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The Art of the InterviewYou can fill your studio with resources, become a serial attender of pedagogy conferences and approach every teaching day with Walt Disney creativity levels, but if there are problems on the practicing front, the lessons will quickly die. The reality of this profession is that your job satisfaction—in fact, the ability to do your job at all—is dictated largely by how students work at home.
Given that, it's worth finding out about how this prospective student is likely to approach the six days between lessons.
I've always been much more interested in how students practice than how much, (see The Practice Revolution) but with transfer students in particular, lessons start with you being at the 
mercy of established patterns. If the student has been doing all their practice in a single panic session on the morning of their lessons, you have to know that. Not because you shouldn't accept them as students—I would have missed out on some of my best ever students if I had weeded out travel companions on that basis—but because it affects your agenda for the initial lessons.
So we sit down with a schedule, and construct a picture of their week. But here's the thing. I don't even mention practice. I just tell them that I'm interested in what keeps my students busy, and was wondering how their week pans out. The plan is to spend ten minutes filling in everything—when they get up, when they leave for school, when they do their homework, sports, dinner, computer game playing time..."practicing" is always carefully omitted from my list of examples. The question is whether it's also omitted from what they write down.
This whole exercise is best done with a parent at least present, just to make sure that there is independent corroboration of the picture you're being presented with.
Whether practice is missing from the picture or not, the next step is always the same. You're going to ask them to show you how they could fit a lot more in. A lot more. I mean, crazy-get-out-of-here-you-must-be-kidding more.
The key here is to make the demands almost unreasonable—not because you're really planning on insisting on that level of commitment, but because you want to see how they react when the request is made. Even if there's no way you'd normally ask for this amount of work, there will be times when you might need to...I would know more about the person on whom I might need to place such a burden.
So I tell them. "Ok, this looks like a busy schedule! Here's the thing though—let's imagine I needed you to find an extra four hours each week of practice, and needed you to agree to that before lessons started. How could you make that practice happen?" I'm not actually all that interested in the details, but I am very interested in their willingness to consider each suggestion. They could get up earlier? Commit to linking practice to the size of their allowance? Practice twice on a Sunday? Practice during three of their seven free periods at school? Adopt an every-day-even-on-my-birthday policy?
My experience is that the leopards here declare—and then rarely change—their spots. Students who pull a face at the idea of getting up thirty minutes earlier are the very students who are likely to resist that idea if you ever needed it. Other students though will actually make suggestions of their own and approach the whole exercise with a spirit of "let's do this".
With practicing being such a major issue in any studio, such a student is getting a major tick from me—even if they currently were reporting less practice than some others I might have met with earlier.
If you really want to know what it's going to be like to work with a student, nothing beats, well, actually working with them.The "concert in 10 minutes" tactic is designed to give you a taste of what might be ahead were this student to come aboard permanently, and is especially good for brand new beginners.
The way it works is that you tell the student that they'll be giving a performance in 10 minutes' time—600 seconds to get the new piece ready. It's something they've never seen before, but it's short and carefully chosen to be something they could do...possibly...if they work spectacularly well.
So what could a beginner do in 10 minutes?
Don't get too picky about posture, hand position or other details. Instead, you're going to play a piece for them that uses the two notes on your instrument that are easiest for a raw beginner just to play. Play the whole thing for for them once—so they know what the finished produce needs to be—and then start the clock.
With the countdown now running, something wonderful has happened. You've become a team, and you're both about to learn a lot about each other.
As long as both the student and parents are comfortable with the idea, I'll often send parents out of the room at this point—the plan being that we're going to surprise them with the performance.
For the next 10 minutes we'll be working hard together to cook and then serve the student's very first piece, all within the confines of a time limit that would otherwise seem crippling. The atmosphere is similar to those backyard renovation shows where the team needs to complete the makeover before the family returns from their holiday, with the ticking clock adds a compelling sense of urgency to all preparation.
At the end of the 10 minutes, you'll have a student smiling because they've just played their very first piece (even if it was just three Cs and a D) Parents will be clapping and making isn't-this-amazing noises to everyone in the room. Give your student a high-five, and tell them what a great job they did.
In the middle of all this congratulation , you'll have developed a strong impressions of just how well you two might work together—it's up to you now to decide if you'd want this team every week. If you've enjoyed the past 600 seconds, chances are the the lessons ahead will be fun too.
Turnaround Time is the length of time it takes a student to get a piece from "never seen it before" to "ready to play for my teacher"...and then ultimately "ready to perform". Obviously short turnaround times makes your life much easier, and keeps lessons and repertoire ticking along at a healthy pace (for hints on slashing turnaround times, see the Turnaround Time entry on pages 352-359 of Practiceopedia)
That transfer student in front of you might seem thoroughly charming, but you're going to be less easily charmed if they take a semester to learn each two page piece. So it's time to do a little fishing, to get a sense of just what their turnaround time expectations and skills are...just so you know you're not in for years of glacial progress.
Ideally, the student will have with them a book of music they've been working on. Choose a piece in there that's representative of the standard of the pieces they have been playing recently, but one that they haven't seen before.
At this point, you're not going to ask them to play it—instead, they have to answer a question:
"If I were to give this to you today, how long would it be before I could hear it from beginning to end?"
You haven't said anything at this point about "fluently" "no mistakes" "from memory" or "up to tempo", but their request for clarification on these parameters (or the lack of such a request) will speak volumes.
Once they've told you their estimated Turnaround Time ask them why they chose that answer. So if they had told you 5 weeks, then ask what each of the weeks would be for. What sort of shape would they expect it would be in after 2 weeks?
You'll hear a guided tour of how they normally do things. Even if it seems overly slow to you though, it's not game over—the real point of interest here is how they respond to the idea that they might consider working differently.
Having heard their estimation, now it's time to see how they might respond to a shift in what they're used to. If they told you 5 weeks, ask how they could achieve the same result in 2 weeks. What would they need to do differently? How much help would they need? Where would that help come from?
If they seem reluctant, or are overly quick to declare it "impossible", have them imagine that the deadline exists because they have to perform the piece on national television in 14 days...to win $100,000. With that sort of motivation, most students would find a way, and you'll learn a lot from the strategies they suggest—and even more from the things they don't say. (See also the Marathon Week entry in Practiceopedia for more tactics for getting jobs done in impossibly short time frames).
However, some students will just continue to protest that it will take them 5 weeks no matter what...in which case a saying about old dogs and new tricks comes to mind, and you might be better off without this particular puppy. Better now than after three or four unhappy years, and hundreds of hours in the car together.
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