Background
College and high-school guitar-club members turn over every year with wide skill gaps, and clubs usually run on senior-to-junior handoff with no system. I brought in the teaching methods I’d built at my music workshop to show that club teaching can also be designed and evaluated.
What I did
- Designed an annual curriculum from learning-development theory, combining cognitive, affective and skill dimensions; broke down folk-guitar skills through guided decks, live demos and multimedia.
- Served as contracted instructor for the guitar clubs of National Taiwan Ocean University, Oriental Institute of Technology, Chihlee University of Technology and Huafan University, plus Qingshui, Haishan, Taishan and Mingde high schools — eight university and high-school clubs at once.
- Set up teaching pods and a mentor system to track learning outcomes; evaluated with classroom tests (L2), small showcases (L3) and a large recital (L4).
- Ran a two-day, 16-hour officer leadership camp centered on club management, team leadership and meeting procedure, with 100+ officers attending.
- As lead organizer, had each school’s PR team connect with a different nonprofit every year, co-fundraised at the annual recital, and ultimately co-hosted a charity concert.
- Ran a parallel own-brand instrument business (distributor for FARIDA and Xin-Li-Sheng): designed several entry-level folk guitars, ~200 sold a year, with bulk orders exceeding NT$600K.
Outcome
Six-year teaching satisfaction averaged 91%+ and post-camp satisfaction 95%+; coached Oriental Institute of Technology’s guitar club to a top rating in the national college-club review; the eight-school charity concert ran for six years with local media coverage. This was the first time I ran the full loop of needs assessment → curriculum design → evaluation — the prototype for my later corporate training work.