How do you deal with canceled lessons?
Every student needs to cancel a lesson from time to time. Some students are more careless than others, canceling lessons to go see movies or because they did not study for their lesson. But even the best students can get sick or have a family emergency.
Some teachers are strict and do not provide any refunds or make-ups. If you do not show up you lose your time and your payment. If your lessons are highly sought after and you get away with that, lucky you. For the rest of us this would not work.
If you simply let your students cancel lessons you lose money. What’s even worse, it creates the wrong attitude. Students will learn that it’s OK to call or email you and cancel. They even save money by doing that!
Fortunately, you can have the best of both worlds. Allow your students to reschedule a lesson if they need to. But instead of canceling it, offer a make-up lesson. You are nice to them by accommodating their needs. You still get paid. And they get their lesson.
Except… that good old day planner begins to look messy and you are doing admin work instead of teaching.
How nice would it be to have an online calendar where you could keep track of all lessons for every student? If every student could go online and notify you when they cannot make their future lesson? What if they could also select one of the times that you provide for make-up lessons? And now that their time is available, maybe another student could use it to make up their own lesson? Right, right, that’s exactly how Lesson Signups works. You get an email for every schedule change so you are always up to date. And if you have an emergency and need to cancel a lesson you can use it too! Log into Lesson Signups, mark the lesson a canceled and your student will be notified. They will go online an select a make-up time that works for them.
Isn’t that awesome?
How do you deal with canceled lessons?
