Student Onboarding

One of the things that makes Sage Music different is our fanatical focus on personalizing our music lessons and approach around each student’s unique personality, preferences, learning style, and goals. It all starts with our student onboarding. The onboarding is all about focusing on you. We’ll spend a full hour dedicated to learning about you and how we can help you best.

The onboarding is completed before your first lesson so that you and your teacher can hit the ground running. Our students tell us that after taking the onboarding they feel super prepared and ready to start their lessons. And they realize how much Sage Music is really different from other music schools, because of how much we really focus on you.

Students leave the onboarding feeling like they are in control of their own direction, and that they don’t have to fit into any box here.

That’s exciting to us, because that’s exactly how we believe it should be.

We realize that you are unique and have your own interests and goals and learning style. The student onboarding is designed to help us uncover those things. In the onboarding, together we’ll

• Set your goals
• Set your preferences
• Assess your personality and learning style
• Answer any questions that you may have

For online music lessons, to be there are no technical issues, we’ll

• Test your online lesson setup
• Learn how to navigate your online lesson room

Goal setting is one of the more important learning activities that you can do. We are going to help you learn exactly what you want to learn. But in order for our teachers to plan the route, they have to know where you want to go.

In the onboarding, you’ll write clearly defined goals that will help both you and your teacher come up with a plan that will get you playing exactly the music that you want.

There is also much evidence that deliberate practice, which includes setting clear goals, produces much better results and helps students achieve more. Parents will also be happy to know that when children have some input into their learning, they stick with it longer.

Just like our students all have unique goals, they also have different preferences on how to get there. We’ve surveyed thousands of our current and former students to determine exactly what is important to them in their music lessons.

And it turns out that there are 9 categories of things that are important to our students. And most students have very different answers to these questions. In the onboarding, you’ll record your answers to these most important questions. This will allow our teachers to personalize their approach to your learning.

For example, some students want their lessons to be 100% work. No socializing. No small talk. They just want to get to work. For other students music is a social activity and they want to spend some time socializing with their teacher during the lesson. One of our preference questions lets you decide how much socializing versus how much work you want in each lesson.

We want to get it right for you.

We use a well validated psychological assessment to learn more about your personality so that we can teach you in a way that works best for you.

For example, some students score very high in a factor called openness to experience. These students thrive on new ideas and trying new things out. So our teachers are going to introduce more new styles and types of music.

On the other hand, students who score low on openness to experience can be uncomfortable with lots of new things and tend to have a good sense of what they already like. For these students, we are going to push less boundaries and stick to what you like to ensure that you are always comfortable.

We are also very interested in how different aspects of personality affect learning and practice. We are always researching this to improve our approach to teaching, and to help students learn and practice more effectively in light of their tendencies.

At the end of the personality assessment, we provide each student or parent a full copy of their results if they wish.

After your onboarding is complete, we’ll input your goals, preferences, and insights into how you best learn into our Arpeggio® music lesson system.  Our teachers will then prepare for your first lesson, so that you can hit the ground running with a plan personalized just for you.