Best Practices for Teaching Kids at Lessonface

Friday, July 21st 2023

Our 2023 TeacherFest webinar on Best Practices for Teaching Kids at Lessonface was hosted by expert instructors Leah Hinton (voice, piano), Brad Ward (guitar, Loog guitar, ukulele, bass), and Gina Sobel (guitar, Loog guitar, ukulele, flute, saxophone, songwriting, piano, voice).

Here’s a recap of the information shared and topics discussed in the session.

Required technology and equipment for teachers

Leah Hinton recommends that teachers use a laptop or any device with a larger screen. Using two webcams when teaching keyboard is usually necessary. Free OBS software makes it easy to switch camera views.

Optional extras for teachers

Using a USB mic can help with sound quality.
Brad uses Guitar Pro for written notation and Soundslice so students can listen to the written music.
Musescore, Notion, and Noteflight are other options for writing notation and tab.

How to keep kids engaged during lessons, and how to encourage practice between lessons

Gina teaches primarily from songs. Spotify or Youtube playlists are great resources for older kids. Younger kids enjoy learning to pick out popular songs (ie, Mary Had a Little Lamb) by ear.
She also advocates not staying with a single song for too long. There’s no rule that says you must perfect one song before moving on, it’s more important to have fun learning fresh material.
Leah likes to adapt to the needs of the moment, which sometimes means abandoning a lesson plan and pursuing an activity that gets the student excited to play music (writing a song, etc.)
Brad Ward likes to use a Spin the Wheel game to teach chord shapes and other guitar concepts.
Leah recommends www.liveworksheets.com to find fun music topics for live question and answer quizzes.

Required technology and equipment for students

Gina recommends keeping things simple, but adjusting Zoom settings and enabling Original Sound is critical for some students. She uses screenshots to demonstrate correct settings.
Gina emphasizes the importance of good posture and technique and explains why it's important for long-term health. However, she doesn't obsess over being able to have a perfect view, as it's not always possible. She'll remind students to lift up their guitar neck when it's necessary to see the student's hands, but in other cases will use her ear to correct a chord or note.
Brad recommends connecting to internet by ethernet cable any time wifi is unreliable.

Parental involvement and communication

Gina says that the amount of parental involvement needed completely depends on the kid. Some young students need the parent involved, and others focus better when they’re encouraged to take their lesson independently.
Leah prefers having parents involved with very young students, and encourages parents to step away once the child matures.
Brad likes parents to be present for at least the first lesson or two. After that, he keeps in touch with parents by message as necessary.
Attendee and voice teacher Rob talks about teaching kids to sing in a hard core, screaming voice in a correct, healthy way.

Challenges encountered as teachers

One challenge Gina has encountered is communication on practice assignments. She now creates a google drive folder for each student to keep track of lesson notes and documents.
Lessonface Beta’s new Contacts session solves this issue in a similar way and enables students and teachers to view all shared lesson notes, videos, and materials.
Getting young kids to practice can be tricky, as well as communicating to parents that they need to enforce practice time. Teachers suggest practicing in short sessions (5 minutes), linking practice to another part of their routine, and keeping your instrument out rather than storing it in its case.

Gina Sobel is a touring and recording multi-instrumentalist, and loves to share her expertise on these instruments with students of all levels and ages. Brad Ward is a guitarist and bass player popular for his enthusiastic teaching methods for playing and creating music. Leah Hinton sings jazz, soul, R&B, and more and has been teaching piano and voice for nearly 10 years.