How to Become a Guitar Teacher
To become a guitar teacher, you don't need to be world-class. As long as you have a moderate amount of experience, some patience and the will to work at your guitar teaching abilities, then you may well be ready to start teaching guitar right now.
Preparation
To become a successful guitar teacher you must prepare properly; this means arranging your teaching space, getting the right equipment and preparing a moderate amount of teaching material to give to your guitar students during the lessons. Most people that come to you will be beginners so make sure you prepare plenty of chord-based repertoire, chord diagrams and riff-based repertoire so that you always have some good quality material to give them.
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Market Yourself
You must have a website to promote yourself as a guitar teacher, and so students can find you. If you don't have the technical skills to do this, ask around and find someone that does. Your website doesn't have to be state-of-the-art; as a minimum it could be a single page with a photograph of you playing the guitar, as well as your contact details.
Be Organised
To be a successful guitar teacher you must be organised. Start and finish guitar lessons on time. Keep accurate records of your students' progress so that you always know what you taught the in the last lesson and what to teach them next lesson. Have frameworks for different aspects of teaching guitar such as a technique program, music theory program, aural skills program, etc.
Be Adaptable
To be a successful guitar teacher you must develop the ability to teach in a variety of way. You need to be able to teach guitarists of all levels of academic ability; this means making judgements about the pace of the lessons as well as how technical your lessons content should be.
Set Terms of Business
In order to build a successful career as a teaching guitar, you must take your business seriously and put in place some basic terms. To avoid last minute cancellations and loss of income, explain to students in lesson one that you require a minimum of 24 or 48 hours cancelation of a booked lesson, otherwise you would expect payment. This must work both ways. I.E. If you cancel a booked guitar lesson in this time then you must provide a free lessons to compensate.
Learn from Being a Guitar Teacher
To become a successful guitar teacher you must learn from your lessons. What went well? What could you do better in future? Nobody can get everything perfect first time. Being a good guitar teacher relies on personal development.
