One of the best ways to inject excitement and extra motivation into your studio is to organize a special weekend workshop for your students. This takes a lot of advance planning and skilled scheduling. When so much effort is expended, we all want to make sure the product lives up to its advance billing!

What exactly is it that we as home teachers want for ourselves, our students and their parents when we organize such an event? Here are some things that spring to mind:

  • Inspiration and motivation for students, parents and teachers.
  • A chance to see our students as others see them.
  • The benefit of a new pair of expert eyes and ears to find things we may have missed or not emphasized sufficiently in our students’ playing.
  • Some new ideas and new approaches to the development of skills and solving of problems.
  • Validation of our efforts by a respected colleague.
  • An enjoyable time for everyone—students, parents and teachers.
  • An opportunity for our families to build a sense of community and to become aware of the larger Suzuki community with whom they share values and enthusiasms.

There are probably other things you could add, but even as it stands this list presents a formidable task for a visiting teacher.

We are justified, of course, in hoping for major benefits. We have, presumably, invited an admired colleague who has substantial experience and thorough knowledge and training. Many of us (especially those indispensable volunteer parents) spend countless hours finding and booking teaching locations, carrying on delicate negotiations with church leaders, school principals, and custodians, shuffling budgets, making name tags, writing out and checking master schedules, constructing signs (with the arrows going the right way), arranging for snacks and coffee, pushing around chairs and tables, moving pianos, collecting and delivering appropriate-sized chairs and foot stools etc. The efficient performance of these tasks is essential for a successful workshop.

But we also need to give careful consideration to the task of creating an environment in which the visiting teacher can do his or her very best teaching. Good teachers, no matter how eminent or experienced, are not superhuman paragons who drop from the sky and solve all problems regardless of working (or playing) conditions. The way in which a workshop is organized for the visitor as well as for the students plays a huge role in its success.

One of the things it is important to remember when planning a workshop (whether it be for one, two or three days) is that the kind of teaching that happens will be quite radically different from the kind of teaching that happens in the home studio. It will even be different from the teaching in the more extended time available at a summer camp or institute. At a workshop the guest teacher and students and parents are usually total strangers, and the teacher will not have any time to build a relationship, to discover sensitive areas, to become aware of the things that make students laugh or cry, to test out frustration levels, to understand the little quirks and idiosyncrasies that we can ferret out when we have the luxury of months and years of working together. The guest teacher, typically, will have to make a snap decision on how to approach the student both in simple human terms and also in terms of that student’s learning style Within the first two or three minutes of these strangers’ meeting, a decision must be made by the teacher on what teaching point to select that.

  • will be useful to the student.
  • will be understood by the student and parent.
  • will engage the interest and active involvement of the student.
  • will not undermine in any way what the home teacher has been doing.
  • will offer at least some hope of noticeable improvement in the 15 or 20 minutes available.
  • will leave student and parent feeling that the experience has been worthwhile, enjoyable, perhaps even inspirational.

If a masterclass format is used, all these assessments need to be made and their implications followed through with 15 or 20 very individual students in a single day! The description of workshop teaching (attributed to Marc Johnson of the Vermeer quartet) as “hit and run” is perhaps somewhat alarmingly accurate!

When you re-read the above list you will no doubt realize that the teaching day of your guest will be an incredibly intense experience, and that the sort of focus and quick thinking called for is quite different from that demanded by a day of home studio teaching. This is not meant to imply that home studio teaching is not demanding, just that its demands are of a different sort. I have discovered over the years that sometimes teachers who do outstanding work in their home studios are less successful as workshop teachers, and some extremely stimulating and inspiring workshop or institute teachers may not cope as successfully with the long-term ups and downs of their home programs. While the technical and musical knowledge are the same in both situations, the skills required for effective communication of that knowledge are quite different.

Having worked both as a ‘home’ teacher making arrangements for a visiting clinician, and as a ‘visiting’ teacher in other programs, I have experienced an amazing variety of situations, and a number of kind and helpful colleagues have also given input for this article. Using this material I have come up with some thoughts that I hope will assist both hosts and guests in their co-operative efforts to create an environment that will allow for the most productive use of everyone’s time and energy. While most of the suggestions are directed towards workshop organizers, teachers who are invited to participate as guest faculty also need to think about these points and may wish to ask about them ahead of time if the initiative does not come from the organizers. However, many teachers are uncomfortable about giving a long list of conditions, and Suzuki teachers seem particularly diffident about playing the role of demanding outside ‘expert,’ and so the whole process becomes much easier for all if the organizers make suggestions and ask for their guest’s opinion, or offer choices and ask which choice the guest would prefer.

Notes from author: I would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of the many friends and colleagues who responded so generously to my request for ideas on this topic. You know who you are, and I thank you sincerely for your time and effort. I do not claim that the questionnaire I sent to these teachers produced statistically significant conclusions: it simply helped to clarify the issues for me and provided reassurance that I was more or less in agreement with the rest of the Suzuki community of teachers. This article does not give detailed advice on budget, advance planning or organization of facilities and schedule (all of which I hope will be addressed by someone in the future), but is limited to a discussion of some issues, mostly directly concerned with the role of visiting faculty, that many of the larger centers of Suzuki teaching may well take for granted, but which teachers without the experience handed down from many years of workshop planning may not have considered.