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Episode 233: Cheers to Knowing vs. Doing

Well hello there, my studio music teacher friends!  Welcome to the Beyond Measure Podcast! Christina Whitlock here: your host, voice of experience, and Anytime Piano Teacher Friend. Don’t you love how I’ve already decided we’re friends?  I can’t help it. I think we would be friends in real life. I’ve come to find anyone who resonates with this show is someone I could hang with in real life. But – until we meet in person – you have me here, in your ears, each week. One of my favorite things to do on this show is to name the things that go too-often unnamed in our work, and today’s episode aims to do just that. Are you ready for it? Let’s do this thing!  You are listening to Episode 233 of the Beyond Measure Podcast.

Do you ever have one of those weeks where you find yourself giving the same speech to every single student who comes through your studio?  😊  Every once in a while something aligns in the universe and it seems like every student needs to hear a version of the same thing.  Well, the last few weeks have felt like that in my world. There is one specific something I find myself reminding my students lately, and I thought maybe you’d appreciate hearing it, too. Perhaps your students need to hear the same words as mine.

I’m a little nervous about this one, because it’s something I’m sure you already know. I almost pulled the plug on this entire episode because I’m not sure it feels revelatory enough.  Then again, I think it’s a reminder we all need, so even if this doesn’t feel earth-shattering at first, stick with me, okay?

BECAUSE you know this… and BECAUSE it’s so obvious to you… I wonder if it’s one of those things that you haven’t verbalized to your students enough.

So, I guess I’ll just go for it: We’re talking today about the fact that KNOWING something and DOING something are two different things. And – in the world of music – they are both VERY important.

Here’s the thing: The bulk of my students these days are late elementary players and above. And there’s something interesting that happens in that late elementary stage: students KNOW a lot of things at that point. They are equipped with quite a few fundamental understandings of music. We’re not revealing a lot of BIG new information. From there on out, we mostly talk about concepts that are smaller in scope, more detailed, more nuanced. At this point, our students often understand the basics of music. They can make sense of their music on the staff. They can calculate rhythms. For the most part, they understand what they are seeing.

This is a wonderful accomplishment!  I love seeing my students understand that they now have skillsets to decipher what’s in front of them. Hooray!

…but there’s some cognitive dissonance that enters the picture at that time, and I think it goes overlooked by a lot of us.

We need to understand: our students’ classroom experience thus far at school has taught them that KNOWING information is enough. Our students often learn and memorize facts. They recall those facts on an exam, which results in a good grade, and they think that’s all there is to it. They know their material.

Music is different. KNOWING and DOING are two very distinct stages of being a musician.

I’ve said this to students a million times over the years: I tell them I need to see two things from them.  First, I need to see that they CAN figure out the music in front of them. I need to know they can make sense of what they’re seeing. They understand whatever elements of music we’re emphasizing at that point. THEN, secondly, I need to know they HAVE figured it out. As in, they’ve put their knowledge to work. They’ve put in the time. They’ve done the reps. They have DONE it.

All that to say, the difference between those stages is a matter of KNOWING vs. DOING.

I don’t know about you, but my students don’t struggle as much in the knowing department, but they definitely don’t always hold up their end of the bargain in the DOING department.

Again, most of us recognize this. I’m not revealing anything new to you.

BUT – just like we talked about a few weeks ago, most of us are quick to blame the issue on lack of practice time and call it a day.

“Okay, Johnny… you know HOW to do it, now I need you to go home and DO it.” Right?  Practice more and the piano world will be your oyster.  😊

Obviously,  there’s truth to that.

But let’s talk about one reason our students aren’t practicing more. Hint: it’s not ALWAYS the soccer team’s fault.

Put yourself in your students’ shoes for a moment. Literally: Go pull out a piece of music that is around performance-level for you. Something you’ve never played before. I’ll wait.

…no, actually I won’t wait. But try this later, okay?

Even if you are a top-notch sightreader, there will be elements of your chosen piece that you’ll probably need to work on. That’s inevitable, right?  The more we know about music, the higher our standards are and the more we realize we never really max out our potential with a piece of music.

All that’s a given. But here’s the important part: pay attention to how you feel when you encounter those areas that are going to require some more work. Pay attention to how quickly frustration sets in. How quickly that negative voice creeps in and says, “Why can’t you do this already?” “Something must be wrong with you. You know exactly what the music is asking you to do”…

Pay attention to all those feelings. And understand – those same thoughts are occurring to your students. They, too, are thinking, “I know what this is telling me to do. Why can’t I do it?”

…and I can’t help but think THAT FEELING and THOSE THOUGHTS are a bigger part of the reason our students aren’t practicing than we realize. Again. Maybe it’s NOT just soccer. Maybe our students are getting frustrated because they don’t realize there’s a difference in KNOWING vs. DOING.

This is especially true with my adult students. Working successfully with adult requires a lot of reassurance. It’s one of our top jobs with more experienced learners.

One of the frequent reassurances I offer adults comes down to this: It’s not enough for our brain to know what we’re looking at. Or what we WANT to accomplish. We have to DO it. Over and over and over again.

And the DOING is not guaranteed just because we understand what we’re trying to accomplish.

Our adult brains will cycle through ALL the lies: “You should already be able to do this by now”. “You know everything on this page. Why won’t your fingers DO IT already?”

(Or, maybe the most problematic of all) “You don’t need to work on individual phrases. That’s for babies. Just play straight through the whole thing.”

Sigh.

Sometimes we forget the physical realities of what we do: we have fingers, muscles, tendons, ligaments, nerves, blood vessels… all performing their part in what we do at our instrument. NOT TO MENTION all the neural pathways that need to be established between our brains and our bodies before we can play something fluidly… that all takes time. Time and repetition. I said that two weeks ago on this show, right? Time and repetition is irreplaceable.

But here’s the thing about human beings:  We’re bad at time and repetition.

We think – once we KNOW something – we’re done.

It’s like this: My teenager is a cross country runner and she is constantly dealing with pain in her shins. She’s been through physical therapy. They’ve given her 8,000 exercises and stretches to strengthen that area of her body. But guess what? If she doesn’t actually DO those things? Nothing gets better.  KNOWING what you need to do is different than actually DOING it.

Again – that sounds obvious – but we are ALL guilty of avoiding time and repetition in different areas of our lives. In fact, I’m not just here roasting my kid. I’ve talked to a lot of people who have undergone physical therapy for one problem or another and I’ve deduced that the VAST MAJORITY of people who go through PT do NOT consistently put in the recommended time and repetition at home once they’re done with therapy.  Or sometimes even during the course of their treatment.

It makes me feel like the physical therapists of the world are kindred spirits. 😊  Like, we get frustrated enough with our piano students who don’t practice. Physical therapy is more intense AND more expensive than lessons, yet those physical therapists are constantly dealing with people who aren’t holding up their end of the deal at home, either. We’re all out here trying to make the world a better place, dealing with clients who avoid the time and repetition necessary for us to do our best work.

So – JUST like exercise… JUST like learning an instrument… JUST like any type of new skill… we have to START by knowing what to do to improve. And the KNOWING is a really important step, but knowing is not enough.

Do you have any of those students who can give you ALL the right answers? Like, you say, “Tell me how you’re going to practice this at home” and they can outline the 3-step process they’re going to take and give you a full-blown academic report on how they’re going to accomplish their goals for the week… but their track record tells you they are probably NOT going to do that?

I think it’s important to remind these students that KNOWING isn’t enough. I think it’s good to call out the fact that a lot of their educational experience has been based in learning things with minimal action or follow-through. It’s important to explain WHY learning their instrument is different.

Remind your students: if they play in a band or an orchestra at school, they get dedicated time multiple days per week to PLAY THEIR INSTRUMENT. That’s how those groups are successful. They are actively DOING the thing. Every day or every other day. Not just learning about the thing. They are immersing themselves in their instruments. They’re learning as they go.

Same with sports: There is a lot of knowledge that goes into athletic pursuits. That’s a critical first step. But after the KNOWING comes the DOING. And any athlete will tell you: repetition and consistency is a strong part of the process.

I guess my biggest contribution today is this: As teachers, try our best to get inside our students’ heads. Right?  We need to think of things from their perspective, not ours.

When you can name something your student is thinking before they’ve said it out loud themselves? Your student WILL feel seen and understood.  And, you know how I feel about helping students feel seen and known: they need to experience THAT before they will fully commit to anything we say.

SO:  The next time a student is struggling from lack of practice, try saying this:

“It seems like you’re feeling frustrated because your brain knows what it wants to do, but your fingers are not following suit. Am I right?”

Chances are, they will say, “YES!”

And that’s your in, friends.  Then you remind them, in the plainest language possible, that THIS is what sets learning an instrument apart from, say, learning about the fall of Rome.  Learning the facts of music; learning how to interpret the symbols on the page… that’s only PART of this artform of ours.

In fact, it’s not even the GOOD part. It’s the academic part. The FUN stuff comes through DOING IT. PLAYING IT. EXPERIMENTING WITH IT. CREATING the experience you want to give to the world. That’s the good part. Don’t skip the good part.

Your fingers need time to build familiarity in their pieces. There’s just no way around it. But why do we think that’s tortuous? Why are we so reluctant to repeat something we are doing well? Shouldn’t we actually enjoy playing a passage once we’ve corrected an error?  Isn’t playing the point?

See… it’s just like I was talking about last week. We are all out here treating our practice time like an academic study. Like a pass/fail exam. We approach our assignments as though they are a laundry list of errors to be corrected, and once we check all our practice boxes, we can move on.

I’m over that whole approach, friends. So over it. The point of playing the piano is to do that very thing: play the piano. And that means DOING the things we know. Over and over again. It’s not figuring something out so you can pass your piece in your next lesson. That’s not, actually, the point.

Too many times, we focus on the KNOWING part in our lessons. I’m not trying to downplay that aspect of teaching; it’s ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL for us to be helping our students KNOW their stuff. I just think there’s a LOT of emphasis on teaching the knowing part out there… and we need to start thinking about how to teach the DOING part.

This means setting our students up for success with appropriate assignments and appropriate preparations in the lesson itself. It means making sure parents are on board with our expectations and that ALL PARTIES INVOLVED have the same goals for the week. There’s A LOT HERE to unpack, but maybe more importantly than any of that, we need to simply look our students in the eyeballs and reassure them that there IS a difference between knowing a thing and doing a thing. There are physical truths at play here that mean we make mistakes EVEN when we “know better”.

If you’ve not had this kind of conversation with your students lately, perhaps it’s time?

While you ponder that one, allow me to offer a toast to send us on our way this week!

Studio music teacher friends from, well, a little bit of everywhere:  Today I encourage you – and your students – to remind yourself there is a difference between knowing and doing. Let’s not use this fact as yet another something to feel guilty about, but, rather, something that EXPLAINS why our fingers do not always follow our brains. May we all embrace those tried-and-true elements of TIME and REPETITION and remember that, yes, PLAY is the point of it all. Cheers to you, my musical friends!  Hear, hear.

So, yes… KNOWING and DOING are two important steps in the learning process, and we need to make sure we’re not overlooking one or the other. I hope this has been a helpful reminder for you today, and I *also* hope you’ll come back and listen next week, as we will be celebrating – officially – FIVE YEARS of Beyond Measure. Phew!  Five whole years, friends. What a joy you’ve been to my life.

It’s going to be a good one. I’ll be back with  you next week, friends!  In the meantime, onward and upward we go.