Teach Students How to Practice, Not Just What

Every assignment should come with how to practice it, not just what and how long. That’s where I start when teachers ask me how to teach students to practice: a student who knows the process can improve without you in the room. From a student’s point of view, that’s what the best teachers do: they teach them how to practice.

What I saw in my own studio

I learned this the hard way, with my own private students. They’d come to me for thirty or sixty minutes and learn whatever we worked on that week. I’d give them things to practice. Then they’d come back the next week having either practiced the wrong thing and built bad habits, or forgotten what to practice altogether.

Things changed when I asked for less time and more often. When I said, “Practice this for just one minute a day, but try to do it every single day between now and next week,” they came back highly proficient.

That became part of how I built Practicing Musician. One of the goals was short video tutorials, thirty to sixty seconds each, so a student could practice a little every day with an expert demonstrating it correctly, and hearing a clear explanation, every single time. I drafted the curriculum for 21 instruments and beta-tested it every week, for a year, in 5 schools.

What I saw in those classrooms surprised me. Students were glued to the screen. A short video is easy to pay attention to, and they got to practice right away, with exactly what to practice and how to do it. It wasn’t too much information. When they came back to band class, they were ready to keep going.

The same thing happened with my private students once they had video to watch between lessons. They came back having practiced correct technique. They hadn’t been practicing past fatigue, or with too much on their minds. They were ready to go. It was pretty incredible to watch.

Minutes measure effort, not attention

Most teachers and parents mean well when they say “practice thirty minutes a day,” or “an hour once a week,” or “play it until it’s right.” But minutes measure effort, not attention or progress, and that’s backwards.

New skills move into long-term memory through more frequent repetitions, spread out over time. A major review of ten common learning techniques rated spacing practice out over time as one of the two most useful (Dunlosky and colleagues, 2013), and researchers who pooled hundreds of memory experiments found that spacing practice out beats cramming it together (Cepeda and colleagues, 2006).

That doesn’t mean everyone should practice for two minutes a day. It means a student should practice for as long as they can pay good-quality attention. If they can hold their attention for a full hour, wonderful: practice for an hour. If they only have half an hour, and their attention is wonderful for that half hour, that’s great too. But if they can focus for thirty-five minutes and push on for an hour, the last twenty-five minutes are poor-quality attention. They’re practicing making mistakes. They’re not making progress; in many ways they’re going backwards.

I say perfect practice makes perfect. I don’t mean perfectionism. I mean playing it to the best quality you can at the time, and pushing for higher quality over time. If a student keeps messing up because they’re tired, it’s fine to put it away, then come back to it the next day, and the next, until it’s right.

When students practice the wrong thing, or without the right quality of attention, it’s easy for them to get frustrated, decide they’re “not musical,” and quit, when the truth is they just weren’t practicing the right way.

Why teaching the process works

Students who practice with a goal and feedback improve faster than students who just put in time. In a study of advanced piano students learning a hard passage, how long they practiced and how many times they played it didn’t predict how well they played it the next day; how they practiced did, especially how often they played it correctly (Duke, Simmons and Cash, 2009). A meta-analysis of 435 studies found that feedback has a solid effect on learning, and a stronger one on thinking and motor skills (Wisniewski, Zierer and Hattie, 2020). The classic study of expert violinists tied the best players to years of focused practice (Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer, 1993), but a later meta-analysis found that the amount of practice explains only about a fifth of the differences between musicians (Macnamara, Hambrick and Oswald, 2014). Hours alone aren’t the whole story.

Writing and testing that curriculum taught me that many students don’t practice because their method book isn’t enough for them on its own. They can’t hear what it’s supposed to sound like. They’re not getting the demonstration or the explanation at home, so it doesn’t sound like it did in class, and they get discouraged. They put the instrument aside and think, “I can’t do this.” I believe that’s a big part of why so many students drop out between fifth- and sixth-grade band, or in their first year of private lessons.

There’s simply too much information to hold onto from a thirty- or sixty-minute lesson. Most people can only hold about four new things in mind at once (Cowan, 2001; Cowan, 2010). Thirty minutes of new information is just too much.

Teaching that makes you less necessary

Equipping a student to grow on their own is serving them, not just directing them. I want every student I teach to be able to learn on their own. I don’t want them to become reliant on me, and I certainly don’t want them to idolize me. I want to inspire, encourage and ultimately motivate them to become whole musicians and whole people, with a unified mind, body and spirit.

As a servant leader, my job is to make each student less dependent on me over time. I believe music is the most powerful spiritual tool we have, and a student who knows how to practice can carry it through their whole musical life and into everything else they do.

Change this in tomorrow’s lesson

Give every assignment three parts:

1. The goal. Maybe an even tone on these four bars only, not the whole song. Break it up so it’s manageable, something the student can pay attention to the entire time.
2. The method. For example: start slowly and work on one thing at a time.
3. How they’ll know it’s done. Give them a recording to listen to or play along with, so they can compare. If the goal is their own expression, have them record themselves and decide whether they’ve played it well enough.

At the next lesson, ask the student to show you how they practiced it, not just play it. That’s how we do it in every Practicing Musician lesson, and it’s how I work with every private student I coach.

Parents: instead of “Did you practice?”, ask “What were you listening for today?” Get specific, and skip the yes-or-no questions. Learning runs in a loop: input, processing, output, then feedback to tell whether it was right. The goal is a student who can give themselves that feedback. That takes observational skill, and a question like “What were you listening for?” asks your child to analyze their practice and teach it back to you.

If you’d like to bring this way of teaching into your own studio or homeschool, it’s the work I do with music educators and homeschool parents in My Private Studio. Serving students this way is also at the heart of my talk Servant Leadership in Action, and the free 7-Day Practice Plan is a week of short, attentive practice you can hand to an older student.