So what do we do about that Missed Lesson?
Our options?
- Give a Live Makeup every time? Sometimes?
- Give a Workshop, Group Lesson or Schedule an Extra Week as a makeup?
- Create a Swap List
- Simply give nothing?
In the post The Missed Lesson we detailed these options.
Let?s look at the facts.
Lesson attendance promotes progress. Progress promotes continued interest. Interest is what drives retention. Students that do not attend lessons, do not stay in lessons. The weekly lesson check-in is the key.
Our goal should be to promote regular attendance above all else.
Once a week, every week. This is simply good education. A student needs time to process, but too much time leads to confusion and detachment. Missing weeks and catching up by scheduling hour lessons or multiple lessons within the space of a week is a poor substitute for the regular schedule of week to week. So that?s what we need to be asking of our students and their families. Come every week. If you miss, you miss. No live makeup. It?s not an appropriate solution.
But students will miss. Life happens. So we need a makeup solution that respects the process of good education, that weekly student/teacher check-in.
LessonMate is that solution. That and a whole lot more. LessonMate is at its core a teaching tool. It?s software designed to help the music teacher do every great thing they do, just made easier.
Within LessonMate you can write text, record video and audio, upload PDFs and MP3s, include photos and embed YouTube videos, all directly into the student?s own online LessonMate journal. All of this great information can then be easily saved with a ?click? inside your very own Teacher Library to be used again and again, saved into the cloud to be accessed anywhere, anytime.
Now, when a student cannot make a lesson, during that scheduled lesson time you create a makeup using LessonMate and all its many features. Here is an ebook about what a LessonMate makeup looks like.
LessonMate is not only the best way for teachers to share lesson information with their students and provide an honest makeup solution that works for everyone, but it fundamentally changes the way teachers collect, save and organize all the wonderful stuff that makes them unique as an educator.
What we?re trying to accomplish here at LessonMate is to not only enable teachers but to embolden them. Having all your teaching materials stored in the cloud, available at any time, then having a simple, intuitive way to share those materials with any student is a small revelation that just might change the way you teach.
?I use LessonMate frequently as an alternative to missed lessons. It?s a win-win situation. My students still receive new material each week and I give fewer credits. My students love having the ability to pause the videos and view their lesson notes multiple times. I highly recommend LessonMate to music teachers!? Tina Booth ? piano teacher
Ryan Cullen, owner of Louisiana Academy of Performing Arts says ?We are loving the modern means of teacher-student-parent communication that LessonMate provides. So far we?ve created over 1300 lessons with it and we routinely get compliments from everyone about how nice it is to be able to have every lesson saved in digital format. Support has also been great and they are always working on new features. And no more make-ups! 2 thumbs up!?
