One of the ways you can make a private music studio stand out is to focus on building your studio’s sense of community. Encouraging your students and studio families to connect, support each other and get to know each other is one thing but as the teacher it helps if we create environments and routines to allow these relationships to build easily. In so many ways we are leaders and our music studios are within our circle of influence. It is up to us to make this a priority!

Read on to hear a few of the ways I’ve been able to do this in my violin and viola studio.

Give Opportunity to Cheer Individuals in Studio

Often times as students are approaching a performance, whether fit is an audition, recital, etc., I will have them perform for other students in the studio! I do this easily by having them perform for the student either before or after their lesson time or during a group class. The most recent example of this was for a student preparing to audition for our local arts high school who performed in a group class for my other students. The students who were in the audience giving the auditionee encouragement and remembered to follow up - When the auditionee was able to share they were accepted! It provided a great opportunity for the student who was accepted to feel pride in their accomplishment, while giving other students a chance to cheer another student on and see what might be possible for them someday, too!

On an even smaller scale, I’ll sometimes have students overlap their lesson time to play through easy duets or run through our review pieces together. Anything where they can get more face time with another student, become comfortable with them and feel united is great!

Group Performances

When my studio was on the smaller side, we would fill the time with group pieces. These helped us fill out the recital time and gave students a small taste of playing in an ensemble. You could also match individual students together to perform duets or trios of different levels. The performance itself can be done at a number of different places - Nursing homes, retirement centers, in a park, community center, house of worship and so on. But anyway you can connect students together and unite them as a team will help them become invested in seeing everyone succeed.

Workshops with Guest Teacher

Opening our students up to another teacher or musician can have so many benefits - A shared experience for the studio, educating yourself about other styles and reinforce that you do know what you are talking about! Sometimes it just helps students and their families to hear the same feedback from someone else.

Topics could be fiddling, improv, praise team playing if there’s a lot of church attendees. You could do a themed sight reading party for movie music, specific decades (For example: 60s music could be the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, etc), regions of the world, holidays. There are so many options here and you can easily customize it to your current studio’s interests.

Studio Field Trip

Take your students to a local music performance for a studio field trip! This is another community building activity with so many fringe benefits, too. The downtime from before the concert and during intermission allows people to sit, chat and have fun. You get to support your local music community. By opening the invitation to the entire studio family and any friends they’d like to bring along, you are exposing so many people to where they can find local music.

I’ve long been a proponent of studio field trips and started holding them myself back in 2016 (If you’d like some thoughts on how to put this into practice with your studio, check out this post here: How to Plan a Studio Field Trip in Five Steps.). You could even sweeten the deal by saying everyone can meet before or after the concert at a nearby ice cream shop or coffeehouse for added group fun!

Group Lessons

This one should be obvious to Suzuki teachers, but even those who aren’t Suzuki teachers will see the benefits of giving their students group classes every once in a while! Similar to scheduling a workshop with a guest teacher, you can use the same list of themes or topics to inspire your group class. Additional ideas that might work well in that format include composition or music theory. By now you notice the theme - The more you bring people together, the more contact points your students have, the better your studio’s community will be!

Recital Ideas to Foster Community

There’s a couple small ideas I’ve used in my studio recitals to help bolster community. If your recital is small enough, take the time to introduce each student, their piece and share an encouraging or unique thing about that student with the audience. Be sure to have a reception - Where there is food and drink, there is time for mingling, getting to know others and finding ways that we can all relate.

My favorite idea for recitals is one I learned while attending my first Suzuki institute years ago. During a recital, I provide colored pieces of paper throughout the audience’s seats, along with a few pencils. As I open up the recital, I invite the audience and students to write special and encouraging notes to the performers, letting them know they will have an opportunity to drop their notes into the student’s goodie bags at the end of the recital. I always outline keeping it uplifting, while mentioning how younger students can draw a picture based on the song or on how it made them feel, parents can share what thing they loved most about the performance and so on. I love this idea and I find it key to my recital practices these days.

Final Thoughts

Community is good for the whole person, and it is good for us to recognize the opportunity our studio has to create a vibrant community for our students and their families as well. The responsibilities of being a private music teacher can sometimes feel never ending, but we do well to keep this in mind! From a practical standpoint it can help bolster your retention and income, but from a much larger perspective it can help the humans in your studio even more. And isn’t that what it’s all about anyways?

Dr. Suzuki said, “Teaching music is not my main purpose. I want to make good citizens. If children hear fine music from the day of their birth and learn to play it, they develop sensitivity, discipline and endurance. They get a beautiful heart.” If they start being good citizens in our little corner of the world, imagine what more they can go onto do with the skills we help them develop in our communities.

I hope you’ve found today’s post helpful. Please share your favorite ways to build studio community in the comments below, on Instagram @shawstrings or reach out to me by email.

Building Community in Your Music Studio