This episode is part 3 of the Building a Band Program series on the Rock School Proprietor podcast, hosted by John Kozicki (Michigan Rock School and RockSchoolProprietor.com).
In this episode John shares strategies for effectively grouping students into bands in your music school. This includes using variables like age, ability level, and musical interests in conjunction to find the best fit for students to build an engaging group environment that students will love.
Included:
- Variables for grouping students: age, ability, musical interest
- The importance of social development in band rehearsals and finding balance with ability levels
- Strategies for flexibility when grouping by age and ability levels
- Avoiding some common pitfalls when putting students in groups for your band program.
If you’re interested in starting a band program in your music teaching studio or looking for ideas to enhance or grow an existing program, this series is for you! In it we will cover how a band program can create a strong community in your studio, increase profit margins, and lead to greater student retention.
Interested in the Building a Band Program webinar?
We’re planning a free live webinar to accompany this series on Friday, July 24, 2026. John will go deeper on these topics and answer your questions directly. If you’re interested, send an email to info@rockschoolproprietor.com with the subject line Webinar and we will be in touch with details.
Rock School Proprietor is a podcast for independent music school owners and lesson studio operators. New episodes drop Wednesdays at RockSchoolProprietor.com and on all podcast streaming platforms.
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Episode Transcript:
(Please note: This transcript was generated by robots. There may be errors. For the best experience, please listen to the podcast episode.)
John Kozicki (00:01.35)
Welcome to Rock School Proprietor Podcast and welcome back to our special series of episodes called Building a Band Program. My name is John Kozicki and in this series, I’m sharing my years of experience running a rock school with bands as a central focus in my music school. If you’re thinking of offering a band program or looking for tips to elevate your program, maybe you already have it. This is the place.
Maybe you have students or parents who are even suggesting or asking you to offer some sort of dynamic group program where kids play together and perform together. Or maybe you want to have a competing offer with one of those larger franchises like School of Rock or Bach to Rock. I know that is something I hear often in the online groups and from other studio owners. You start to get a little nervous when those franchises move into town.
I’m here to help. I’ve done it. I’ve competed with those franchises. So that’s what I’m sharing. I’m sharing all the info that I have about building the band program at my own school, Michigan Rock School. Today’s topic, how to group students into bands. This can be complicated. And again, I get asked to this, well, how do you…
There’s so many variables. Yes, there are a lot of variables or there can be a lot of variables. I think the key is controlling those variables and figuring out how you want to approach them, which are important in which are not so important. And generally I kind of see a couple of schools of thought on this. One school of thought is grouping students or band members by age.
This is one of the things that I often see from some of those larger franchises that offer band programs. It’s very much just focused on age and then grouping all of those kids in that age group into a very large group or ensemble and then sort of figuring out how to segment them out from there. I find this as a very general way of grouping kids into bands.
John Kozicki (02:23.51)
and it can work. And in many cases, though, what I think it will lead to is this second school of thought. And this is kind of the one that I’m going to talk about. And it’s the one that I use in my studio, which is a more curated approach to consider a few other variables besides just age. I think it’s there’s more
in my opinion, a little bit more longevity there. It’s definitely more work and slightly more complex on the front end. But I’m going to walk you through how I approach it, because I think it pays off over time, because if you’re ultimately going to end up there anyway, you may as well just start there in the in first place is my thought process. So I’m going to walk you through this more curated approach to grouping the students into bands.
And there are essentially three variables that I consider when we are setting up our bands at Michigan Rock School. Age, ability, and musical interests. Now keep in mind, like you could add other variables, but the more variables you have to consider when you’re trying to group these kids into bands, the more complicated the process will get.
And on top of that, you simply need more students in a pool to make that work when you do consider more variables besides things like age and ability level and all those things. I mean, you’re already dealing with instruments that they play, which is sort of an unspoken variable that I’m not even going to get into in this episode. So how I do it and how we do it at my school.
We group for age and ability first. So those are those first two variables. And then musical interests last. And I’ll get into that a little bit more as we go. So let’s start with age. I think age is probably the most important variable when you’re trying to group these kids into bands. And even then, what we try to do is we segment those
John Kozicki (04:49.928)
ages of the kids into into ranges. So basically, we’ve got an elementary school aged range, we’ve got a middle school age range, and then we’ve got a high school age range. They’re not firm guidelines, I believe in a little bit of flexibility there. That gives you more ability to work within this somewhat complex system with
more variables to be able to make exceptions. Say for instance, you’ve got a kid who is maybe fifth grade age and he’s a really good fit for maybe a group of kids that are in sixth and seventh grade. You can make an exception. But the age range is more general guideline. But I do think it’s important because when we’re putting these kids in groups,
Part of the allure and part of the draw for the band program. Yes, it’s playing music together. That’s a huge part. But it’s also that bond that the kids make. Emotional development matters when we’re talking about age range. This is a social activity. Again, yes, it’s about playing music.
but it also becomes a very social environment when kids are in band rehearsals. We’ve even had situations where the families of the kids in a group would get together outside, not just the kids, but the families of the kids would get together outside of band rehearsals before final performances for one more run through of their set. And they’ll go all out.
and the kids are playing airsoft and video games and then running through their songs and then having pizza. And that’s very social. It all spawns from this idea of playing music together. But I think it’s important to remember how social this activity becomes. And that is so important because that’s the thing that’s gonna keep these kids engaged in this activity. It’s the thing that’s going to improve your overall retention.
John Kozicki (07:15.499)
with your students in these band programs, that is where the magic happens. So yes, keep in mind that this is a social activity. Now, flip side, we’ve definitely had situations where we’ve had an exceptionally talented kid for his age and even some pressure from parents saying, my kid is
talented and can play with these older kids. I had to push back and say, I don’t think that’s a good idea. And the situation I’m talking about, I’ll name it here. We’re talking about a kid who was in, I want to say maybe fourth grade and playing at a very high level, playing at a level where in terms of skill, he definitely could play with
kids that were maybe 15 years old. And we got pushback from parents wanted the kid to be in a more challenged environment. While I understand it. What I think parents don’t view, and I think it’s important for us to consider is when you put say a nine year old in with a group of 15 year olds, socially,
those kids are completely different. The nine year old is going to feel way out of place socially. The 15 year olds are going to feel uncomfortable too and not on their game because there’s a younger kid in the group. So you got to consider the social activities or this as a social activity. So that’s a long explanation to basically say that yes, age is a
important variable. So think of those three age ranges like elementary age, middle school age and high school age. All right, variable number two, what we consider is the ability of the student kind of goes along with what I was just saying. But I tend to say that age sort of trumps ability in a sense. How do you do this? How do you figure out
John Kozicki (09:41.772)
what ability level this kid is playing, these kids are playing at. Especially when you’re dealing with a lot of kids to group into bands. It’s very easy when you’re talking about, you know, I’m trying to put these two bands together from the students in my music school, we’re talking about maybe, you know, eight to 10 students, pretty easy. You can get a read on their ability. When I’m grouping students in my music school, we’re talking about, you know, maybe 90 kids.
And so we’ve developed a process to essentially assess these students based on what they can do. And then we categorize them into essentially different levels. And for each instrument, we have different skills that we have the instructors assess the students at. Can they do this? OK, cool. Then they’re in this level. Can they do these skills?
If they can do these skills, then maybe they’re in this other ability level. If they can do these other skills, then maybe they’re in this even higher ability level. So ability level matters. It’s basically categorizing all these kids, right? And so using these variables, then we were able to sort of look at pools and categorize the different kids so that we can group them together. Last variable that we consider is musical interest.
This is a tricky one. It’s important, but it’s not static, meaning that the musical interests of all of us, but students in particular, ebbs and flows and changes over time, a band that they love one month, they may not like the next month. So these things change. So it’s a tricky variable to consider. We do try and consider it though.
More important though is making sure that students understand that they need to be willing to be a little bit flexible in these situations. They may have to play songs that they don’t love. They may have to play songs that they downright do not like, but they’re also going to get to play songs that they do like.
John Kozicki (12:05.665)
instructors have to curate that a little bit. Instructors have the final say, at least at my school, what these students are going to play and what songs they’re going to play. So yes, consider musical interests when you can. I think it again helps with that social aspect of it. If kids are excited about the music that they’re playing, then they’re going to be more likely to be engaged in in the groups and have fun.
But, you know, take that with a grain of salt, because it is a really tricky variable. I put it last in the list of those three variables to consider when you’re grouping the bands. All right, now, I’m gonna mention something that I would advise you try and avoid. Try to avoid when you’re grouping these students into bands.
Try and avoid adding rehearsal times into that mix.
And what I mean is going to parents of interested students and saying something like, hey, does this time for rehearsal work?
If you have a list of five students or six students who are going to be in this group and you ask each one of their parents that question, you are going to get different answers. So don’t even bring that into the conversation. This is not like private lessons where you do ask, hey, how about this time or this time? Think of this more like how maybe a sports team would operate or how dance classes operate.
John Kozicki (13:54.183)
Neither of those go to the kids who are interested in these activities and say, we’re thinking about practice times. What do you think about this? They don’t do that. They just set a time and participants work around that to work it into their schedule. I get that this might be a hard thing to wrap your brain around.
in music lessons, especially if you’re so used to private lessons, because this is contrary to how we do tend to operate. We are accommodating. We do say what times work for you when you’re talking about private lessons. It’s just not practical when you’re working with groups. Now, the pushback I’ve gotten from some people when I’ve mentioned this is like, well, but we want to make sure that they they like this experience and
they’re gonna like the experience, right? And if parents and students are motivated to do this program that you’re offering, they will work around it. They will make it work. You can still change their lesson times for them, their private lesson times for them. You can still accommodate them for those things. But again, think about all the variables. We’re talking about a group of five or six kids. We’ve got an instructor.
We’ve got room availability. You have to be the one to say, is the time when we’re going to be offering this group. Hey, does this work for you? This is a really good, we think this is a really good fit for your kid. There’s some kids that are the same age as him. They’re at a very similar ability level. Hey, they even like some of the same music. We really think your child is going to love this.
this is the time that we’re gonna offer it, what do you think? If it doesn’t work for them, it doesn’t work for them, but you can’t let that spoil the entire process. I would, again, caution against that ask, does this time work for you when you’re talking about grouping these kids into bands? All right, I hope you gained some insight on how to group students and band members into these
John Kozicki (16:16.256)
bands from this episode. Stay tuned. We’ve got more cool topics planned for this series, like how to choose songs. What does a band class or rehearsal actually look like? How do you manage students in rehearsals? And then some elements of great concerts. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you next time.
