By: Merv Young

Senior RGT Examiner, Merv Young, provides advice to help you prepare yourself or your students for the RGT Electric Guitar Teaching Diploma.

The DipLCM(TD) is a fully-accredited guitar teaching Diploma launched several years ago by RGT.

It consists of four components: fingerboard knowledge; lesson; presentation; discussion.

The specific requirements for each component are detailed in the RGT Electric Guitar Teaching Diploma Exam Information Booklet.

In this article we’re going to look at some practical ideas for each section, and you can find further details for each of these sections in the RGT Electric Guitar Teaching Diploma Exam Syllabus.

Fingerboard Knowledge

All of the scales and arpeggios should be played ascending and descending, without a pause and without repeating the top note.

Multi-position scales should be played in the same octave wherever possible. Playing two notes per beat, you should be playing the scales at approximately 152 b.p.m. and the arpeggios at approximately 120 b.p.m.

You are expected to be able to devise or research your own fingerings for all of these requirements; hopefully this approach should suit most teachers who can use their own preferred fingerings.

Guitar Lesson

The requirement here is to teach a 20 minute lesson to a pupil in the examination, or alternatively to submit an audiovisual recording of yourself teaching a 20 minute lesson.

In many schools, particularly at primary level, 20 minute instrumental lessons are now the norm.

For those of you who are more used to giving 45 or 60 minute lessons then a 20 minute slot may well come as a bit of a shock.

It will require some planning and preparation but if you stay focused, you can achieve quite a lot within this relatively short time period.

The purpose of this section of the exam is to show the examiner how you actually teach.

To be successful in this section therefore, do just that. Although you will have planned the lesson beforehand, don’t stage the lesson or script it out.

Similarly, don’t prime your pupil to ask pre-arranged questions and don’t feel that you have to select the most capable pupil you have either.

The examiner will be looking for evidence of how you inspire others to play the guitar – so don’t just ask your pupil to reproduce a long list of scales, chords and arpeggios – that’s not teaching.

Be creative and constructive, and stop after 20 minutes!

Remember as well that the examiner isn’t looking for a faultless performance from your pupil as an indicator of your teaching abilities.

In fact it would start to look suspicious if your pupil made no mistakes at all. So, deal with anything that crops up in the way that you would normally during a lesson – by correcting and encouraging.

Let’s look at some ideas that you might consider using if your lesson pupil was of RGT Grade One standard.

Among the chords and scales for this grade are a two-octave E blues scales played in open position:

You might want to focus on their lead playing by introducing them to this E blues scale and trying out some simple bluesy phrases.

If they already know the scale, then get your pupil to improvise a solo – then you could demonstrate to your pupil some other techniques or lines they could use with that scale.

You could try out some simple question and answer phrases here either by composing them yourself or by seeing if your pupil can come up with some short, effective licks during the lesson itself.

Among the chords that are required for Grade One are E7, A7 and B7 all in open position.

This gives you a great opportunity to look at some simple blues rhythm ideas for lesson.

What you do from here will depend on what your pupil can already do: maybe get them playing the chords for a 12-bar blues in E and offer suggestions as to how to strum the rhythm or vary the strumming pattern in certain places to make it more interesting, or to add some dynamics into their rhythm playing.

Perhaps your pupil could play these chords while you play a simple solo or melody. The bottom line is to take this standard progression and teach it in a way that is interesting and inspiring.

Presentation and Demonstration

This part of the exam provides you with the opportunity to expand and develop upon the ideas and techniques you utilised in the lesson component.

In broad terms you need to explain what you do, how you do it and why you do it.

Your lesson probably only focused on one or two areas of guitar playing; you need to broaden things out in this section and talk more generally about all aspects of your approach to teaching.

Some initial background information is always helpful, such as where you teach, how many pupils and what range of abilities they are.

You can include practical details such as using a practice notebook and warm-up tips for each of your students, to more creative ideas such as how you develop improvisational techniques, composition, use of backing tracks during the lessons and so on.

Although you will want to plan this part of the exam very carefully, don’t read it from a script.

Work out what you are going to say and then say it as naturally as you can rather than read it.

You’ll find that it will flow much more smoothly if presented like this. Also you will find that the examiner will jump in with questions from time to time so you need to be prepared to deviate from your prepared presentation.

If you’re not used to group teaching or lecturing and presentations don’t come naturally to you, then plenty of practice might be needed here.

For instance, you might like to try practising your presentation in front of a willing audience of friends or family.

To help you plan for this section in a little more detail let’s look at some ideas you could incorporate in your presentation.

The syllabus specifies that your presentation should cover your approach to teaching lead and rhythm playing techniques, as well as general musicianship and aural awareness.

Let’s look at a pupil of RGT Grade Three or Four standard and consider how you might outline your approach to teaching scales and improvisation.

With the variety of different scales that are introduced at this level it’s a good idea to have a range of songs that you can use to demonstrate a particular scale and style of music.

Let’s say that one of your favourite teaching tunes has the following chord sequence:

Hopefully you’ll be able to explain that your Grade Three pupil could improvise over this chord progression using either the Ab major or pentatonic major scales.

Would you expect your pupils to learn these scale shapes and then jump straight in with an improvised solo?

You might teach only one octave of these scales to start with or maybe a solo from a song that uses some of the notes from the scale.

All of these approaches may be equally valid – provided you can explain, and demonstrate, your reasons for teaching in this way.

For example, you might prefer using the pentatonic major scale with a pupil who prefers more rock and blues based songs, whereas the major scale might be more fruitful with a pupil that is either more experienced or prefers a more melodic or jazz-influenced sound.

Also, you might find that your younger pupils cope much better technically with the pentatonic major scale as an improvising tool rather than the major scale.

Discussion

This section of the exam is a discussion between yourself and the examiner on any issues arising from the previous sections of the exam.

The focus here will be on the standard of pupil you selected to teach in your lesson component.

So don’t worry about being grilled on the finer points of Grade Eight if your pupil was of Grade Two standard!

You may be asked to clarify or expand upon something you said or did earlier in the exam, or the examiner may ask questions on aspects of teaching that haven’t been fully covered in the previous sections.

Although being questioned in this way may seem a bit daunting, do remember that being able to analyse and respond to questions relating to how you teach will give you a much deeper insight into your own teaching and will, therefore, help to improve how you actually teach.

Let’s take a look at some examples of the type of questions that might be asked. “How would you develop your pupils’ confidence when performing?”

Hopefully the experience of having lessons will provide your pupils with a big confidence boost, but it’s good to have a variety of tactics at your disposal.

You might try recording your pupil playing a lead solo, or a rhythm part, or an entire song if you have the facilities.

All of these suggestions will have the advantage of placing your student in a situation where they have to perform under a little more pressure than usual.

If you teach in groups then you have plenty of opportunity to develop confidence skills by involving everyone in a performance situation.

This could be a rehearsed song or an ad-hoc jamming session. Again try recording this if you are able to so that your students have a chance to criticise and analyse what they did.

How about performing a rhythm or lead part from sight as a means to developing some playing confidence?

Remember this is an integral part of the RGT electric guitar grades – so you could see how your Grade Three pupil copes with playing a rhythm chart from the Grade Three handbook with only about 30 seconds of preparation time.

In the discussion you could then describe what feedback you would give your pupil if there were errors in their playing, and how you would ensure this feedback encouraged them and didn’t demoralise them.

Another typical question the examiner might ask would be: “Can you explain your approach to teaching aural skills?”

For a pupil around Grade One standard you might start by playing or clapping simple rhythms that they have to play or clap back:

You might tie this in with developing your pupils’ music reading skills by getting them to play or clap the rhythm whilst reading it from a flash card.

If you teach small groups you might try getting one of the pupils to clap the rhythm whilst the others try to play or clap it back.

If you are focusing on teaching pupils of Grade Three or Four then maybe you try to encourage them to work out relatively simple solos or chord progressions from songs.

If so, then what advice do you give to make this process easier?

You might start by playing some major or minor chords and seeing if they can identify them as major or minor.

Or maybe you do the same thing with a natural minor and a major scale.

How do you explain the different sound of major and minor?

Remember that this is about how you approach teaching, so make sure you can explain and demonstrate your ideas and techniques clearly all the time.

Do you have any questions regarding the RGT Electric Guitar Teaching Diploma? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.