10 Tips for Avoiding Online Teaching Exhaustion
Teaching online can be absolutely exhaustion! Luckily, there are some simple ways to make it more fun, meaningful, and stress free for you.
Here are the 10 tips referred to in this episode:
Get a comfortable chair - forget the bench!
Schedule regular breaks OR don’t schedule more than 4 students in a row
Stretch during the lesson and stand up
Close your eyes and listen to the student play
Turn your computer to night setting to help with eye strain
Talk less and ask more questions
Introduce a sight reading activity in the middle of the lesson
Get your materials ready at the beginning of the day vs. when the lesson begins
Use YouTube videos to reinforce what you’re teaching
Don’t be a perfectionist, focus on progression and growth
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Enjoy the Transcript for This Week!
In today's episode, I'm going to be sharing with you 10 tips for avoiding online teaching exhaustion. Many of you have recently switched to teaching your students online, and no matter your age or your level of tech ability, you've likely felt some major exhaustion in the process. Maybe before Covid-19 you had never taught online lessons. You might be feeling like the technology, and all the steps to upgrade it, has been overwhelming to you. You’ve been trying to incorporate a lot of new ideas and methods for teaching your students online. Maybe you have a lot of beginner students who may or may not be a little bit distracted during your online lessons, and that feels overwhelming to you.
You are likely able to demonstrate in-person and teaching online, and are trying to figure out how to demonstrate. Now in an online setting, no matter what it is, I hope to be able to offer some positive insight for you today. I've been teaching online for several years and I know that the transition is not easy at all. I applaud you for making this transition, especially if it was something that you
were not planning to do. Maybe you never thought that you would teach online. You were comfortable and happy however you were doing lessons before this pandemic. And even though it's a challenge, I’m proud of you. All of the skills that you're learning are only going to benefit you in the future, whether you teach online or in person. So here we go. Let's dive into 10 tips for avoiding exhaustion.
One, get a comfortable chair. You don't have to sit on a piano bench if you're teaching piano. You can get an office chair, something that swivels. You can use it to turn and face your computer for a moment and then turn back to your piano. Whatever you're teaching, get a comfortable chair so that you have a little bit more support for your back throughout the day as your teaching. You could also stand during your lessons. If you need to give yourself a little bit of a break from sitting, or if you don't have a good chair to sit on while you're teaching.
Two, schedule regular breaks, or don't schedule more than four students in a row. You cannot teach 10 or 12 students in a row. It will be really hard to be online all day long without any breaks at all. So I suggest building in those breaks. It’s hard to do that if you have students back to back or 30 minute lessons. As a first step, I would consider doing 40 minute lessons and scheduling them 10 minutes apart. That way, you only have a student every hour on the hour, if possible. I promise it'll be worth it to you, even if you have to spread your lessons out or teach on a day that you wouldn't normally teach on. Having them more spread out is going to enable you time to go get a snack or to call a student if you need to. If you need to reschedule things or work on your business in between, it's just so much better to be able to do that in between lessons. If you are okay with teaching students back to back, then I suggest no more than four in a row. So, for example, if you have 30 minute lessons, you could teach students from 8:00 to 10:00, then have a 30 minute break and start again at 10:30, go from 10:30 to 12:30, have that half-hour break and that'll save you a lot and help you get reorganized for the students you have coming up.
Three, stretch during the lesson and stand up. Something that I do all the time is that I will just turn my video off and stand up. Sometimes I will use a scarf and hold it up to stretch. I wish I could show you, but you can't see me. I'll hold it with both hands, put my arms in the air and use it to stretch out my back. That's something that I learned when I was going to Berkeley from one of my piano professors and a chiropractor there. Whenever I was getting a lot of back pain from practicing so much, I would grab a scarf, or a sweater, or a towel, hold it in the air, and just stretch a little bit. It relieves a lot of that tension in your back. You can do that during your lesson. You can still listen to the student playing their song, reviewing a piece, doing their sight-reading, whatever it is they're doing. You can turn off your video and do whatever you need to do. The student doesn't know and they likely don't care that you need to stretch a little bit during your lesson.
Four, close your eyes and listen to the student play. A lot of teachers are talking about eyestrain with online teaching. It totally makes sense. You are staring at a screen all day long. There's been a lot on the Internet about Zoom exhaustion with everybody on Zoom and video calls and meetings all day long. Something I'd invite you to do is to close your eyes. Just listen. If you don't want your student to know you're closing your eyes, you could turn your video off. But teachers, when your student is playing a piece, they're not looking at you. So it's OK. You can close your eyes and just listen, if you don't mind not seeing their hands for a moment or seeing their posture for a moment, give yourself a little bit of a break from staring at that device. I try to do that once or twice a lesson during an entire song. And in the long run, if you're doing that multiple times throughout the day, that does actually save a lot of that strain that you might get from staring at your screens.
Five, turn your computer tonight, and put on settings to help with eye strain. Another way to do this is to get blue light glasses from Amazon and you can wear those. If you are having that issue with the color of the screen, you can download an app called Flux. That way, it’s set to change the color of my screen to a more orange color around 10:00 p.m. Then when I'm teaching, I just turn it on, and that helps a lot.
Six, talk less and ask more questions. Save your voices, teachers. There's no reason for you to lose your voice over your lessons. Save your voice when you're feeling tension in your throat or when you feel like you just can't talk anymore. Pause, take a drink and ask your student a question. What kind of questions should you be asking? Well, ask questions. If it's at the beginning of the lesson, ask them about their week. Spend some time getting to know them a little bit, ask them which piece was the most challenging for them and why. If they just reviewed a song, ask them to play it again or to play that last line again, or maybe give them some time to memorize a line of the song. Ask them questions about musicality, about dynamics, about key signatures, whatever it is, finding ways to engage them with questions is going to make it so you don't have to talk as much and your student is participating more, which is a huge positive.
Seven, introduce a sight reading activity in the middle of the lesson. Sight reading can be done with any piece of music. One thing that I learned when I was attending Berklee was the power of sight reading. I had a professor who was an amazing sight reader. I have always been fairly good at sight reading, but I can't read everything. I can get by pretty well with a lot of piano music. But when I saw him sight read, it was like he could pull out some classical literature that he hadn't played before and play as though he had learned it and performed it.
So I asked him for some sight reading tips. And what he suggested was to go to the library and get Broadway books and musicals and go through a new Broadway book every day. So I spent an hour a day for several months, I think an entire semester or even like six months going through Broadway books every day. You just turn pages and you're reading new material every single day. And I cannot tell you how much better I got at sight reading in just that short time. Being very persistent about how much I was reading every single day made a huge difference.
Now I am adamant about my students sight reading. So in the middle of our lesson we pull out music that is either their level that they aren't using currently, or we sometimes even use a previous method book from the year before, or a sibling's book or a songbook that they're just not using. We get it out and we read through three songs. They go very slow and I have them just reading new music now. It takes five minutes, but I love it and I'm teaching my students how to do this during the week so that they actually do that every single day of the week as well. So including this in the middle of your lesson allows you a little bit of time to regain your sense of what you want to share with the student that day. If you need to pull out some materials for them, if you need to email something over to the parent or make some quick notes, you can do that while they're doing their sight reading. That way, you're not talking, which is one of the biggest strains or causes of exhaustion.
Eight, get your materials ready at the beginning of the day rather than when the lesson begins. I suggest scheduling 20-30 minutes before your first lesson to open all of your digital music for the entire day. If you don't already have your music organized in Google Drive, you should be doing that. To make it easier, I have a folder with each student's name on it and I can copy the music into that folder so that all of the students' music is just ready to go. I open it up and I have it ready to go. Doing this will also save you that time during their lesson saying, OK, just give me a second while I get your music out. It's just easier to have all of it open and ready to go at the beginning.
Nine, use YouTube videos to reinforce what you're teaching. This is one that so many teachers have been doing lately. I’m going to put in a link to my YouTube Channel. I have more than 600 instructional videos using the Piano Adventures series, and you can use these videos during your lessons to demonstrate if you need to go grab a drink or run to the bathroom. Then you can grab that link and share it through your video calling software. You can share it in the chat and they can click on it and watch it themselves, or you can share your screen. Make sure you're sharing your computer audio so that they can hear the best audio from the video straight to their device. Always check that box to “share computer audio” and let your student watch that video once or twice. I always have the student looking at the music and even holding a pencil and following along while they listen. Then I have them listen a second time, and circle places where they were confused and had questions, and we can talk about it.
And that saves me some time, not having to demonstrate. While I love demonstrating, it's hard to do that all day long throughout every lesson. So you can absolutely use YouTube videos. I will link my YouTube channel and if I don't have the video, then it's likely somebody else on YouTube has recorded it or performed the piece that you're introducing to your students. So take a look. And if it's not on YouTube, then that's something that you could record. You could start recording a library of instructional videos. If there are some supplementary books you really enjoy using, or if you have composed your own pieces, record them and put them up on YouTube, public or unlisted. They don't have to be public. It allows you to have access to them and you can share them during the lesson.
Ten, don't be a perfectionist. Focus on progression and growth. I say this because a lot of the time as teachers, we have an agenda. We know that the student is capable of so much. We see their potential. We know they could work harder. We know they could work faster. We know they could be learning this amazing music. But that's not what it's always about. Is there a time and season for that? Absolutely. If they're preparing for an exam, of course. If you're preparing for a recital, yes. But every single lesson does not have to be a well-run or well-oiled machine. We don't have to do everything perfectly. We can listen to the student and pay attention to their body language. We can see if they're feeling anxious and pull out an app or a theory lesson or some sight reading activities or a composition activity, if we see that the student is not engaged.
If you were trained another way in a very traditional way that worked for you, that's just fine. But times are a little different now, and I think that there is so much more room for innovation. There are ways to connect with the student on a different level than just being this task master teacher. So I give you permission to explore those new methods. Don’t wait, start now. I see that as coming from experience. I have been that teacher. I was trained classically. I had some incredible teachers who pushed me really hard. And in college I had some amazing teachers as well. But what I've learned as a teacher is that that is not what every student needs or wants. And not every student is able to connect with you in that way.
I have a student that is remarkable. And I can tell that they need that extra side of me, and that's when I bring that out. So whatever that means for you, just find a good balance with all of the students that you teach, do what feels right, and ultimately, always make sure that your students are feeling connected with and motivated to learn.
I hope that one of those ten tips resonated with you. I'm going to run through them really quickly. Again, if you are at a place where you can write some of these down, then do so. If not, I will put them in the show notes and they will also be on the website, Teach Music Online if you want to look at them there. So here are the ten tips, one more time.
Number one, get a comfortable chair. Number two, schedule regular breaks. Number three, stretch during your lessons. Number four, close your eyes occasionally. Number five, turn your computer night setting on or use blue light glasses. Number six, talk less and ask more questions. Number seven, introduce a sight reading activity in the middle of the lesson. Number eight, get your materials ready at the beginning of the day. Number nine, use videos to demonstrate. Number ten, don't be a perfectionist.
Thank you so much for listening. I want to just tell you that I think you're incredible, your students love you and appreciate all of the hard work you're putting into creating an online studio that is wonderful and filled with music that is inspiring for them. Keep up the good work!