There’s a new teaching method that’s all the rage these days, and with good reason.
In a flipped classroom, students view pre-recorded “lectures” at home, and do their “homework” in class, where teacher assistance is only a raised hand away.
Students are learning math, science, foreign languages, and computer programming this way.
It got me wondering––is the time ripe for flipped guitar lessons?
Flipped Guitar Lessons
At the end of a lesson last week, I was telling my student what we would be working on in our next lesson––switching chords in time.
As I was doing so, it occurred to me that I had just recorded a video that showed exactly what we would be doing. So I sent the post & video to him, and asked him to watch it before next week.
He showed up to yesterday’s lesson fully prepped and already doing the exercises I had planned for him.
We got to skip over 6 or 7 minutes of me talking, and instead spent that time actually playing guitar. In a 30 minute lesson, this is not an inconsiderable amount of time, and we made big strides forward in that time.
So What Can Be Flipped?
So much of beginning guitar seems to be ideally suited to flipped guitar lessons, for two reasons:
- the early skills are so universal, and
- extra time spent playing under teacher supervision is so beneficial.
Because the early skills are universal, a teacher could make a short video for each topic, and use that content again and again.
And I’ve written before about treating lesson time like working out with a personal trainer.
It’s too early to say, but I also think that the flipped guitar lesson may obviate the need for much of what gets taught via TAB. And anything we can do to avoid unnecessarily hobbling students with TAB-centric thinking is going to be a massive boon for them later.
What Can’t Be Flipped?
While I’m bullish on flipped guitar lessons, I realize that it has its limitations. It’s probably poorly suited to high-level discussions where a teacher is trying to train a student how to think about music.
But even then, I think a short video lecture before the in-person lesson will allow us to get deeper faster.
What are your thoughts on the matter?
Is this just a flash in the pan that’ll soon fade?
Are the limitations of flipped guitar lessons too great to be useful?
