Hovland Conservatory of Music

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My daughter attended their Piano lessons offered in Arizona branch for ~1yr. Hovland has teaching facilities in both MN and several places in AZ. We decided to leave this program and I regretted not doing this sooner. There are a couple of things I noticed and would like to share:



1. They offer the first 8 trial classes for free to allow kids to get a feel if they like to piano or not. This part is great.



2. Hovland did “great” info session to parents. One of the staff member (Peter I think is the name) is a great sales person to peach about how wonderful their lessons are and how different it is from other places. The hype of after 7yrs with the program how great your kids would become. They played a wonderful recital recording during info session and I was bought into that. No wonder they lure some many Kinders to the class!



3. The teaching philosophy is to only discuss student progress over email or phone call, not in front of students or with instructors directly. They said the instructor will report out the student progress to staff member and that will turn into email communication to parents. The progress communication through email part NEVER happens in past 1 year. Phone call is always routed to voice mail and leaving message asking for call back never works. But I did receive call from them “immediately” when my auto-payment credit card number changed and my monthly payment was unable to be processed by their office 



4. All students at the same age are expected to make the same progress by end of the year. Believe me, that class goal is NOT challenging AT ALL. Kids are not challenged enough and the offered class notes are super easy. In preparation for the recital session, my daughter has been playing the same recital song for the past 3mons and she is not along, all students do that. I wonder how many kids stay interested after this. After so many repetitive recital song playing sessions, no wonder all students do great in recital session. But this is misleading! I met a couple of parents and their kids have been with this program for almost 3yrs and still don’t know how to read notes. Kids have camera memory and they just memorize it… This is the exact situation that Hovland mentioned in their great info session to be avoided.



5. The class instructor qualification and very high turnover rate. I started questioning the qualifications of their instructors after I saw their ads looking for instructors on Craiglist. No doubt that there are some very capable ones, but others are just lack of enthusiasm about teaching kids piano. Hovland class instructors have VERY high turnover rate. During our 1yr stay. I’ve seen more than 1 dozen instructors come and go. No wonder that Hovland encourages changing instructors frequently during their info session.



Stay away if you can.