And I don’t just mean play one review piece as prep for a new piece, but center the bulk of your lesson around review.

This is magic. This is elegant. This will transform your teaching life.

Most teachers I know spend the majority of their lessons teaching students notes. This is about as absurd as a chef helping a cooking student pull out all of their ingredients from the cooler and then sending them home.

Good teachers use the lesson as an opportunity to develop a student’s playing with the notes they already know.

Good teachers will still usually do this on newly learned repertoire, but master teachers will do this on review repertoire.

Review pieces are the perfect playground in which to begin integrating new skills into a student’s playing. If you are trying to develop their sound, their bow control, their posture, their left hand frame, or anything else, the best place to do it is in review.

If teaching notes is the equivalent of a chef helping a cooking student pull out ingredients, then only working on polishing new pieces is like a chef attempting to refine a cook’s skill by teaching them a new recipe every day. Far more effective is working on the same old, simple recipe every single week, and polishing their ability to execute the simple recipe as a master would.

But the thing is… telling your students how important review is will not encourage them to do it. You must show them the importance of review by spending the majority of the lesson on review.

My Book 1 students play every review piece they know every lesson.
Book 2+ through 5 students play 3-5 pieces from the book back.
Book 6+ students play 1 or 2 select review pieces.

During this time, during review, I teach them how to play the violin.

Parents and students will pick up on this. What you prioritize in the lesson is what they will prioritize at home. If you never hear review pieces in the lesson, they will never practice review at home. If you never work on actually upgrading violin playing via review in the lesson, students will never work to develop their playing in review at home.

The moment you spend the majority of your lesson on review– using that time to really work with the student on HOW they play, not WHAT they play– is the moment your studio will change forever.