weekly training session, and then a game on weekends. There is not an expectation that a student who is learning soccer has to be drilling their goal kicks for at least 20 minutes a day outside of this. Sure, some kids who really love soccer might do this, but it’s not a requirement of participating in the activity.
For students who have a lot of other commitments, they might only be able to find 15 minutes, two or three days a week, to practice outside of lessons. For these students, a longer lesson means we can spend twenty minutes in the lesson just practicing the pieces for the week. Will the students progress as quickly as a student who practices more? Probably not. But does that mean that they shouldn’t still get all the benefits of a musical education and all the joy that music brings to their life? Of course not!
Students preparing for exams get time to do non-exam things
Exams can have an annoying tendency to ‘hijack’ lessons. In a thirty minute lesson with a student preparing for a preliminary-grade 4 exam, there’s just enough time to cover all the exam requirements, but nothing else. And while exams can be valuable to some students, they are not intended to be a comprehensive curriculum. Lessons which cover exam material and nothing else tend to be limited in repertoire (range of styles and amount of new repertoire learned), limit coverage of aural and rhythmic skills, and limit students’ knowledge of scales and technical works outside of those used for the exams.
In a 45-minute lesson, a student who is doing an earlier grade exam can still have time to cover some material outside of the exam syllabus, which results in a more well-rounded musician.
good teaching means that students won’t get bored
A common misconception about having young children and beginners taking 45 minute lessons is that they simply can’t focus for that long - they’ll get bored. In my personal experience I have never found this to be the case, because I plan my lessons to incorporate a wide range of activities to help keep students focused. This is simply good pedagogy. Here’s an example of what a 45 minute beginner piano lesson with a six year old might look like:
1-2 minutes - greeting, checking in, setting up
5-7 minutes - checking posture, hand shape, arm drop technique onto each finger
10 minutes (3-5 minutes per piece) - reviewing the new pieces from last week - Student plays, I give feedback, we play again together with the feedback implemented, repeat for next piece etc.
10 minutes (5-10 minutes per piece) - learning new piece/s - Teacher plays the piece first, Student and teacher analyse the piece, Student learns the piece by reading or rote, has a few opportunities to try.
2-3 minutes - playing review pieces - student plays through a few pieces they can already play.
10 minutes - theory games to teach new theoretical concepts and reinforce known theoretical concepts in a fun and engaging way
2-3 minutes - aural games - e.g. identifying something heard (high or low, steps or skips etc.), melodic singbacks, melodic playbacks
2-3 minutes - rhythm games - e.g. keeping a beat, echoing rhythms, rhythm reading and identifying notated rhythms, aurally identifying metre etc.
2-3 minutes - sight reading
You can see that even though the lesson is 45 minutes long, the child is rarely being asked to focus on anything for longer than 5 minutes at a time. Higher focus activities the child might have to focus for up to 10 minutes on one thing, but this is not the bulk of the lesson, and higher focus activities are balanced with lower focus activities like playing known repertoire, games, and off-bench activities.
Longer lessons and fewer students limits teacher burnout
I spent the better part of a decade of my teaching career teaching almost exclusively thirty minute lessons. This meant that for me to have a full afternoon of teaching, I would need to have 6 to 8 students in one day, back to back. This meant that I had less time to really get to know the students and their families, and I had to teach 40-50 students per week. This led to burnout and meant that I wasn’t really able to give each student my best self. Longer lessons means I get to spend more time with fewer students, which is better for me, and in turn, better for the students.