This is the second in a three-part series. In it, we explore how to build a studio environment inspired by locker room design.
It was written by my good friend and colleague, Christina Whitlock, NCTM. I asked her to write this series for you since, of all the conference sessions I attended last year, it was the one that impacted me the most.
If you missed the first posts in this series, I would recommend reading it first.
In part 1, we looked at a few ways to incorporate a sense of interdependence in your studio. Today’s post is going to focus on your studio environment or, in keeping with the theme of this series, your Studio “Locker Room!”
I realize we all have varying degrees of control over the physical space we teach in, but I hope this post will inspire you to seek out similar applications that work for you.
Creating Studio Legacy – Tradition
Let’s consider this picture of the Hofstra Ladies’ Lacrosse Team locker room.
The first thing I notice is the statement, “Tradition Never Graduates.” Friends, we all know, sports are ALL about legacy! Why should your studio be any different?
The phrase varsity musician’s playbook likely stopped you in your tracks as it did me – especially if you’re someone who has ever said: Once my piano students hit middle school, I often lose them to sports.
At every conference I attend, while there are many excellent sessions, there are always one or two whose message sticks with me for good. At this past MTNA Conference (2016 San Antonio), my “sticky” session was by far:
The Varsity Musician’s Playbook: Commitment Building Strategies from Team Sports to the Studio.
Bam! Wow, the title hooked me. As someone who enjoys the business side of running my piano studio – this was my type of session.
I have a fever, a fever that never breaks. It’s a sickness, really.
It’s called organizational fever; more specifically to this post-file fever – and I don’t know how to stop it! Being organized is fuel to my body. It gives me clarity and peace of mind.
My studio gets organized and reorganized every few months and rearranged to some degree once to twice a year. I’m getting to the point where I’ve nearly perfected the arrangement, but rearranging and organizing are like a breath of fresh air. I’m a better teacher when everything is in its place. I have my moments – we all do – but I strive to keep my studio and workspace tidy for my and my students’ sake!
This post will share how I organize my (physical) student files.
First, a quick note on what inspired me to improve my organization even more.
Getting Things Done
Since reading the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen, I have been working to streamline my work. Some of the topics he covers include cleaning up the space you work in, setting up the right tools, corralling your “stuff,” and keeping things fresh and functional.
One of the first things I did was purchase a label maker. After several months of using it, I wondered how I’ve gotten by as a supposedly “organized” person without a label maker my whole life. I’ve been label-making like crazy!
Student Files
My file drawer is one place where my label maker has been put to work. I love 4-drawer lateral files. All my student files are kept in one drawer. Every student gets a hanging folder. Monday students’ names are labeled, and the label is situated in the slot clear to the left. Tuesday students are in the second space, Wednesday students are in the third space, and I think you get the idea. I love seeing the files laid out this way!
(In case you’re wondering, I used the app “Blur it” to blur out the last names in this photo.)
After hearing me share how I built my studio to 45 students in less than two years, a colleague recently sent me a message on Facebook inquiring about one of the specific tactics I mentioned,, which was marketing to music teachers in the schools.
I thought her questions were ones that many of you might enjoy hearing my answers to but first here was her inquiry:
I’ve heard you mention before that you had good luck meeting with school music teachers, letting them know about your services and asking them to refer students to you.
How did you find out which teachers to contact?
Did you call or email?
Did you meet with them in person?
What did you say to make them more likely to agree to the meeting, and what things did you bring up during the meeting?
One of the many marketing tactics I took in the first two years I was open for business included contacting and meeting all the school teachers in the county and surrounding counties in person.
Psst…there’s a freebie at the end to help you organize your new marketing strategy, so stick with me!
Why This is So Important
Who is it that parents go to when they look for lessons? They ask the kid’s music teacher.You should know who they are and what they look like, so if you see them around town, especially in a small town, you can at least put a face with a name.
Building rapport with school music teachers is building your referral network.
Since I keep detailed records of every inquiry, conversation, and contact I have with potential students, I can announce for a fact that 6% of my total inquiries thus far have come from the school music teachers. This includes those who only inquired as well as those who ultimately registered. Even better, 8.7% of my total registrations have come from this marketing effort – nearly one in eleven.
One of my biggest goals and projects for this summer was to develop my studio website. I am proud to say I designed and did all the work myself on WordPress.
I have a lot I want to share with you today about my site including why I waited until 5 years into my business to do it.
This post is NOT a tutorial on what your site needs because, good grief, there are already plenty of wonderful posts out there for piano teachers on what elements are needed for a good studio site. I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel!
What I am going to give you are the best resources I’ve found and used for inspiration to guide me through the planning and design of the site.
Do you give out awards to your students for various achievements from the past year?
Would you like to do more awards but aren’t really sure what to do besides recognizing student achievements in festivals and competitions?
Do you struggle to implement or track something like this with any kind of consistency?
This post is going to look at a few types of awards that can be integrated into your studio’s awards program, as well as how to track everything by creating a simple “policies and procedures manual” of your own.
Types of Awards
There are a few different types of awards I give annually at the recital.
Awards don’t always have to be about celebrating achievements; they can also serve as a time to celebrate a student’s ongoing commitment to music study, which is why I love MTNA’s Music Study Award.
Please note that you have to be a member of MTNA to have access to this award.
They have a free certificate available for download signed by the current MTNA President and the Executive Director and C.E.O.
The PDF is editable so you can easily type in your student’s name and print it.
Don’t worry, it doesn’t print the purple color on your forms!
For the first few years, I printed them on heavy white cardstock but recently have been using heavy certificate paper so they look a little nicer.
Important points to note:
It can be a bit tricky to find these awards on the MTNA website, so I’ve included a screenshot (updated as of 4/2021). You will need to be logged in using your member information in order to access these pages.
[Click on the photo to enlarge]
If you are using a certificate paper that has a large border on it, you will need to scale down the print area. Here’s a 2-minute tutorial to show you how.
Event Participation
Any students who participated in events outside the studio throughout the year are given their ribbons and certificates at the recital.
For example, if I have any students participate in our state’s Achievement in Music Festival in March, they are given their certificate and medal on the day of the event, but the theory ribbon is distributed to teachers after the event.
It’s nice to have something physical to hand to students when recognizing their participation in the event during the recital award time.
One-Minute Club
Each year all students are required to participate in the One-Minute Club Note-Naming Challenge. The winner of each level is given a $5 gift card to Walmart and the overall winner (the fastest time for level 5) is given a $15 gift card. These are all announced at the recital.
Other Awards
A couple of other programs I’ve used in the past that are good to include in your end-of-year awards time:
The Music Achievement Award Program is another one offered to members of MTNA and can be found in the same area of the Members Only site as the Music Study Award shown above.
Students have to complete several outside musical tasks such as writing a report on a composer, composing pieces, and more. They have a huge array of things to choose from and MTNA has an implementation pack to help you get started.
Students who completed this program received a small plaque at the recital that says “Music Achievement Award,” (purchased from Music in Motion). I also took those students to a professional performances such as a concert with the Philharmonic. Due to the expense of the awards that I give for this program, I do charge a small fee for students who enroll.
I offered this (optional) opportunity to my students for several years but in my effort to reduce activities and simplify, have not offered it in a while.
Design A Policies And Procedures Manual
Once you determine the types of awards you want to incorporate, set aside some time to formally write up the program (for your own reference) so it’s concrete and consistent from year to year.
Here are several items to consider including in the manual:
1 – A list of the awards you give annually including any requirements.
Here’s mine as an example:
MTNA Music Study Award (awarded for total years in piano lessons) Participation Award (less than 25 lessons)
Year 1 – Certificate (25 lessons minimum)* Year 2 – Certificate + Lapel Pin Year 3 – Certificate Year 4 – Certificate + Lapel Pin Year 5 – Certificate Year 6 – Certificate + 5” Trophy Year 7 – Certificate Year 8 – Certificate + 7” Trophy + Legacy Inductee** Year 9 – Certificate Year 10 – Certificate + 11 ½” Trophy
*If preschool students participate in recital they receive a participation award and/or the certificate from Wunderkeys for completion.
**Students who study at Studio 88 for 8 years will be given the legacy award and their names placed on a plaque in the studio.
2 – Links to the exact item(s) that you purchase for each award.
For consistency, give the same awards every year. This is also a way to build excitement for students. Imagine a 2-year student seeing a student who has been studying for 6 or 8 years receive a large trophy.
I recently witnessed a 5-year student commenting to another student that they’re staying in lessons at least until they receive the “Legacy Award” (8 years) if not longer (see below for details on the legacy award).
Here’s what mine looks like:
3 – Notes and reminders regarding engraving or anything else you may want to remember from year to year.
It was important to me that the wording and formatting of my engraving were the same from year to year so I keep a few notes regarding those kinds of details.
For example, do have the names engraved in all caps or just uppercase the first letter? Do you put the year the award was received on the plaque or trophy or X number of years of study, or a date such as 2015-2020, etc.?
4 – A list of students by name and their years of study.
Keeping this list from year to year will be a big time saver. Each year I simply copy and paste the listing onto a fresh sheet, shift everyone’s names down a year, and remove those who are no longer students. This process takes about 10 minutes!
If I have any transfer students who will be receiving an award for the first time in my studio, I make sure I confirm with the parents exactly how long they took lessons prior to coming to me and ensure the parent is in agreement with the years of study I will be awarding their student.
Awards
4/21/202 – To see more specifics on the trophies I give as well as a list of my awards updates, check out this post:
3/31/2021 – If you’re just now starting an awards program, do you wonder if you should play “catch up?”
Right on the tail of my lost-a-student-out-of-the-blue email, the very next day, I received possibly one of the best compliments you could hope to hear from a parent who was completely off-cuff.
This mom almost always sits in on lessons and engages with her children’s practice and learning. As I took a step back from the piano to my bookshelf next to her chair to switch out sightreading cards, she said (and I paraphrase):
*Sigh* I just love coming here. If only I could make my life as orderly and structured as you run your lessons. You know exactly what you’re doing when, it’s like boom-boom-boom. It always smells good in here (I diffuse oils), and it’s always neat and clean.”
Wow! Mama, you have no idea how much you made my day. I’ve always wanted my studio to feel like a place of comfort and like home. I take pride in my space, and as I told her, it takes work and planning for my lessons to run smoothly.
This makes me smile again as I sometimes catch this working mama with her eyes closed in my black leather chair, taking a quick shut-eye or simply enjoying the music-making happening with her children. She’s there to say “good job” when they play especially well for me and to know exactly what’s expected that week.
What most people need, then, is a place of community that has purpose, order and meaning… A place in which being human is a prerequisite, but acting human is essential.
A place where the generally disorganized thinking that pervades our culture becomes organized and clearly focused on a specific worthwhile result.
A place where discipline and will become prized for what they are: the backbone of enterprise of action, of being what you are intentionally instead of accidentally.
A place that replaces the home most of us have lost.
That’s what a business can do; it can create a Game Worth Playing.
It can become that place of community.
It can become that place where words such as integrity, intention, commitment, vision, and excellence can be used as action steps in the process of producing a worthwhile result.
What kind of result?
Giving your customer a sense that your business is a special place, created by special people, doing what they do in the best possible way.
A few weeks ago, in preparation for my first national conference presentation, I traveled to Butler University in Indianapolis to give a trial run of my session to their MTNA Collegiate Chapter.
Local teachers were invited, and several attended. It went really well, and in the end, as usual, I offered time for questions. Although the session was 100% about marketing, the questions that emerged had nothing to do with marketing but with studio policies.
How do I handle students who quit out of the blue? Do I make families sign a contract? How do I word my policy and enforce it?
I was happy to answer the questions, but they took me by surprise at first since I had just gotten done talking about marketing for 60 minutes.
Later that afternoon it dawned on me that it really wasn’t surprising at all. Why? Studio policy will forever be an issue with independent teachers, and when we talk to someone or see someone who has been successful, we want to pick their brains for the toughest issues we face.
That is why I am opening my dirty laundry today and sharing a complete email exchange with a studio family that happened recently.
Rather than giving you a general idea of what to say in this situation, I hope sharing the word-for-word exchange will help you see one example of how to handle the email we never like seeing.
Luckily, the exchange was not outrageous or nasty. Overall, it was pretty cordial and well-handled, in my opinion. This is just a little dose of reality.
More than anything, I want this blog to be real. I don’t want just to show you the perfect sides of my job, but the hard parts as well.
Around 11:45 today, I received a call from the mother of my 1:00 student. She wanted to check with me as “M” had been complaining of a sore throat and said she was feeling a little achy. Although she didn’t have a temperature or seem sick otherwise, the mother wanted to see what I wanted to do. Thank you! I was grateful to her for being considerate of my health. She knew I would be traveling for the next week and wanted to be especially cautious.
At first, I suggested I would do a video lesson for her; I have been trying this for the first time this year and have had good feedback from parents. (I still need to figure out a better way to record videos other than with my iPhone but that’s another conversation). It then dawned on me that I had not yet replenished my Piano Adventures 3A studio copy. It makes it hard to do a video lesson without the music they are working on!
Then I remembered I updated my policy this year to read:
Students who are ill should not come to piano lessons. I reserve the right to send a student home if they arrive sick. If students are only mildly ill, please contact me and we can do a FaceTime lesson or I can record a short video assignment for them during their regularly schedule lesson time.
I had yet to try FaceTime with a student so we decided to go for it and I’m so glad we did – we all agreed it was a great success! The mom held the phone and was able to maneuver around as I needed. We were able to cover all the material we normally do during her 45-minute lesson. Mom dropped by the studio about 30 minutes later on her way to Walmart to pick up new sight-reading cards, a fresh assignment sheet and a few other things.
My baby, my life, my dream, my passion, oh yeah, it’s also my place of work!
I GET to come here every day.
I remember my undergrad professors telling us repeatedly that being in this profession is amazing because we don’t just get to do a job; we get to “do” our art, which happens to be our profession.
by Michel E. Gerber, which wrapped up her feelings spot on:
