Hello all. I am after some advice, and also wondering if anyone else feels the same.

I have been teaching singing for about three years now. I teach in two schools, one primary, one secondary, and have a range of private pupils from teenagers to people in their 70s. My private students have built up mostly this year, and about three or four of my school students have been with me for three years. I have had reasonable exam results, so far up to grade 5, with a good crop of merits and distinctions, and even those who haven't done that well have had at least one merit mark in their songs.

I am having a problem in that I find it very hard to measure progress. I don't know whether this is unique to teaching singing, or if others have the same issue. I recently started teaching someone trumpet, and within a few weeks I could see a serious improvement. But these were more obvious things, like she was learning new notes, and playing scales faster and more confidently.

With my longer term students, I can see progress, such as grade exams. Or they can now handle songs which I felt were too difficult a couple of years ago. Development of tone, or tuning, can also take many months in some cases.

I am possibly worrying about it too much. But I like to be able to tell students that they are getting better, and explain why, as it often isn't obvious to them.

Does anyone else have a similar issue? Or any advice. Thanks.

Hi Splog

I have this exact same problem. I teach piano and that's quite straightforward. There are piano tutor books to progress through with methodologies to follow for technique. What's needed when at so on

But singing - nada!

There are no schemes are tutor books because all students are so different. But then so are piano students and I use my judgement with them within the framework of the book. Sigh

What I'm doing now is working through the Go for Bronze/Silver/Gold scheme from NYCOS. It's great because it's based on Kodaly and my students are now learning skills like pulse, rhythm, tuning and notation. It's aimed at children aged 7+ so it's accessible.

I have then created my own "technique list" with skills I'm expecting them to have covered at different stages. And for those who are advanced enough for exams I'm using the syllabus for LCM Pop Vocals to help with scales and stuff like that. But of course that list more often than not goes out of the window.

I would love to know how other teachers do it!

I've never looked at actual singing course books, as I've never found any. I use Discover your voice, which has lots of good vocal exercises, and I have areas I work on. Posture, breathing, tuning, tone, vowel sounds, diction, expression etc. I also try and start them sightreading music as early as I can.

I have also never found any guidance on exam pieces, for example, what makes a song grade 3? I look at it musically and technically and work out why I think it is grade 3, and make sure my students can do the technical aspects.

I'd be very interested in anything that says what a singer should be able to do at each level. I tend to do this very much by intuition. If a student can confidently sing songs from a grade, doing what I think are the technical and performance aspects well, and can sightread and do aural to that standard, then I will enter them at that level.

You don't come away from a singing lesson saying "Hey I learned a new note today!"

Are you doing classical or pop?

The new trinity rock and pop books have technical tips in them which I've found useful to understand. You don't need to buy the books as you can preview all the songs and tips on their online store.

Plus the rockschool vocal books have interesting exercises on phrasing and dynamics.

Hi there,

I'm a singing student, not a teacher, but I am an instructor in one sport (will be relevant later in the post). I'm probably the least talented singer that you would be able to find. I could unreliably hit only a few notes (3ish?) in my first lesson, and even then with tons of strain at the bottom of my range. My teacher has had the monumentous task of helping me hit the right notes using correct technique. I'm not a naturally intuitive person with my body, so it's been quite an uphill battle, but slowly progress has been made. I've been taking lessons for a little over 1.5 years.

Now, onto your question ...

Do your students record their lessons? Sometimes when I get discouraged, it helps to listen to lessons from several months back to realize that the progress is there.

For me, maybe because I'm involved in teaching a sport, it also helps to think of singing as a sport, which it actually is. It requires you to coordinate the function of certain muscles in your entire body, like engaging your core (and not the superficial core muscles most people use when doing things like crunches) and controlling the sound from your core while keeping your neck and shoulders relaxed, weight supported by legs with unlocked knees, throat open, and tongue and jaw engaged just enough to enunciate properly without undue tension (among other details; these are my "layman's" terms based on physical perceptions in my own body). The hard part is that you can't see or hear what you're doing (the way others hear you, that is), and you can't see what anyone else is doing since most of these muscles are internal. You can only feel what you're doing and hear your teacher. As such it has helped me to break things down and try to feel how individual pieces of the overall picture should feel like, and gain control over them in isolation (i.e. keeping shoulders relaxed during an exercise, even if other things go wrong). Once something is working well enough, try to add something else in. My teacher also spent ages trying to get me to know and understand what an open throat felt like, what it felt like to have the vocal cords come together properly without too much "glottal onset", breathiness, or squeezing, and how certain sensations I was feeling inside correlated to good technique and the sound someone else would hear. When the whole process is broken up into smaller skills, it's easier to see progress. Even if you don't have the final product in terms of the overall sound, you can at least say, "See, you're not tensing your jaw anymore!" or "You've improved the control you have over your core" or "You've developed more endurance". Basically, with other instruments, you have external guidelines to measure progress. With singing, you may need to help them understand the "internal" progress that's taken place, and not just base it on external measures like hitting new notes or singing harder songs. Those external measures are the culmination of a lot of progress made on many different fronts internally, and is much more complex than learning to play a few extra notes on an instrument.

How often do your students practise, and what do they do when they do? If you don't practise consistently, you can't expect to see results. If you don't practise effectively, you also can't expect to see results. If something's not working, do they keep pushing through, or do they stop and try to figure out what's wrong and to see if there's a way they can fix it?

Do your students have an unrealistic time frame for obviously discernible progress? Also, do they think that all of a sudden something will "click" and they'll get drastically better? This can happen depending on the "problem", but usually true and lasting progress occurs slowly over a period of time as you consistently train and push your muscles beyond their current limits. Sometimes you may even feel like you're going backwards for a bit. I'd say that for the first year it felt like I wasn't making any progress whatsoever (there were a few brilliant moments, but I could never repeat them because I didn't know how or why they had occurred). I spent a lot of time doing and playing around with the drills my teacher gave me, but because there was so much to coordinate and learn, and because everything was totally foreign, it took a lot of time for various things to sink in. The trick in this case is to have an optimistic attitude and trust that you can eventually achieve your goals, and enough persistence and commitment to regular focused practice. Since the instrument is part of your body, would it help to explain that it takes time for changes in the body and mind to occur? Children aren't born knowing how to talk, walk, or do math - it takes time and training, and more of both for more advanced skills. Maybe it would help to say that sometimes it can take a year or so or even more to really and obviously see the progress that's been there all along?

Anyway, just my two cents.

I hope this helps .

My teacher's really good at pointing progress out in ways specific to me. We are working a lot on technique rather than pieces, and she mentions things like how I used to have such-and-such problem and I no longer do, or that there are things she doesn't need to say any more that she used to.

That said, I don't know if this approach would work with students who are not as focused on technique as I am. I think it would drive some people crazy to focus on that sort of details.

Thanks everyone. That is really helpful. ExpressYourself I would be interested in looking at the technique list you have devised, with skills expected at each level. I have access to the rock school books, and will look again at the technique stuff. I may be doing a lot of it anyway, but it could give me an idea of what to do at each stage. I basically teach classical technique but let the students sing whatever they wish, although I don't let the young girls sing low (and discourage belting)

The sporting analogy is very good, and corenfa, you too seem to be saying the same thing. If I break down the technique into smaller sections, I should be able to see achievements.

One singing student performed in public this week and I and others noticed how much his voice had improved. He has been with me for a term. Another one has just done grade 5, with a song I told him two years ago was too difficult, and the examiner has commented on how well he handled the technical aspects. So I know there is serious progress being made. There seems to be very little change for ages, then suddenly it's a better sound, there are easier high notes, tuning issues have disappeared etc...

However, my trumpet student bounced around the room last night when I told her she had learned all her grade 2 scales, and declared that she wants to do the exam next term. So easy to feel good about that.

I don't know whether there really is a problem here, or it's just me being too practical. But I do feel if I am not praising students for making progress they will lose heart. I also tend to rely on word of mouth to attract new students, rather than advertising.

My experience is that teaching singing is very different to other instruments because there are so many unknowns and factors which influence progress - individual voices, age, experience, lesson time, practice time, goals etc. etc. Of course, these do have an influence on other instruments but not in the same way.

Overall, pupils need to make a huge emotional investment in learning to sing (particularly adults and older children). I've recently taken on an adult pupil and for the first six lessons, despite dropping in the 'tip', the time has really been spent just getting her to 'open up' and sing. We're only now getting to a point where she feels more comfortable with that. Some might argue that she hasn't made any progress - after all, a pianist may now have learnt several notes and be playing some basic pieces hands together. The reality of course is that she's made fantastic progress.