Sooner or later a parent catches you in the doorway, car keys already in hand, and asks whether their child is getting any better.
The answer is, of course, yes. The hard part is naming one thing, on the spot, that would actually mean something to them, and I have fumbled that more times than I would like to admit.
What they are actually asking. At 6:40 on a Thursday the question can land like an audit, but it is a fair one. They want to know whether this is worth the money and the Tuesday afternoons. The trouble is that a parent who does not read music has exactly one available measure of progress, and it is whether the piece sounds like a song. That is the entire instrument panel. So a student can spend a whole term getting better at reading, at counting, at keeping her eyes off her hands, at recovering from a wrong note without starting over, and the parent in the next room hears roughly what they heard in September.
We know that was a good term. They have no way of knowing. So whose job is it to tell them?
I stopped trying to answer this at the door, and started answering it three times a year, in writing, before anyone has to ask.
- The September note, which sets the measure. This is the one most of us skip, and it does the most work. You are telling the parent what to listen for before the term starts, so that in November they are measuring the right thing:
This fall I’m focusing on steady reading and keeping the beat going with Ellie. You’ll hear a lot of short pieces rather than one big one, and that’s on purpose. What I’d love you to listen for is whether she can keep going after a wrong note instead of starting over.
- The mid-term note, which shows change instead of activity. Most of us write activity. “We worked on scales and started two new pieces.” It is true, and it tells a parent nothing, because they cannot judge whether that is a lot or a little. Write the change instead:
In September, Ellie stopped and reset every time her hand had to move to a new position. Last week she played through the whole middle section without stopping once.
A parent can picture that. They can even go and listen for it.
- The pre-recital note, which connects it to what they will hear. Tell them what they are about to watch and what it cost. “On Saturday you’ll hear a piece that’s about ninety seconds long. In October she couldn’t hold a steady tempo through one page, and this piece is three.” That is the note that gets forwarded to grandparents, and the one that renews for next year.
Write it down on the day. None of this works if you reconstruct nine weeks in one sitting in November. Two sentences after the lesson, while you still remember what happened. Then you are editing instead of remembering, and it takes four minutes instead of the hour you have been dreading since Sunday.
If the student is in a group class, this gets harder rather than easier. “We did a group class this month” tells a parent nothing about their own child, and group parents ask more often, not less, because they see even less of what happened in the room. Whatever you use to keep track, make sure it follows the individual student and not the class.
What finally made this sustainable for me was a one-page link for students. Each family has a single link of their own with everything on it: where their child is in the curriculum, what they’re working on this week, the resources that go with it, and my notes from the lesson. No account to create, no password, nothing to download. I send it once, and I never update it by hand again. Whatever I mark during the lesson is already there when they open it.
I send it by text as often as by email. Plenty of parents never get to the bottom of their inbox, but everybody opens a text, and once they save the link, it’s there in the car, at the kitchen table, and the week before the recital. Nothing gets buried in a binder, nothing goes out of date, and nobody has to ask me what the plan is, or where we’re at this week.
I also keep one page I can forward to a new family that explains, in plain language, how lesson progress actually works and why it does not move in a straight line. Ours is here, and you are welcome to send it to your own families whether or not you ever use our app. The software itself, ClefRoom, is free up to 100 students.
I put the three notes above, with fill-in templates, on the back of the weekly practice sheet I print for each student. The front is one focus for the week, what to practice with a box for each day, somewhere to put the recordings and page numbers, and space for notes from the lesson. It is free here.
Parents are not hard to reach on this. Give them something concrete to look or listen for, and the doorway question changes. They stop asking whether it is working and start telling you what they noticed.
Harrison Lavins is a pianist, teacher, and app developer based in Detroit, Michigan, and a co-founder of ClefRoom, a curriculum platform for music studios. ClefRoom is our newest advertiser here on Music Matters Blog, and we are grateful for their support of the online music education community! If you are interested in finding out more about how you can promote your company, event, or product, just send us an e-mail and we will let you know about our advertising packages.
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