Lesson Structure and
Teaching Approach

For a brand new student, I usually start by asking about their experience with voice training so far. Have they done any voice training at all? Have they looked at any resources? What do they know, and what do they think they know? This helps me figure out where to start.

From there, we might talk about goals, the kind of approach they want to take, and what’s generally involved in voice training. This is also where I might introduce the idea that there are a few rough stages in voice training. These usually involve initially getting familiar with everything, developing skills, trying out voices, and refining them.

This layout fits most closely with my default approach, which is about providing tools and information and introducing skills so students can develop them further in their own practice. The structure might differ slightly for someone opting for a slower, steadier approach.

Once we have talked about goals and approaches, we might start exploring your own voice to get a sense of your current skills. Depending on how much time is left in the lesson, we might begin creating homework tasks to get the ball rolling, or we may start experimenting with exercises and explorations in the lesson itself.

In the case of a returning student, if it was fairly recent, We'd normally start off with asking about how they got along in practice and how the homework went. If that all went a-okay, then we might just continue where we left off.  If things didn't go too well, we might go over the homework in more detail, try to figure out where problems are popping up, and likely address them. If no homework got done, we might pivot towards working on those things in the lesson itself. Or if the person is looking to move on we would do so, being aware that they need to work on the past homework as well after the session. 

From there, it would probably involve checking in whether there was any specific stuff they wanted to go over, even if it wasn't something we talked about before, and then we would probably just continue on from where we left off. 

As you can probably tell, I do not rigidly adhere to a fixed structure. There is no strict schedule such as working on vocal warmups every week or adding a new variant on week three. Lessons are flexible. We see where the student is and adapt based on their current needs and progress. For this reason lesson structure for returning students not particularly representable beyond this point.

In this case, it normally starts by asking what the experience has been like with voice training so far. If they have trained alone, we might talk about the resources they have used. If they have worked with another teacher or a therapist in the past, we would ask about what they worked on and how they feel about it.

If they are using a different framework to understand how voice works, we might go over the one that I use and make sure we are on the same page about everything.

Even when people are using the same framework, it is common for there to be some mismatches in understanding. For example, it is quite common to see people mix up what vocal weight, resonance, or vocal size are.

From there, we will probably talk about goals, both more broadly and for the lesson itself. Then we usually move into the topic that brought you to the lesson.

Again at this point it becomes fairly unpredictable.

My default approach is all about cost-effectiveness, self-reliance and building a firm foundation. Essentially, I try to turn the lessons into a catalyst, while allowing your own practice to become the true engine for change. For most people, this allows us to cut down on the total number of lessons while still making progress. In essence, this means we get to save you money.

How this works:

In lessons themselves, our time is spent on giving you feedback, introducing new ideas, introducing tools, and introducing skills. We build up this foundation and get the proverbial ball rolling so that when you're practicing on your own, you can charge ahead in practice. It gives you more agency in where you take your voice but still allows you to come back and seek support after troubleshooting on your own. 

Who this works best for:

This approach is likely best for people who only want one or two lessons, who would be likely to request a recording of the session, and who would listen back to it. It may also be appropriate for people who just want some form of consultation on what their current voice is like, and what sorts of things they might want to explore to take it further and improve. 

This approach is balanced. We aim to build a strong foundation, but we won't go exhaustively over every little thing. If we go for a hybrid approach, we'd likely meet more than twice, but less than 10 times.

How this works: 

Time in lessons would be spent doing some guided practice, but we would also introduce new ideas, too. The ideas themselves would likely be wider in scope than if it was for the slow and steady approach. But it wouldn't be jam-packed. An example to illustrate this point would be that if we were practicing something in the lesson, we may talk about common pitfalls before we start, and we might try to look for them as we go. 

You would be expected to practice between lessons, though it would be largely focused on refinement and exploration and neither tackling new things with the only the bare minimum necessary information nor working on something with a very small scope repeatedly.

If a problem came up while we were working on it in lesson, then it would depend on the problem to whether we dive into that new issue, or if we just stay on track. If it's relatively simple, I might just set you to explore it as a piece of homework. 

If you struggled with something that we did as homework, we could absolutely go over it again.  

Or if you didn't manage to get any practice done and wanted a refresher, then we could go over something we'd already covered. Though doing so would be done with an understanding that it slows us down.

Who this works best for:

This approach is a bit of a middle ground, so this approach works best for people who don't find the cost of lessons prohibitive but still want to exert more control over their voice training. 

As we have more sessions it's common for our approach to drift towards this midline. 

This approach is all about giving you enough time to build up a strong foundation. We won't try to maximise the utility of every single moment. Instead, we'll spend as long as we need to, to help you build up confidence as I guide you through practice and support you along the way. Lessons are usually more frequent, and the process takes longer overall, but ensures that you don't jump ahead to new things before you're ready. 

How this works:

Our time in lessons would largely be spent doing guided practice. We might introduce only one or two ideas, and practice them together, so you can leave the lesson knowing exactly what to practice and how.

If a problem came up in your practice, we'd address it in context, but we'd focus on reinforcing the original skill before adding in any new tools or techniques to fix this new problem. Only after the foundation is secure would we move on to tackle anything new. 

Who this works best for:

This approach may work best for people who know they don't work super well on their own and view voice training as a long-term goal that they're ready to commit to, but feel they need support along the way. 

At its best, voice training is something that can bring us joy, give us agency, and make us feel happy with our voices. But it shouldn't really ever be something that causes us pain. Now, it might be that there's a situation where you can't avoid pain, like dysphoria. We can minimize dysphoria, and we can control how we respond to dysphoria, but we can't eliminate the presence of dysphoria entirely. 

That said, we should never ignore or normalise physical pain in the voice itself.

What are some core things that we can emphasize in our practice, regardless of whether you work with me, to make voice training safer? 

• Practice good vocal hygiene and look after your vocal health

• Do not ignore pain, tension, or discomfort.

  • If something feels wrong, adjust what caused it.

  • The longer an issue goes unaddressed, the more likely it is to develop into a real problem. Similarly, if a poor vocal behaviour becomes habit there is a greater risk of harm.

• Practice responsibly.

  • Keep practice sessions at an appropriate length.

  • Be cautious when exploring new sounds or techniques.

  • If pain or discomfort arises during exploration, stop before it becomes ingrained.

  • Avoid or minimize practice forms you know may strain your voice.

  • Deliberately seek physical comfort during training.

• Seek appropriate support when needed.

  • If you encounter an issue that feels medical in nature, consult an appropriate professional.

  • My guidance is not medical advice, but poor practice can cause injury.

  • If you suspect you have an underlying condition that could affect your voice journey, seek medical support before training.

• Understand the risks.

  • Voice training, like speaking, singing, or yelling, always carries some level of risk to vocal health.

  • With good habits and awareness, these risks can be minimised, but they should not be ignored.

If something in our training is inherently more risky, then I will always try to be quite up front with you about why we might want to avoid it or why we might want to be cautious when approaching it. If we're going for the default approach, this will probably be explained in more depth.  Whereas, if we're going for the slow and steady approach, I'll probably try to aim for the right amount of information for you rather than risking overwhelm. 

Hi, so when talking about efficiency in my teaching, I think there's a few different things we could talk about first. To start off with, let's just list a few different ways that this efficiency applies to how I think about teaching. Loosely, we might sort this into efficiency that stems from: the general approach, the structure, habits and based on how the individual learns.

When I think about efficiency in my teaching, it's really about maximizing the result that we get from our time input, our energy input, and the money spent on voice training resources. The different approaches addressed above have maybe got a slightly different mixture of each of these variables when it comes to how that plays out.

Regardless of the exact approach we take, voice training takes time. That has nuances. For example, some people just zoom through voice training, and leave everyone else in the dust. For most people, it's an endeavour of months to years. Though that depends whether you're classing finished as the first point at which you can make a passing voice, or if your idea of finished is a perfectly habituated voice or maybe even a perfectly perfected library of skills and voices. We would aim to make your voice training as fast as is suitable for you. 

When it comes to energy input, I try to find the right balance for you. My default approach does leave more space for your critical thinking. So ultimately, you will probably spend a little bit more cognitive effort there if you're only coming to me when you get stuck, rather than for every single problem. If you go the slow and steady approach, there might be a little bit of redundancy. So you might spend a little bit more time doing it. But ultimately, I do aim to keep your time spent there efficient as well.

This is the other type of efficiency, and it's one I think about a lot. I know that voice training is a lot of the time quite prohibitively expensive to quite a lot of people, which sucks because it's something that lots of people need. I do try to do my own bit in my teaching though. As you're probably aware, I put together resources that people can access for free. In lessons my default approach is to give you as much relevant information as I can as quickly as possible, to maximise value. And while this isn't really something that shows up in my teaching specifically, I also do try to leave avenues for people to get access to cheaper lessons, as well as just having cheaper lessons than a lot of other teachers in the field.

I'll be a little bit more specific now and go into some of the more specific ways in which I try to maximize the return on these things. 

One of those forms of efficiency I seek in lessons is that produced through the approach we take. My default approach, as mentioned already, trends towards keeping the time in lessons as efficient as possible so we can be as cost-effective as possible. 

Another form of efficiency is just being conscious about the structure which we approach our learning. There is no one exact structure, but I would say that we could probably cut up voice training into four stages. 

There's an initial familiarity stage where we learn a little bit about voice training and what it involves, and pick up some preliminary skills. There's probably a stage where we work pretty expressly on picking up skills. From there, we might move into a stage that's based around exploration, experimentation, creating voices. And the fourth stage would be one of real-world application, refining everything, and turning the voice itself into a habit. 

This is relevant to how I teach all of my lessons, but it's most relevant if you plan to go for a more default approach where we're trying to get all the information we can in as quickly as possible. Knowing that if you pick up skills early on, then it allows you to apply them later on and accelerate your progress is a really useful thing to know.

In contrast, if we're going for a slow and steady approach, this is still kind of percolating in my brain, but It'd be likely to be a little bit more behind the curtain from a student perspective. And we might rejumble our priorities a little bit. 

A structure for that may look more like: work on vocal warmups and building vocal consistency, getting into a habit of spending time on voice. Looking to modify vocal weight and move into sustainable speech. So on and so forth. So a simpler thing from your perspective. But I’d be adapting what the future structure may look like as we move forwards with lessons and I learn more about what you find easier and what you struggle with. 

While not necessarily something that I do during lessons, something that we might encourage you to do is pick up habits which support your learning.

So, one of these examples, which I really love, is to encourage you to spend time thinking about what you practice in your own time. This is the most relevant for people that are looking for minimal intervention from me in their learning, but the act of sitting down at the start of your session and trying to just think about what's gone well for you, what's gone poorly, and what you're learning as you do it is really powerful. You can do a list, a mind map, or just brainstorm all your ideas, put them on the page.  Then you can look back at what you've done previous times and get a feeling about what your voice training is looking like. If you're confused, you can reach out to me and be like, "well, these are some things I noticed I struggle with." "Is there anything you'd suggest?" Or you can have a go yourself and ask, 'what is the most productive thing I could be doing right now?' and 'If I have this goal are there any things I can do to push myself in that direction.' By doing this kind of thing, we can actually change our practice from just practicing into practicing practice itself, which then allows us to make our practice even more efficient. 

Other beneficial habits might include the habit of spending time on voice training, the habit of using a modified voice, the habit of doing vocal warm-ups to support your vocal health, and listening out for vocal features in day-to-day life that you might like so you can think about whether you might like to incorporate them in your own voice.

There are probably actually more ways I take in efficiency into account, but I think they probably got covered in other sections. But I think the most important other way that efficiency comes into the frame is thinking about what's efficient for an individual student based on how they learn. 

Some quick examples of this might play out

1.  If you're super self-reliant, then longer gaps between sessions often work really well.  Whereas if you like the constant reinforcement, then what might actually be efficient is seeing you more often so that we know you're staying on top of things. 

2. The amount of information I give you. If you want a recording taken, then lots of information might work out for you, because you can listen back to that recording, and reflect on it all, and think about it, and hopefully each time you listen, you might be able to take more away, more and more information. Whereas if you only attend the lesson, and you don't want a recording, and you like struggle with lots of things on top of each other, then in that scenario, we might actually want to keep it very limited instead. We might try to stick to one core message and build from there. 

3. Let's say you were one of those people that kind of blazes through practice, and you initially kind of requested a slow and steady approach. Efficiency might mean having a conversation with you about how, actually, you can move ahead.  

I'm not going to go into any more of those examples right now because it really becomes very situational, especially when we go down to like the individual student level. But I hope this kind of talk through how approach for efficiency has given you some idea of, like, how I tend to think about it in lessons and how that tends to affect my approach. 

When it comes to any form of communication, but teaching especially, I tend to consider trust to be fairly invaluable. Our whole relationship is built on mutual trust and communication. It's a two-way street and it manifests in more ways than you might think.

But if we want to get a feeling for it, I think it may be good to talk about the foundation of our trust. Typically that's these ideas of what you want from lessons and what I'm hoping for from you. The exact hopes of any student will differ a little bit, ranging from "I want guidance and feedback" to "I want you to fix my problems for me." If your hopes are closer to the latter, we may need to have a discussion about why pivoting to "I want you to support me as we work through my problems together" would be a more actionable hope. There would probably also be other hopes there too, like "I hope my voice works well in lesson today" or "I hope they're nice."

In contrast, I imagine it's a little bit harder to discern what my motivations are. Ultimately, like any other human, there are multiple motivations underpinning my actions. Lots of them tend to revolve around something a little bit more immediate, such as "I hope the lesson today isn't stressful." At a larger scale, when it comes to thinking about a student more generally, my hopes are usually something like "I hope that voice training feels frictionless, fulfilling, and hopefully fun as well."

I don't know if other teachers might feel a bit differently about this, but at least from my own personal perspective, I tend to hope that your journey goes well. I don't necessarily feel that I need to see you every single moment along it. I suppose my default approach might hint at this, but I love it when my students come away from a lesson feeling empowered, and it's my hope that this empowerment stays with them as they continue voice training.

First, I want to address the ways in which I approach trust from my own side, and then I want to talk about ways that we can work together to make sure lessons go as well as possible.

One of the most important things when it comes to trust is trusting that I'm being honest with you about how you sound and what's going on with your voice. When you ask for feedback on the internet, there's a lot of variance in the quality and validity of that feedback. To some extent, everyone will judge a voice a little differently, and usually it's a snap judgment. What I will aim to do with my feedback is make sure that it is truthful. In other words, I won't give you baseless reassurance.

That said, I will aim to approach feedback from a place of practicality. If you've been voice training for a week and you feel like you sound awful, it's likely that you're still far from finishing. I'll aim to keep my feedback truthful but appropriate, rather than just saying "yeah, it doesn't pass." We'll aim to analyse it to some extent, see what's working well, what's working poorly, and draw conclusions about what our practice ought to look like.

I'll also aim to be transparent about the amount of progress we're making. If I think that you're catastrophising, I'll push back against that. But equally, if I feel like we're treading water and not making much progress, I will aim to be honest about practical concerns, such as if you're not practicing, we might need to ask whether right now is the right time for you to be doing voice training, or if something else needs to change. Further, if it seems that we aren't a good match as teacher and student, I will be straightforward about it.

This next one is somewhat tied to practicality as well as trust. When I'm working with you, I will always aim to make sure that whatever we're doing is something I believe will be productive for you and bring you closer to your goals. I'll also aim to be truthful about practicality. If I see you doing something that I think isn't very congruent with your goals, for example, if your goal is to sound natural and pass, but the voices you bring up are all cartoon or video game characters, I will aim to have a conversation with you about it rather than avoid it because it's an awkward truth.

That is to say that I'll always endeavour not to shy away from the truth just because it might be awkward for one of us. Further, if there’s something I don’t know, I’ll aim to tell you directly. We can still discuss it and I can offer some informed conjecture, but I won’t pretend to know everything about something I don’t. As a teacher, there’s an incentive to appear as though I know everything about voice training, but no one knows everything about anything and everyone has blind spots.

I’ll aim to be open about mine. One blind spot I know I have is that sometimes I don’t notice when I’m drifting towards my default approach in teaching. I might skim past some practice time in order to introduce more information, or give you more information than you hoped for. When I notice such things, I’ll aim to course-correct. But you can imagine that if I wilfully avoided this truth, I’d be much less likely to fix the issue.

Being truthful towards myself benefits both my teaching and your learning, so let’s talk about the more collaborative side of things. Where do you come into this picture, and how can we use our awareness of it to make lessons better?

The first thing to consider is being truthful about your goals and hopes. This is one of those internal and external things. Externally, being honest about what you hope for allows us to have better conversations about what voice training can look like. Don’t tell me what you think is the right answer. Something I see fairly often is people coming in and saying, “I just want a passing voice,” but when it comes down to it, it seems as though they have a more specific idea in mind, whether that’s the end goal or the process.

Honesty can sometimes require introspection. If you say you want a perfectly natural passing voice, but all your role models are video game characters with husky voices, it might be that you don’t actually want a perfectly average, natural voice. In this case, we might have a conversation about what your immediate goals are. Often, these more niche voices can have higher requirements for control or awareness, so a truthful conversation about what we want now versus what we want later can be helpful. You might even have a voice for the first part of your journey, and later on switch to a different one. Or you might have one for friends and another for day-to-day life. There are lots of options here.

The next thing I want to talk about is honesty about understanding. Sometimes, in lessons, I’ll introduce a concept, we’ll work on it, and I’ll set it as homework. What I need from you is honesty if you don’t understand something. There’s no shame in not understanding. But if you tell me that you do understand something when you don’t, it creates a mismatch between where I think you are and where you actually are, and that makes planning for future lessons much harder.

If you face issues while doing homework, remember we’re not expecting every moment to go perfectly. But if you can be honest about when you struggled, or when you didn’t understand something, it gives us a better chance to fix it. If we get to the next lesson and you don’t mention those struggles, I might assume you’re confident with everything, and that can come back to bite us later. The more upfront we are, even when not directly asked, the more effectively we can fill gaps and make sure learning is smooth.

In a similar vein, we want to make sure you’re practicing between lessons. I get the impression that some students feel pressure to tell me they’ve practiced even when they haven’t. There’s no shame in not completing practice; it just means we’ll fall a bit behind. I won’t be mad if you tell me you didn’t practice. It’s more likely to lead to an honest conversation about what we can do to make practice easier. If life got in the way, we might skip over it entirely. But if you know you’ll be consistently busy, we might need to discuss changes, maybe more frequent lessons, maybe different goals, maybe smaller steps.

If we can’t find a balance, it might lead to a conversation about whether now is the right time for voice training. If you simply don’t have time, you don’t have time. We might decide to focus on an interim voice or find another practical solution. The key thing is to be honest about your circumstances so we can plan around them.

Finally, one thing I want to be able to trust you to do is actually try the homework I set, not just practice, but give the specific tasks a proper go. When I set homework, it’s because I believe it will be the most productive thing for you. Some tasks are more tedious than others, like using external noise, but sometimes that’s the best tool available. Avoiding it because it’s boring can lead to gaps. You might think you can replace it with something else, but sometimes those substitutions do the opposite of what we want. For instance, replacing external noise work with whisper exercises might introduce constriction, which that task was designed to reduce.

If you find something tedious or pointless, please tell me. We can have a conversation about it. Sometimes you’ll have a good point and I might adjust. But I’ve seen cases where a student skipped something like accent mimicry because they thought it was irrelevant, only for the problem to persist.

Ultimately, I’ll bow to practicality. If you’re absolutely set on not doing something, I won’t force you, but be aware that disagreeing with someone more experienced doesn’t automatically make them wrong. Just be cautious of the Dunning Kruger effect.

The last thing I want to mention, because it ties into trust and truth, is safety. Voice training isn’t a medical process, but it does carry risks, just like any physical skill. You can break an ankle dancing, and you can strain your voice talking. Trust the signals your body sends you. If you experience pain or tension, take a break and try to avoid triggering it again.

Practicality is fairly integral to voice training. Being conscious of it is really useful but it's also a pain sometimes, it’s always something have to reckon with. In many ways, practicality is what keeps lessons grounded. It’s allows us to create a bridge between our goals and what we can actually do right now.

When I’m teaching, I always aim to make things as practical as possible. Being direct and honest in my feedback is a big part of that. But, I won't drown you in it either, it will depend on the situation, but I will always aim to give you the right amount of information in the moment. Listing 5 unrelated problems all at once while we're working on one specific topic is unlikely to help. 

In a similar way, the exercises and skills we work on in lesson are going to be the ones I think are most likely to work for you and build good long-term habits. There are often countless ways to approach any one problem in voice training and a lot of information behind each method. My general rule of thumb is to give you the amount of information I expect to be useful to you at the time. There's lots of layers to dig into a lot of the time, but in order to stay as practical as possible we'll usually chill in the perceptual layer of things with maybe the occasional diversion into something deeper as it makes sense to contextualise things.  If you’re interested in learning more, we can absolutely go deeper, but if we do we should go in with the knowledge that sometimes it can confuse things and will likely slow us down. It's the same reason why I would very rarely introduce something like spectrograms to a student, because it's just going to slow us down and doesn't teach us something we couldn't figure out already in a more direct way. Generally I aim to keep lessons practical and efficient. Though that doesn't neccesarily mean that everything will stay super serious all the time. As sometimes the most practical thing could be to find a way to relax. 

A big part of practicality also lies in setting goals that make sense for you. I would say that most people have the physiological ability to produce a voice that is capabable of passing the majority of the time. Sometimes there is an issue though. For some people the voice they want may not intersect with the voice they're capable of sustainably producing, different people have different physiological barriers.

On average, reaching an innitial passing voice tends to take a few months of consistent practice, though that varies. I'd say that with me a fair few people find it within the first couple of lessons, while others may take longer. Coaching usually speeds up the process, but life circumstances, vocal health issues, or mental health can all slow progress down.

If I think there are external factors getting in the way, I’ll be upfront about that. Sometimes it might mean suggesting a visit to an ENT or a speech therapist, or simply reassessing what kind of progress is realistic right now. Sometimes wanting to succeed isn't enough if, say, your dysphoria is so bad that you can't focus on practice. In that circumstance sometimes seeing a therapist that can help you figure out how to manage dysphoria in so far as it's possible may be neccesary for you to see further progress. While I don't ever feel particularly comfortable recommending it, some people may even opt for voice surgeries and, for some of these people it's the right choice. All this stuff might seem a bit stressful and dark, but if we want to be practical we want to make sure that we're making informed choices. Sometimes addressing the difficult stuff is what makes progress move from unlikely to easy.

Being practical also means being realistic about vocal goals. For instance, if passing naturally is a key aim, then using cartoon or video game characters as vocal role models probably won’t make much sense, because those voices rarely sound like real people. That doesn’t mean those goals are wrong, but it means we have to ask questions around what you really want out of voice training. If your goal is to pass and blend in only only then toning things down may be the right thing to do, but if the reason you're voice training is largely about doing it for yourself and self expression then it's totally valid to accept the trade off of 'this might draw more scrutiny' for 'this feels more like me.'

Talking about this stuff lets us figure out what's actually right for you in reality and not just on paper. For some people, passing is a matter of safety, which naturally affects how we weigh our options. It’s all about finding the most practical path that still aligns with what matters most to you.

Sometimes you can have mutually incompatible goals and you need to figure out what you're willing to give e.g. sometimes people feel uncomfortable about changing certain things, but avoiding them makes passing harder. 

Practicality also shows up in the reality of how we use voices. To improve a voice, you generally need to use it, even when it sounds awkward or incomplete. That can be challenging if you don’t have many safe or comfortable places to practise. In those cases, we might need to find ways to make it work, like practising privately in Discord servers, in games, or in small social settings. Real progress usually requires speaking with others, not just practising alone in a quiet room.

Being practical also extends beyond the technical side of voice training. If you struggle to practise, stay motivated, or find opportunities to use your voice, those are things we can absolutely talk about in lessons. I’ve spent entire sessions brainstorming practice plans with students, and that often ends up being far more useful than repeating the same exercises again. The goal is to spend our time on what’s most productive for you, even if that means stepping outside the typical training format for a bit.

Keeping lessons and practice manageable and ideally engaging is another piece of practicality. Sometimes that means doing fun or creative tasks like singing, mimicry, or experimenting with silly sounds and voices. Sometimes it means finding a community of people to practise with, or reporting back to me about how long you're spending on practice each day. Depending on how practice is going to be as practical as possible we may increase or decrease the amount/types of homework you work on as well!

And, of course, practicality also means being realistic about what can fit into your situation. Some people want to progress quickly, but are poorly suited to fast paced lessons and need to slow down. Sometimes people can only afford one lesson even if they'd really want more ideally, in that case recording might be almost neccesary to make sure we can cram in as much value as possible and so it can be remembered or at least returned to. 

Ultimately, when it comes to practicality it's not just about being efficient, it's about moving you forwards in the best ways possible within the constraints of your goals and reality. I will always aim to approach lessons in the ways that are most practical for you and not just applicable to the average student.

Adaptability is the final of my core teaching values, there are definitely other things that influence it, but, these are the five that i tend to think inform my teaching the most. They manage to feel like the connective tissue that helps to keep everything in place. 

Adaptability is a bit tricky to place and I was unsure of whether to include it as something separate to practicality as they share a lot of similarities, but I do tend to think they're both important with some nuances between them.

If practicality is about working within the reality of the situation we’re in, then adaptability is about being ready to change things up when that situation shifts. That might mean adjusting how we approach lessons, or for you, it might mean trying your voice in a new context and feeling comfortable with that process. Which is something we may well go into in later lessons.

When I think about adaptability, I always try to remind myself that every student is a different person. Everyone brings their own experiences, bodies, needs, and goals. No two people are identical and that means their lessons won't be identical either. Of course, there are patterns that carry over between students, and what I learn in one session might apply to another, but people also change over time. The situation in one lesson vs the next can be quite different, even if it's just based on the kind of day you've had before the lesson, so i try to be ready to for that. We need to be ready to adapt towards what's practical. 

This is also why I don’t create pre-set lesson plans or fixed schedules. It’s not practical because I can’t predict exactly how someone’s skills will develop between lessons. What I can do, though, is prepare for the idea that you might be in a different place than I may have expected and be ready to meet you there.

We might plan to introduce SOVTEs but end up focusing on something else entirely. Or we might move faster than we expected and cover more ground. Even if we started with an approach in mind in terms of pacing, we may well change that to something faster or slower in the moment.

We adapt depending on the content, your progress, and how you’re feeling about it. Everyone learns differently, and what someone finds easy or hard is highly individual.

Homework is similar. Sometimes I’ll give you more if I think you’re ready to handle it confidently, but if something’s proving tricky, we might slow down and have you focus on one small thing. Like with practicality, adaptability thrives on communication. The more we talk about how things are going, the better I can adjust to your circumstances and help you get the most out of your lessons.

Ultimately, what we do in lessons depends on the context we’re in at that moment. I will always aim to go for as close to in sync with your needs as I can be, because this tends to make learning easier!