I’ve been a guitar teacher for over 15 years and I’ve taught thousands of different lessons to kids, adults and groups on all aspects of guitar. I know how hard it is to plan and teach an effective lesson especially when you’ve had no training as a teacher. To help you with this I’ve created a large selection of free guitar lesson plans that you can use in your teaching.

Some of the plans cover broad subjects like chords and rhythm. Some cover more specific songs or techniques. There’s also a selection of guitar lesson plans that have been designed specifically for teaching children. You can browse my selection of plans below or if you would like the newest free guitar lesson plans sent straight to your inbox sign up to the Teach Guitar Now mailing list. You also get lots of other teaching and marketing help.

HOW THE GUITAR LESSON PLANS WORK

I’ve designed all my lesson plans using a similar structure and there’s a few thing you need to know before you start using them. Everything I cover below will also help you plan and create your own guitar lessons in the future.

LESSON OBJECTIVES

Each plan has a set of lesson objectives at the start. These are the things your student will learn in the lesson.

It’s crucial that you always know what these are before you teach a guitar lesson. If you don’t know exactly what you are trying to teach your student you won’t be able to plan effective tasks and activities for.

Here are a couple of examples of lesson objectives.

  • Play the E, A and D chord shapes without using the diagram.

  • Play the intro to Wonderwall using a simplified rhythm.

You want your lesson objectives to be very specific. For the first lesson objective it could just be ‘Play chords on the guitar’. But this very vague and won’t help you plan your lesson.

With ‘Play the E, A and D chord shapes without using the diagram’ you know exactly which chords we’re are focusing on and which resources you need. You can plan some activities to help memorise the chord shapes. If you are teaching kids this is an ideal opportunity to plan some memory games to help them.

Your lesson objectives should also be written in a way so you can build on them to help your student progress. The second objective could just be ‘Learn how to play Wonderwall’. But there are some many different things your student will have to learn before they can play the full song. It’s much better to break it down into sections.

With ‘Play the intro to Wonderwall using a simplified rhythm’ you know which section your student will be learning and that you will be focusing on rhythm. You can now plan some other rhythm activities to help support your student with the main objective.

You can also build on this lesson objective. In your next class you could play the intro section with a complex rhythm or learn another section of the song.

HOW TO USE THEM IN YOUR TEACHING

You have to remember that all of your students are different and you need to individualise your lessons for them. I’ve written my guitar lesson plans for a generic student but along the way I will give you some ways you can tailor them for your students.

If I’m covering a big topic like chords or rhythm my plans will cover all the different stages that you need to go through to achieve the lesson objectives. For some students you may need to spread this out over a few lessons. It can be boring to just cover one subject for an entire lesson, this is especially true when teaching children.

Your students might need the time to practice some the activities in between the lessons before they are ready to move on. It’s your job as the guitar teacher to make that decision based on your student’s needs and ability.

RESOURCES USED IN THE GUITAR LESSON PLANS

In the some of the plans I will talk about specific resources that I use in the lessons. All of these resources are included in The Guitar Teacher’s Resource and Marketing Pack. As well as all the resources from my lessons plans it also includes really useful marketing templates which will make your social media marketing much easier and more effective.

You can always make your own resources to go along with the lesson plans. I use Guitar Pro and Neck Diagrams to create my materials.

REQUEST A LESSON PLAN

I create new guitar lesson plans on a weekly basis. They will be available through this site or they can be emailed straight to you.

If there’s ever a guitar lesson plan that you need that I haven’t got send me a message and I will add it my list to create.