Simpedia

Neil Moore

Here is my experience in a nutshell, and it is an easy nut to crack, but only if certain conditions prevail. Unless you are in a position whereby you are able to advertise regularly, and the cumulative effect of the advertising generates at least 10 to 15 new students each and every month, then creating a mostly larger, Shared Lesson environment requires a different strategy – one whereby you ‘evolve’ the larger numbers, as compared to trying to ‘create’ them as a starting place.

In other words, just proceed with assembling your 2s, 3s, and 4s etc., and let them get underway, moving as you usually would, through the curriculum. As each week goes by, you introduce and develop a particular dialog, one where you need to be continually talking to the students and parents about how the learning environment with Simply Music needs to be maintained in a fairly ‘liquid state’ – one that can change shape & size, and dimensions & dynamics, whenever necessary. Talk about how this can and needs to occur whenever it is in everybody’s best interest to do so.

One of the ways I would manage this at a practical level, was by teaching a smaller Shared Lesson, but as we were working on any given piece of music, I would talk to them about how we might approach the piece a little differently were we to be in a larger lesson of 8 or 10 students. Conversely, in my larger Shared Lessons, I might talk about how we would learn some particular piece quite differently, perhaps spending more time at the keyboard or being in mentor-groups etc., if there were only 3 or 4 of us working together.

The point to be made is that in helping to manage the Shared Lesson environment, (and a Shared Lesson is any lesson, of any size that has more than one student), you need to continually talk to the students and parents about the fact that the class structure is always subject to change, depending on what is needed.

The question (or concern) that most commonly arises regarding this, is about the impact and difficulty that the proposed ‘changing-scenario’ or ‘liquid approach’ has, with regard to scheduling.

It is a valid and viable question, but as always, the student’s willingness to adapt to your requirements becomes increasingly more co-operative, the more time they spend with you, the more they get to know and like you, and the more they experience success (not the more fun they have, but the more success they experience!). As and when this develops, and having had this happen over an extended period of time, when all the while you have been talking about the need/possibility/likelihood of the class-structure needing to change, the students’ claim over their physical territory is disrupted, and they don’t get as attached or want to ‘own’ their particular class to the same degree.

So how this affects you Mary, is that over a period of a month or two, you will be on the look out, and you will notice that there are two Shared Lessons that are moving at a comparable pace. I would suggest you take the opportunity to evolve those two Shared Lessons into one, and create a larger Shared Lesson. It is also true that this approach takes time to orchestrate and implement, but once you are underway with it, and as you develop a referral strategy that eventually provides you with that constant stream of new inquiries, or you invest in a really successful ad campaign (like the Forum ad that Kevin Meyer posted earlier this week, that always generates 30 or 40 calls for him), I wouldn’t recommend doing it any other way.

In adopting the approach as I’ve suggested, you’ll learn to crack the shell, but preserve the nut by doing it this way, and you’ll be under a lot less pressure.