How do I choose a Suzuki School that is right for my family?

by Scott Gossage

When looking at the choice of Suzuki music lessons, I believe the most important factor is parent education. Parent education is the soul and essence of the Suzuki method. It is the defining element. The importance of parent education cannot be overstated, from either the perspective of outcome or process.

This series of articles concerns the operational implementation of parent education, and how our approach, here at Silicon Valley Classical Guitar School, may differ from that of other schools with which the reader may be familiar.

My background, in terms of my training and professional experience, is very traditional Suzuki. Hard-core, if you will. Consequently, there is a large component of parent education in my experience. Before my colleague, Rob Watson, and I started up our own studio here at Silicon Valley Classical Guitar School in Sunnyvale, we both taught at Longay Conservatory of Guitar in Santa Clara, California. LCG is known throughout the world as a center for the Suzuki method, particularly as a destination for teachers seeking professional development. It is an excellent school. One of the many great and wonderful things I got to do as a part of that extremely rich and intense experience, was to work directly with Frank Longay to create and implement his parent education course.

For over three years, I team-taught the course with Frank, under his direct, personal supervision and guidance. Frank taught the philosophical, theoretical portion of the course, comprising half of the content. The other half of the course, the technical portion, was my responsibility. In addition to teaching the course together and observing each other’s work in the classroom, Frank and I met weekly to discuss the course, its content, and how we could tweak it to optimize results. Through this process, I learned a whole lot about doing parent education for Suzuki parents.

In addition to my work at LCG, I have taken additional professional training, most notably with Jeanne Luedke, and the great William Starr. I have also hung out and discussed this topics informally with many of the world’s most notable Suzuki guitar teachers, who come regularly to LCG to do teacher training there. The distillation of all that I learned is this:

Parent education is very, very important.

There are many different ways to implement parent education.

Each of these have both advantages and disadvantages. Parents looking for a Suzuki school for their children should learn as much as they can about each school’s approach, and choose the program that is right for their family.

In a future article I will discuss the details of how we do parent education at Silicon Valley Classical Guitar School, and compare our approach to that of other programs.