Episode Summary
Are you curious about travel teaching? In this episode, piano teacher and composer Chrissy Ricker shares her experiences as a traveling piano teacher: the advantages, disadvantages, and lessons learned from over a decade of teaching piano in students’ homes.
Guest Host
Chrissy Ricker, NCTM, is a pianist, composer, and arranger from North Carolina. She enjoys sharing her ideas with other piano teachers and writing motivating music for pianists of all ages. Learn more about Chrissy at her website, chrissyricker.com.
Items Mentioned in this Episode
Build a Lending Library of Piano-Themed Children’s Books
Listening Playlists to Accompany Music-Themed Children’s Books
Music-Themed Comic Books for Your Music Studio Lending Library
Episode Highlights
Advantages of travel teaching
- Set yourself apart
- You can run a studio without renting space and keep it separate from your home.
- You get to see in-person your student’s piano and the space where they practice.
Disadvantages
- The traveling
- You’ll never be able to see as many students in a day as you can in a central location (consider your scheduling and pricing considering this).
- You don’t have the same control over the teaching environment as you do in your own studio.
Tips / Lessons Learned
- It’s a premium service – price it so
- Group your students by location
- Make sure you have a well-worded police sheet
Transcript
Amy: Hey there, teacher friends. I’m Amy, the regular host of this podcast. While I’m checking in to say hello, when this episode drops, I’ll be busy hosting the second and final Piano Pantry Retreat for the summer of 2023. It’s been so much fun holding out on the suspense of who the guest hosts scattered throughout the year are.
Today, you’ll get to hear the voice of someone who you usually just hear your students playing music from, and that’s the fabulous composer Chrissy Ricker. If you would like to check out some of the other guest hosts from this year thus far, you’ll hear from Abigail Prophet in episode 58, talking about motivating students with ADD and ADHD.
Melody Payne in episode 62 on how to improve your piano teaching business in four easy steps. And Samantha Coates in episode 66 on how to not give makeup lessons. While we know Chrissy as a composer, she also has a lot of experience as a former travel piano teacher. A topic I don’t have any experience in, and one that those in the trenches probably don’t feel like they hear enough advice about.
Let’s express our many thanks to Chrissy for sharing with us today. To keep things real, she shares three advantages. Three disadvantages, and three tips or lessons learned. Even if you don’t travel teach yourself, hearing from and understanding the variety of teaching formats and options in our profession is important to being a well versed and knowledgeable teacher.
Enjoy!
Have you ever thought about building a lending library of piano or music-themed children’s books in your studio? Building a lending library not only provides another resource for educating students and families but adds value to your studio package as a whole. Over the past 12 years, I’ve been building my own library of around 2 dozen books and shared some of my favorites in a post on the Piano Pantry blog.
To boost the experience even further, I’ve created listening lists on Spotify to accompany some of the books. Free printable bookmarks with QR codes are available for download that you can slip into your own copies to send home with families so they can read and listen. Visit the show notes for details.
Chrissy: Hi everyone. I am honored to be here today as a guest host for the Piano Pantry Podcast. When Amy first invited me to be a guest host, I started brainstorming ideas for topics that I wanted to talk about with all of you. And it really made me reflect on all of the different types of teaching experiences I have had over my 25 plus years as a piano teacher.
I have taught in music schools, both large and small. I’ve taught in my home piano studio. I have taught online lessons. And for around 12 years, I was a traveling piano teacher. And that’s the experience that I wanted to share with all of you today. I often see questions from teachers who ask, I have a family who wants me to come to their home for lessons.
How much should I charge? How is that going to work? So hopefully, By me sharing my experiences with you, it’ll give you a better idea of what being a traveling piano teacher is like and whether it’s the right fit for you and your studio. So let me give you a little backstory as to how I became a traveling piano teacher because it’s not something I ever set out to do.
Back in 2006, my husband and I built the home where we now live. I was so excited when we were building this home because it was going to have a dedicated music room where I could offer piano lessons. This was going to be the first time I ever had my own studio that I didn’t have to share with any other piano teachers.
So we moved in and right away I started advertising for new studios. students. I put the word out to all of my piano teacher friends to ask for referrals. I got on all of the online music teacher directories I could find. I put a sign in our front yard. I even put an ad in the newspaper. Now this was back in 2006 when people still read newspapers.
So I did all of that, and after a year, I had exactly seven students. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I was so discouraged. And what I kept hearing over and over from parents who brought their children out to do trial lessons with me is that I was too far away for them to drive. So the issue was that I live about 15 minutes away from the two closest towns where most of my piano students were coming from.
Now, 15 minutes might not sound like a lot, but the area where I live also has a ton of really good piano teachers. And so, 15 minutes is a deal breaker for a parent who’s interviewing four or five different teachers and wants to find a teacher as close as possible to where they live. So one day I had a mom and two kids in my studio to do a trial lesson.
These were great kids. They had already had a little bit of piano experience. At the end of the lesson, the mom looked at me and once again said, We really like you, but you’re too far for us to drive every week. How would you feel about coming to our home for piano lessons? And I thought, Huh. So up until this point, I had been so focused on building the studio in my home, I had never even considered driving to other people’s homes for lessons.
So I told the mom, let me think about that. And I thought about it for about a week and I gave her a call and said, I think I’d like to give this a try, but I would need more than just two students to make it work for me. And she said, no problem. There’s a lot of kids in this neighborhood. I’m sure some of my neighbors want piano lessons for their kids.
Let me ask around and see what I can do. And within a week, I had seven students. scheduled in this one neighborhood. So, to basically double my studio in the course of a week was amazing. And that is how I fell into being a traveling piano teacher. There were a lot of things I wish I had known and a lot of things I wish I had thought about before I started travel teaching.
So, I want to share with you what I very quickly found were the advantages and disadvantages of being a traveling piano teacher. The first advantage is this can be a great way to set yourself apart from other piano teachers. If you live in an area with a lot of other great teachers like I do, this might be a service that you can provide that would be different, that would help attract students to your studio and help you build your studio more quickly.
The second advantage is being a travel teacher is a way that you can run your own studio. Even if you can’t teach out of your home, or if you don’t want to teach out of your home, I know sometimes it’s nice to have that separation between your work life and your home life. So, this is a way that you can run your own studio without renting studio space, which can be huge for a lot of teachers.
And then the third advantage, this is something I never even considered until I started travel teaching. When you’re a travel teacher, you get to see in person your student’s piano and the space that they have for practicing at home. I can’t tell you how many times I went into a home and I was able to tell the parent, I think your piano needs to be tuned.
Here’s a tuner that I would recommend. Or, this bench is a little bit too low. I think we need to find a way to raise this up a little bit. Or, we’re having a lot of trouble seeing the music. Maybe you could get a piano lamp to go over the piano. These are things that I would never have known.
If the students were coming to me for lessons, but because I was coming to them and seeing their setup in person, I was able to offer suggestions to the parents that made practicing a lot easier for this student in the long run. So now let’s talk a little bit about some of the disadvantages of being a traveling teacher.
The first disadvantage is of course, The traveling. You have all of the hassles that come with being in your car for hours every day. So being stuck in traffic, driving in bad weather, in the heat, in the cold, in the snow, in the rain. The wear and tear on your car, paying for gas. All of those inconveniences come with the territory when you’re a traveling piano teacher.
The second big disadvantage is that you’ll never be able to see as many students in a day of travel teaching as you’d be able to see when you’re teaching in a centralized location. So you just have to go into it setting your scheduling and your pricing, which we’ll talk a little bit more about in a minute.
With the understanding that you’re never going to see as many students as a travel teacher as you would be able to see in a studio. The third disadvantage of being a traveling teacher is that you don’t have the same control over the teaching environment as you would have if you were teaching in a studio.
I know when we’re in our own studios, we usually have all of our pencils, our stickers, our extra sheet music, our favorite teaching materials right at our fingertips. When you’re a traveling teacher, if you want to have those at your fingertips, you have to find a way to take those with you, which can be really inconvenient sometimes.
And then you’ll also encounter all kinds of issues that you would never encounter in a professional studio setting. So I’ve had everything from really friendly cats and dogs that love to sit in my lap while I’m teaching, to friends who just love to ring the doorbell when they know that their friend’s having a piano lesson, to little brothers who like to run around the house in their birthday suit.
Probably the funniest situation I remember from my years of travel teaching, I had one neighborhood that I went to on Friday afternoons, and without fail, it seemed like every Friday that I was in this neighborhood, the ice cream truck would come through. Now imagine teaching a six year old boy, now we all know how difficult that can be, keeping his attention on the piano lesson.
Now imagine teaching a six-year-old boy who hears the ice cream truck outside. It’s something I can laugh about now, but at the time, it was really frustrating, and it’s the type of situation that you would never have in a professional studio setting. So you have to really think about whether those types of things are things that you can roll with as a teacher or if those are things that would be deal breakers for you.
So there are a lot of lessons I learned in my years of travel teaching, a lot of things that I wish I had known when I was starting out. So I want to share with you some tips that I feel might help you if you’re thinking of being a traveling teacher. The first lesson I learned is that travel teaching is a premium service.
You have to think of it as a premium service, and you have to price it as a premium service. I think this is where a lot of teachers try travel teaching and then decide that it’s not working for them. Because they’re not charging enough to cover their travel expenses and their time and all of those inconveniences that we talked about earlier.
What I always found personally is that I needed to charge 15 to 20 more per lesson. to the students that I travel taught in order to make an equivalent amount to what I would make teaching at home. So do your research, look at not only what other teachers in your area are charging for piano lessons, but also what the going rate is for gymnastics, for ballet, for sports. Take all of those things into consideration. Look at what you would need to charge to make travel teaching financially feasible for you and see if it’s something that would be a good fit for the area where you live. Because if it’s not something that’s going to be financially feasible in the area where you live, it’s better to know that now than to have a schedule full of travel students and then a year from now see that you’re not making enough money to cover your gas and your travel time.
The second lesson I learned is to group your students. I learned really early on that travel teaching never works if you’re driving 15 minutes to the first house, and then 15 minutes to the second house, and then 20 minutes to the third house. You’ll just never be able to see enough students in a single day to make it worth your time.
What I found worked well for me is to pick one location that I would travel to on a single day and then to put the word out to the parents. Hey, I’m in your neighborhood on Tuesdays, and I’d love to have a few more students. Would you be willing to post on your community Facebook page? Would you be willing to post on your community next-door app?
Could you hang this flyer at your community pool? And I found that my students parents were always more than happy to put the word out and to help me get more students in their neighborhood when I had openings in my schedule. And then the third lesson I learned is to make sure you have a well-worded policy sheet.
A policy sheet can go a long way to help mitigate some of those issues that I mentioned earlier. So for example, what happens if you show up to a student’s house and they’re not there? That happens more often than you would think. What happens if you get stuck in traffic and you’re 15 minutes late? What happens if the student wants a makeup lesson?
I think a lot of us can be flexible on makeup lessons when we’re teaching in our own studio. But if you’re traveling 20 minutes to get to a student, it’s probably not practical to go out one extra time to make up one lesson. So you want to make sure in your policy sheet you talk about how you will handle those issues.
So that everyone’s on the same page before lessons begin. And this is also a great place to put what your expectations are for the piano lesson environment. So things like make sure a student is at the piano and ready to go right at their lesson time. Make sure that the lesson area is as free as possible from distractions.
These are things that can help parents who probably haven’t had lessons in their home before to be prepared to know what the lesson experience is going to be like. So I hope hearing about my adventures in travel teaching has been helpful for you. If nothing else, I hope it’s given you a little bit of entertainment today.
And in closing, I just want to say I have so many fond memories of the students that I travel taught. It really is a special kind of relationship that you develop with a family when you come into their home every week, and you get to know not only the student but their parents, their siblings, their pets. It can be a wonderful experience, and it’s something I would definitely encourage you to consider for your studio.
Amy: Today’s tiny tip is to take some time to read the series of mini-essays from the creators of the Piano Safari Method. Whether or not you even use the method, in my early days of teaching especially, I learned a lot and was very inspired by the ideas shared in this set of 29 essays. They cover everything from how to teach a piece by rote, to tips for teaching sight reading, leveling repertoire, teaching technique to beginners, and more.
Visit the show notes for the direct link, or navigate to pianosafari.com and find them layered in the menu. By the way, this is not a paid ad. Just a tiny tip from me to you before you go: don’t forget to hit that subscribe button so new episodes of this podcast will download to your device automatically.
Thanks for being here today.
