Better Practice Blog- Show Me The Way: Using Indicators and Milestones to Guide Students Through a Tough Piece
Show Me The Way: Using Indicators and Milestones to Guide Students Through a Tough Piece
Sometimes when I was younger, I would get a piece to learn that was so long or so difficult that I just didn’t know where to start. I would get overwhelmed just looking at it. So day after day, I’d put it off - until, before I knew it, a week passed and I hadn’t touched the piece. I’d sulk into my dreaded lesson, praying my teacher forgot about the assignment… But of course, that never happens. Yes, I was one of those students: I’d attempt to sight-read through it, stumbling, until I was stopped with “…You didn’t practice, did you?”
Why do we not want to practice what's hard?
I thought about this recently because it’s still an issue. Why do I put off what clearly needs the most practice? Why do I save the hardest tasks for last? And it’s not just me: my students are often reluctant to take on a piece they think is “too hard” for them. Why is that? Then I realized - we’re not lazy, or unconfident, or afraid (for the most part). We’re simply less motivated to go for something that doesn’t have a clear path to reach it. We want to see improvement quick - or at least, some proof of improvement. And sometimes that’s hard, especially when you’re in the process of building skills. Sometimes you’ve got to sleep on it to see any progress.
Of course, there are people who are invigorated by a challenge and jump on any opportunity they get to learn or play something ridiculously difficult. And then there are people like me, who see that thick stack of music with clusters and clusters of notes, accidentals, and/or alternating time signatures all over it and just think… “Ugh.”
The Solution: Guide their practice
If you are teaching a child the multiplication table from 0-12, you don’t expect them to memorize it by simply reading it through in its entirety every day. Typically, you would say, “Learn multiples of 2 today. And then when you’ve got those, learn multiples of 3, then 4…”, and so on. Now, you've broken up the larger goal into smaller, manageable chunks and given them a clear path to embark on. Now it’s not an overwhelming table of 144 numbers - there’s a method to the madness.
The same should be done for music. When a goal is so large that progress day-to-day seems minimal (key word: seems), the student needs some indication that they are still, in fact, moving in the right direction. This helps keeps students from getting discouraged (which would eventually keep them from moving forward at all).
Using Assignment Milestones and Indicators to encourage practice
Assignment Milestones
Let students know they are on the right path! Break up a larger piece into smaller chunks and keep track of their achievements. The journey doesn’t feel so treacherous when it’s filled with small achievements to keep things moving. For example, work on a piece in sections (which is a big part of research-proven practice techniques like these) and make perfecting each section a milestone of its own.
You can make a checklist of milestones (of sections to work on) in Better Practice and mark them off as they are completed. This way, the student will see an overview of the path they will be taking and how they are moving through it.
Indicators
Another way to measure if you’re on the right track is to know if you’re working hard/frequently enough. In Better Practice, the teacher can set an amount of practice that they want the student to reach (minutes/items per day and/or days per week). The student will now see an Indicator bar on their practice page, showing them their progress toward that amount and how much more they need.
Our objective here isn’t to make the student practice for a certain amount of time/a certain number of items every day. Focusing on length of practice time isn't such a great way to go - it usually just results in mindless practice focusing more on the minutes left to go rather than the quality of work achieved during the practice.
Noa Kageyama of Bulletproof Musician puts it perfectly:
Practicing mindlessly is a chore. Music may be one of the only skill-based activities where practice goals are measured in units of time. We’ve all had teachers who tell us to go home and practice a certain passage x number of times, or to practice x number of hours, right? What we really need are more specific outcome goals — such as, practice this passage until it sounds like ____, or practice this passage until you can figure out how to make it sound like ____.
So, while we provide the option to indicate if the student is practicing enough, we recommend you don’t make that the focus. It might seem a bit contradictory - but we’ve actually found it helps a lot to have these indicators in place (which we’ll outline in more detail below) when it serves predominantly as a little kick-start or reminder to students, like “Oh yeah, I should practice at least 5 days a week and I’ve only done 3 so far.” As long as the teachers put more focus on what and how the student should be practicing, the students use the Indicators mainly as a reminder to stay on track. And when they get to the piano bench, they actually end up getting lost in the practice, practicing much more than was requested.
Here’s the data
We’d heard so much good feedback from teachers using the Indicators feature that we decided to take a look at the data. We analyzed the data of music schools using the feature in Better Practice and looked at how it affected their students’ practice times. We looked at two specific Indicators measured: the Time Indicator (referred to in the graph as "How Long"; where the teacher sets how many minutes per day the student should practice) and Number of Items Indicator (referred to in the graph as "How Many"; where the teacher sets how many separate items per day the student should work on). The sample size is still fairly small as it is a new feature, but the results were still outstanding. Take a look:
We’re looking at the change (before having Indicators to after) in # of Items Practiced and # of Minutes Practiced. Notice: practice increased in all conditions. Having an idea of how much they should be practicing and visually seeing if they’ve reached it or not really got students to the bench.
My statement above was that giving the student a set amount of time to practice (Time Indicator), would mainly result in students mindlessly practicing until their time was up. When we look at the results, it’s very consistent with that hypothesis: setting a Time Indicator produced far smaller results than setting a Number of Items Indicator. And the Time Indicator produced the smallest change in # of Minutes Practiced (a.k.a. hopping off the bench as soon as the time was reached).
On the other hand, providing the Number of Items Indicator made practice skyrocket! These practicers weren’t thinking about the clock. They were able to focus on each assignment as its own set of needs. To me, this implies more room for improvement, focus, and getting lost in the music. This manifests itself in the results with an amazing 128.3% increase in number of items practiced as well as an almost-200% increase in duration of practice.
This tells us two things:
YES, you should give students an outline of what’s considered below average, good, or above average in terms of length of/strategies for practice. Having Milestones and Indicators laid out for them makes your expectations clear and their path visible.
NO, you should not make the length of practice time the focus of their practice. It doesn’t help too much.
So the next time your students are looking intimidated by a giant piece or starting to look unmotivated - break up the project into small milestones and show them, clearly, the path that they will be taking to achieve them. Being able to see the road ahead of you is a big motivator to get people to take the first steps and to keep moving once they're on it.