Teaching teens can be a completely different experience from your average 7 year old student. Teenagers are starting to figure out who they are and what they like. This means that they won’t always just play a piece because you gave it to them, and they won’t practice something they don’t think is relevant to their goals.

Their goals could be to play a Beethoven sonata, but they also might be to write their own pop songs, or play in a school band. When teaching teens, you really need to have them on side. Creating a good relationship with your teenage students is so important. If they think piano “isn’t cool” (whatever that means to them) they won’t practice enough, and they just might quit.

Do you ever have trouble with teaching teenage students? Do you find students dropping out when they get to high school? Then you have to listen to today’s podcast, I’m sharing my 5 top tips for teaching teens.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The difference in my approach to teaching teens/adults versus kids
• How to relate piano practice to things in their world
• Why building a rapport with teens is vital
• How to become “the cool teacher” and why you should want to
• How to convince reluctant teens to practice their scales

Items mentioned in this podcast:

• Piano Pronto
• Scales Bootcamp
• Making scales fun with DecideNow
• Best iPad apps for piano teachers
• Teaching video: Student improvising backing tracks for scales
• How to make piano scales fun

Thank you for Tuning In!

There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, and I’m grateful that you’ve chosen mine.

Being a full-time teacher myself, I know how busy teachers are and how much time, effort and passion we put into our students. Sometimes, the last thing we want to do in our time off is listen to more piano teaching stuff! So, well done for using this time for self-improvement.

Whether you’re at the gym, on the bike or in the car, I know that you and your students will get lots out of what you learn in the long run. Just make sure you try out some of the ideas before they get lost in the business of your next lessons.

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What’s your approach to teaching teens?

Do you use any of the methods I talked about today? Is there something else that has worked for you with this age group? Or any part of my approach that you disagree with?