Advice please

I have been asked to start a songwriting workshop for intermediate/advanced levels, as part of a local community music initiative (Wiltshire/NE Somerset, UK). Lots of songwriting experience, but not workshop experience. Tips and advice welcome.

In particular:

1. What books would you recommend as good resources? 2. What periodicals/tipsheets? 3. What frequency (monthly planned at the moment)? 4. How often to showcase? How to select for the showcases? 5. How often to invite publishers/other biz people?

There is a demand to help novices too (aged 11 to 15). Any resource books for beginner songwriter level?

Thanks, in advance, for your kind help.

Teaching is always a new experience for anyone. Perhaps you can have a chat with the teachers in the music department of the local community college (or whatever), and perhaps sit in on some of their classes.

'Music pedagogy' is the 39-cent term that might be a good search-term for Google.

When I sit in a workshop, I want to hear the instructor's war stories, and I like to hear a small amount of his music, but I want the material to frequently and consistently turn back to /me./ To what /I/ can learn, and critique of /my/ work. A 'workshop session' where 'we shall develop a song together' ... you, the instructor, provide the seed and guide the session(s) ... would also be a good idea.

Some of those 11-15 year olds are hardly novices; be prepared.

Songwriters have the common experience of feeling that they are fumbling in the dark and that, if anyone else has fumbled too, they aren't able to be in contact with those people enough to learn where the submerged rocks are, or to learn the good directions to take out of the hundreds upon hundreds that seem to present themselves. That's what your workshop's mission statement ought to be.

It helps, I think, to /have/ a 'mission statement' for the course .. don't bore your students with it but keep it pinned to _your_ office cork-board .. and to constantly test your ideas and materials against it.

I have been asked to start a songwriting workshop for intermediate/advanced levels, as part of a local community music initiative (Wiltshire/NE Somerset, UK). Lots of songwriting experience, but not workshop experience. Tips and advice welcome.

In particular:

1. What books would you recommend as good resources? 2. What periodicals/tipsheets? 3. What frequency (monthly planned at the moment)? 4. How often to showcase? How to select for the showcases? 5. How often to invite publishers/other biz people?

There is a demand to help novices too (aged 11 to 15). Any resource books for beginner songwriter level?

Thanks, in advance, for your kind help.