Create a Teaching System with Process Flow Charts

Take a look at the following process flow chart. This is how I handle the administrative stuff that goes on at the beginning of a new school year. To see all the details, please download the PDF version where you are able to zoom in.

Surprisingly complex, isn’t it?

When I initially created my first version a couple of years ago I was quite surprised about the degree of complexity involved. It truly was an eye opener. I never had realized how many steps and small actions actually were necessary before the teaching even started. I also discovered some actions that were NOT necessary at all – and I’ve been able to trim the fat, so to speak, and therefore make the whole process a lot easier.

See, when you’ve been playing an instrument for some time, there’s lots of aspects that have become automatic for you. The common chord progressions are no problem. You’ve played your blues licks a gazillion times. It’s not necessary to think about what you are doing anymore.

Even with teaching it works the same way. Showing someone how to rip with Pentatonic licks, how to play blazingly fast alternate picking runs, how to… is easy. Right? You know your stuff. That’s what you do all the time and with some presentational experience you are able to share and convey your knowledge.

So after a while teaching students, showing them cool, new material is no problem, because you do it often. As your teaching business grows to 10, 20, 30, or even 50+ students/week you have lots of interactions with your students.

Pretty soon you’ve seen it all. All the left hand mistakes, right hand mistakes, lack of focus, lack of concentration, lack of attention, rhythmic problems.

You get good at trouble shooting, recognizing the errors and (hopefully) you are able to show the solutions.

Sometimes it’s a quick and easy fix. Like handing out a good sounding playback for jamming along to a student in order to motivate him to practice more. Sometimes it can turn into quite a long-term project that requires a strategic selection of exercises and careful monitoring from you.

On the positive side you’ve also seen the successes and noticed what worked for your students.

A Process Flow Chart is like a Checklist and Guides You Along

Other aspects of teaching don’t happen that often – but are still essential – either for your financial success (after all, teaching is a business) or simply necessary for your personal well being saving you some nerves.

“Back to School” time is a perfect example. It only happens once a year. But it sets the tone with new students and their parents and could turn into a stressful time if you don’t have a system in place to ease everyone into a smooth term.

Usually, when a new school year starts all those small actions like phone calls, updating contact information, etc… are floating around in the back of your mind. No wonder you feel stressed and have the constant nagging feeling that there’s something that’s missing, that there’s something you should be doing – you just don’t know exactly what.

And when you do find out that your nagging feeling was right, it’s probably too late and the damage has been done already. You forgot to call the parent, check about the room, etc…

Not cool – and really makes you look unprofessional.

Granted, you could manage without such a process flow chart. I did, too – for quite a few years longer than I’d like to admit. So I know it’s possible to stumble your way through.

But trust me, to confidently walk into the meeting room where new students and/or their parents are waiting for you with the feeling that you’ve covered all your bases regarding rooms and time slots and have relevant, up-to-date hand-outs prepared is the better way to do it.

You come across more professional this way for sure. First impressions do count, even in the music teaching business.

Copy Me – Then Adapt

Feel free to model my process flow chart. Naturally there’ll be steps that don’t relate to your own situation. If you teach strictly at home, there’s no need to check with some school administration about room availability. You might create different forms and checklists, use different tools. That’s more than o.k.

The main purpose of this post is to get you to think about YOUR processes as they apply to YOUR own situation and then DO something to improve and optimize them.

Make Your Processes Work For You

My advice to you:

• Think about all the different actions you have to do.
• Organize them into groups and themes, like teaching materials, marketing, scheduling, finances, etc…
• Monitor your own way of handling things.
• Document all the steps.

Re-evaluate your steps:

• Are they necessary?
• Can you eliminate a step?
• Can you improve upon a process?
• Do you use tools that do their job?

Don’t feel like you need to have all your processes identified and documented via neat process flow charts by tomorrow. Take your time with this. But, please, do get started.

Here are some recommended resources to help you get started:

Framework behind Process Flow Charts

Recommended reading

Work the System by Sam Carpenter

The story of a business owner at the verge of financial and nervous break down and how he turned his business and life around creating systems for his processes. It’s a good read, it’s not too technical or specific to his particular situation.

All I can say is that after reading this book, I actually DID something and started my first process flow charts.

Buy Work the System from Amazon

Disclosure: when you buy through my amazon link I get a small affiliate commission. It’s not a lot, but helps offset the costs of running this site. Thanks for your support.

Software for creating Process Flow Charts:

While Xmind (as featured in my mind mapping for musicians article) would work, it unfortunately does have some limitations when it comes to flow charts. You’d need to manually nudge the alignment of free-floating nodes, which would get quite tedious.

Looking for an alternative I checked into SmartDraw. The demo version worked great and I did like it. However, the price tag was too much for me, at least for the limited use I’d really need it for.

On my hunt I finally stumbled upon yEd.
YEd is a really cool and easy to use software for creating process flow charts and diagrams. Best of all, it’s absolutely free to use for both, personal as well as commercial use. My process flow chart (and the PDF) was entirely created with yEd and after watching this short tutorial video you should be up and running in no time at all.

Gmail account for Contact and Time Management

All my student contact data goes into Gmail. I’ve created 3 groups: “students,” “ex-students” and “music teaching” (for related contacts like the school principals) for easy sorting. Even though I don’t have an iPhone/Android device (yet) my SonyEricsson mobile is smart enough to access my contact manager via the internets.

Scheduling goes onto my teaching Google Calendar.

Evernote - The Digital Brain

Evernote is great and I couldn’t imagine my digital life without it. In case you aren’t using it yet, quickly head on over to Evernote and sign up for their free service.

I’ll show how I specifically use Evernote for student progress tracking and how I organize the tags in a future post. Make sure to subscribe, so you don’t miss out once I publish. Still valid.

Get Started with Your Process Flow Charts

Create a system for yourself. It might take some up-front investment of time – but it’ll help you avoid lots of stress for many years to come. Apart from the occasional minor tweak you’ll have something to fall back upon to. And instead of trying to think about all the little things you should be doing, you’ll be able to focus on the actual teaching instead.

Are you using process flow charts for your teaching business? Or for some other music related actions? Feel free to share your ideas and experiences in the comments below.