As a music teacher you will have a curriculum to follow, and it is much easier to follow if you organize music lesson plans at the start of each new session. There is a wealth of information online if you feel you are running out of ideas. You want to have a plan organized for each lesson for your students, each covering a different topic or aspect of the subject. They affect all music teachers – those who teach school children and those who teach individual students privately.

How rigidly you stick to your music lesson plans is entirely dependent on how well your students react to them. Some children are faster learners than others, and it is a shame to hold the brighter students back while concentrating on the ones who find music, or aspects of it, that bit harder to learn. In this case, it is better to have your music lesson plans organized to include more advanced worksheets that your brighter students can work on while you concentrate on getting the slower students up to grade. Ideally your plans will cover all possibilities, a class full of exceptionally able students, or a class full of less than able students, will call for a different approach from you.

Music lesson plans have to cater for all eventualities, including sickness. Whether that affects you, or your students, you will have had to prepare your plans in such a way that this possibility is taken into consideration so that at the end of the session or course, you can be assured that all your students received the teaching as outlined in your initial curriculum.

In the end, you can tell whether your music lesson plans are effective or need improvement based on your students’ performance. Identify which part of the plan they enjoy the most or find difficulty in and improve them.