Parent Meetings for the Private Music Studio

Parent and Caregiver Meetings for the Music Studio

Are you looking for a way to connect more with your studio families and the people who care for your students? 

Some of my tried and true methods have always included studio newsletters, maintaining a studio website, Facebook Page and other social media. Thanks to the COVID pandemic, I’ve been dealing with missing my regular face to face interactions with my studio parents and other caregivers. As I was trying to think of ways to reconnect with these people who hold such influence over my student’s music lessons, I realized we could meet together on Zoom! It’s been a huge help in getting with parents, talking about what they’re seeing at home outside of lesson times and more! 

I would recommend adding something like this to your studio if you don’t have it already! Here are a few of the benefits I’ve seen since starting these meetings with my studio families: 

Benefits

• Community Building

• Supports Studio Culture

• Improves Communication About Studio Events

• Develops Accurate Expectations

• Reinforces Concepts from Lessons

• Vision Casting with Studio Families

You might be thinking “Well, that’s great. But what would I even talk about during this time?” 

For my studio it has been natural to meet about every four months, which coincides with when I release a newsletter with upcoming studio events, information about local music opportunities and performances, studio news and more. This has given me a good outline to start conversations, get everyone comfortable with asking questions and speaking in the group before we move on to deeper conversations. 

Once these practicalities are out of the way, I try to leave space for bigger questions and thoughts about the following themes:

Themes for Discussion

• Practice Aids

  • Room Set Up

  • Games

  • Practice Trackers

  • Taking notes

• General Music Knowledge

• Suzuki Philosophy

• Studio News

• Child Psychology and Development

• Music Enrichment Opportunities

• Updates on Teacher Training and Professional Development

One of my favorite moments in one of the parent meetings I’ve held was how families started sharing their struggles with practice and keeping the joy in music! One of my veteran parents started sharing ideas that have worked with her child and everyone listened, took note and over the next few weeks I heard stories about how those ideas worked at home. It really opened up productive and encouraging conversations between my studio parents. 

If you aren’t sure how to broach those topics with your studio families, you can share any of these resources below either ahead of the call or during the meeting to break the ice! 

Resources to Share: 

• Books

• Podcasts

• Articles

  • Suzuki Association of the Americas

  • String Player sources like Strings Magazine or Strad

• Youtube Channels

• Movies

• Magazines

At our last meeting, I shared a little article titled “Dear Beginner Parent” from the end of Kay Collier Slone’s book “They’re Rarely Too Young… And Never Too Old “To Twinkle””. It was short and easy to read, but I had several parents comment on how they’d forgotten what it was like at the beginning or that it made them feel less alone with their child. It is so easy to hold such high standards for our children that sometimes we lose sight of the long term goal. I feel this helped put some minds at ease and gave us a renewed sense of purpose in our lessons, even if just for a little while! 

Final Thoughts

I hesitated to organize something like this for the longest time. Finding a meeting space was too difficult. Setting a time that worked for everyone was too difficult. Knowing what to say or how to say it was too hard. Like many things in life, getting in there, trying and doing your best is sometimes the best way to figure something out! In my situation, my studio has students living across three states, so Zoom has provided a great “location” for us to meet together. As far as times, I offer the same meeting in two different slot, one during the week and one on the weekend to accommodate for different family and work schedules. I’m learning all the time how to make these meetings valuable to my studio families and look forward to continuing them in the future! 

Let me know what this would look like for you in the comments below or on Facebook or Instagram! I hope you can experience some of these benefits in your studio soon!