Setting Up For Success

The blog today is more of a thinking questions that anything else.  How do you help your students mentally prepare for a successful lesson?  So many of my students come into lessons with their minds just buzzing from their day.  The level of distraction is pretty crazy.  We spend the first few pieces just trying to get into the correct frame of mind to remember what we practiced and to slow down. 

For the next few weeks, I am going to ask my students to take 1 minute and close their eyes and try and clear their minds of any distractions.  Just take deep breaths and get into a piano frame of mind.  Think about how they practiced and what they want to remember.  My hope is that it will we will be able to focus better and have a more disciplined lesson.

For myself, I plan on taking 5 minutes before I begin teaching to go through the same process.  So often teachers just run straight into a lesson with no breathing room.  It sometimes causes our daily stress to bleed over into our teaching manner.  I want to try to minimize this impact.

So how do you help your students focus?

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