Epiosde 271: Cheers to 7 Things Students Need to Know About Practice

Well, hello there, studio teacher friends!  Welcome to your weekly shout-out of solidarity, otherwise known as the Beyond Measure Podcast. Christina Whitlock here, your host and self-appointed Anytime Piano Teacher Friend. I’ve been teaching private lessons for more than 30 years.  I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I DO have a lot of experience and I love unpacking all the human elements of teaching here alongside other thoughtful teachers like yourself. This show is supported by a terrific crew of people I call my SuperFriends, and if you are interested in joining in on THAT fun, membership does come with some pretty great perks. Check out ChristinaWhitlock.com/superfriends for all THOSE details, and in the meantime, let’s get on with the show!  Thanks for listening to the Beyond Measure Podcast.

I know I’m not alone in this, but I did not learn how to PRACTICE – really practice  – until very late in my piano studies.  I know a lot of musicians and MANY of us share the same story. We didn’t learn how to practice until college. Or, perhaps, even later than that.

Today’s episode is going to feature sort of a lightening round of 7 Things Students Need to Know About Practice. This is by NO MEANS a comprehensive guide to practice; it’s just a few things you can communicate to your students easily that will increase the effectiveness of their practice in a big way.

If you’re looking for a deep dive on the art of practicing, there are a few books I would recommend. First and foremost, the book that most recently rocked our music teacher world, Learn Faster, Perform Better by Dr. Molly Gebrian. That book has received a LOT of attention, for good reason. It applies neuroscience to the art of music study, and manages to do so in a format that is easy to read and understand. That’s Learn Faster, Perform Better and I will link that and my other recommendations in today’s shownotes.

Another classic book on practice is Philip Johnston’s book The Practice Revolution. There are lots of great ideas in that book.

This feels like a good time to sing the praises of James Clear and his seminal text, Atomic Habits. That one is not specific to music teaching but there are countless applications to our work there. I think Atomic Habits should be required reading as a human being, and talked more about it back in episode 129.

I’ll also remind you of my deep love for Vanessa Cornett’s book, The Mindful Musician. Like the first book I mentioned, this is a thoroughly-researched book that is ALSO easy to read. It’s not entirely built around practice, but I feel like it belongs in this conversation. I talked more about The Mindful Musician in episode 132 of this show.

Those books – again – were Learn Faster, Perform Better by Molly Gebrain, The Practice Revolution by Phillip Johnston, Atomic Habits by James Clear, and The Mindful Musician by Vanessa Cornett.

So, those are my recommendations for deeper dives into practice, but let’s get on with my lightening round list of 7 Things Students Need to Know About Practice!

First up, I’m going to say TIME isn’t everything.  

Everyone wants to know how long they should practice for. One of my undergraduate friends said her mom would set a timer for 30 minutes of practice every day, and she would know when the 30 minutes were up because her mom would come in and put a Hershey’s Kiss on top of the piano and leave without saying a word. That was their signal that her practice time had been completed.

For the record, I think that’s a sweet memory. She said her mom would still come sneak a Hershey’s Kiss onto the piano even when she would come home from college to visit.

Here’s the good thing about setting time limits: it communicates clear, measurable expectations and emphasizes consistency. Those are good things.

Here’s the bad thing about setting time limits: It’s overly-simplistic. I was a kid – and a teen – and a college student – who put in a lot of hours at the instrument. I defined my efforts by the number of hours I practiced. But here’s the sad truth: you can spend a lot of time at the instrument accomplishing very little.

…I want to note that time at the instrument doesn’t always HAVE to be productive (of course it doesn’t. There are MANY more important things than productivity when it comes to making music). BUT: when you’re working towards a goal – a performance, a piece, even a lesson – HOW you spend your time is more important than HOW MUCH time you spend. I’m going to say that one again: HOW you spend your time is more important than HOW MUCH time you spend. Shooting for long practice hours kind of just hedges your bets. It’s like hoping that somewhere over the course of that 30 minutes (or three hours; whatever) you will manage to accomplish enough to be satisfied.

I’m not one to live life with a lot of regrets… but I will say this: the amount of TIME I gave to practice growing up and through my university studies? It was a lot. And knowing what I know now about HOW to practice? I could have saved myself SO MUCH PRACTICE TIME. Or, I could have accomplished more. Both are true: I could have had a lot more fun not locking myself away in solitary practice rooms, OR I could have progressed a lot further, a lot faster.

I can’t lie; sometimes I feel a little ripped off when I let myself think about it.

SO: that is why it is so important to me to help my students practice BETTER. Again – efficiency in music isn’t everything – but it is certainly SOMETHING, especially with our 21^st century obsession with packing calendars full of every activity known to man.

Anyway, it’s important students understand TIME isn’t everything. Instead, every practice session needs to have a goal. Or goals. It’s difficult to do. It’s tough mental work. But mindless repetitions are not the way to accomplish your goals. At any given moment during your practice time, you should be able to answer the question, “what am I working for right now?”  Am I working to play this phrase without slowing down? Am I working to find a better placement for my thumb during this scale passage? Am I working to voice out the left hand when it has the countermelody I love?  Am I working to stay consistent with my key signature?

Even: “Am I just going to play this for my own enjoyment”? That TOTALLY counts; I just think you should name it.

That was a lot of words to convey a very simple point: Time is not everything. We can’t just punch our practice timecards and call it a day. We need to name our objectives throughout our practice.

Point number two for today? 3 minutes is exponentially better than 0 minutes

Again, we get tied up in expectations of what a “real practice session” looks like, and those expectations can lead us to thoughts like, “I don’t have 30 minutes right now so I won’t practice at all”. I’m here to tell you: if you sat at the piano for three minutes today and played scales? If you listened and felt for fluidity throughout those three minutes? You’ll walk away a better pianist. If you sat down and played the first two phrases of your sonatina, then went back and played them again with better balance? You’ll walk away a better pianist.

You really CAN accomplish things in small doses at the instrument. In fact, during my collegiate years, I often jumped into a practice room for 10-15 minutes between classes because I realized those large swaths of time were increasingly harder to come by. I’d actually argue that 3 individual 10-minute practice sessions will often yield a better result than 30 straight minutes. There are exceptions, of course, but I always want students to recognize the power of practicing in SMALL chunks of time when necessary.

Again, 3 minutes is exponentially better than 0 minutes.

Point number three? Your seating position MATTERS.

Oh, boy. This is a big one. This is one of the reasons I enjoy having occasional online lessons with my students. Students know the routine of finding a proper seating position here at my studio, but I find – at home – they will often just plop their little bodies down on their bench wherever it happens to be. Too close, too far, too high, too low… they’ll just go with it. But, of course, we hope our students are playing more at home than they are in our studios… which means they REALLY need to give more attention to their seating position at home. Their feet should be stabilized, and the bench should be at a proper height and distance from the instrument. This really is important for technical development AND for injury prevention. No one thinks they can get hurt playing the piano, but it’s far more common over time than students and families realize.

Again, your seating position MATTERS.

Point number four? Practice at DIFFERENT TEMPOS

Piano teachers are notorious for telling students to PRACTICE SLOWER. SLOW DOWN. I can’t begin to imagine how many times a week I say SOMETHING along the lines of slowing down. I even have a sloth figurine that hangs next to my music rack and on his back are the words SLOW DOWN.

There’s good reason for this, of course. Slow practice is often overlooked by our students, and it is the solution to a myriad of problems.  That said, this is another piano teacher staple that can easily get over-simplified.

I’ve mentioned this a lot over the years, but most students have what I call a Comfort Tempo. Some Comfort Tempos are slow, others are wildly fast. Left to their own devices, I find most students have a specific tempo they default to until prompted otherwise.

One of the best litmus tests to see if your students understand rhythmic relationships between note values is to see if they can execute rhythms at different tempi. If they can play the correct quarter note/eighth note passages at one speed, but then that relationship sort of disintegrates at a faster or slower tempo? Something’s amiss.

…and, instead of waiting to find that out at their piano lesson, one very simple thing you can ask students to do is to play their pieces throughout the week at 3 different tempos. This does not even need to be a slow-medium-fast type of situation, though it can be. In the end, I want my students to understand the wide variety of tempo choices available to them. So if that means breaking out the metronome and trying to play a passage two clicks faster and two clicks slower than their “comfort tempo”? I think that’s great. It’s an important lesson in the many nuances available to us as musicians.

You know the pains of early elementary students who just plod one note after another?  E – D – C – D – E – E – EEEE?  Sometimes students get so committed to the concept of a steady beat that they sacrifice the entire concept of METER and PHRASING? Learning to conceptualize music at different tempos is a really important part of breaking them out of robotic playing.

So, again: Practice at DIFFERENT TEMPOS

Point number five? USE YOUR PHRASE MARKS

From the time our students start to see slurs – otherwise known as phrase marks – in their music, they should understand those markings are, essentially, practice guides.

We all know students need to learn how to break music down into smaller pieces when they practice. Playing each piece from start to finish only gets them so far. Phrase marks take ALL the guesswork out of how to break down their pieces, yet many students overlook them.

A lot of teachers seem to wait until Intermediate stages of teaching to introduce the ideas of practicing phrase-by-phrase, but I like to start my students on that idea as soon as those markings begin appearing. They learn to practice the first phrase, playing it until it is accurate, predictable, and fluid. Then they go onto the next phrase until IT is accurate, predictable, and fluid. Then they string those two phrases together. Like many of you, I will often use sticky notes to block the upcoming phrase so students aren’t tempted to work ahead.

It FEELS like it takes a long time, but students learn their music MUCH FASTER this way. If they don’t believe me, I challenge them to do it my way for one week. I welcome them to prove me wrong, but of course, they never do.

There are MANY things that take a lot of mental effort in practice, but this one is often pretty cut-and-dry. Use your phrase marks. They are built-in practice guides.

Speaking of Mental Effort, here’s number six on my list: Your Brain SHOULD Be Tired after practice.

Again, not all time at the instrument needs to feel like WORK. Please don’t miss that. It is incredibly important that our students are spending time exploring and playing at the instrument in a way that DOESN’T feel taxing.

….but, again… when working towards a goal: their weekly lesson assignments, an upcoming performance, whatever…. In those cases, your brain SHOULD feel as though it has worked. All that goal-setting and intentional practice I mentioned earlier?  After a good, substantial practice session, you should feel as though you’ve exerted some real mental effort. Sometimes I’ll have student athletes tell me, “why does sitting on the piano bench make me feel so exhausted?!” and I have to remind them that their brains – and their bodies – are doing a LOT of work while we sit here.

If you don’t feel that way, well, it’s a good sign that you were probably PLAYING, but you might not have been PRACTICING.  There is a difference. Both are important. There is no shame in playing for the sake of playing. I’m a big advocate of doing just that.  And yet – if we want to be chasing down our big musical goals – we need to couple our play time with legit PRACTICE time.

Again, Your brain SHOULD feel tired after practice.

Okay, that brings us to our last point for today: Number Seven: Practice After Your Lesson

I know, I know… the majority of students feel like their timecard has been punched on their lesson day and they don’t need to practice at home that day.  I’m here to tell you: 10 minutes of work reviewing what you did in your lesson on your own? Sometime between the end of your lesson and the time you go to bed that night?  That routine will benefit you more than almost anything else on this list. There’s a difference between walking through material with your teacher and walking through it on your own. That post-lesson review session on your own will help solidify the concepts explored with your teacher in enormous ways.

I always think of our setup during undergrad: the professors studios were across the hallway from the practice rooms. I studied with a teacher who would watch where we walked after our lesson, and if we didn’t turn down the practice room hallway, he would yell at us to turn around at get in a practice room.

This professor also routinely turned 1-hour lessons into 2 or 3 hour lessons… and the LAST THING we felt like doing when leaving his studio was sitting back down at the piano.  Even still, I learned what a difference it made, and that was a habit I tried to maintain with future teachers.

Practice after your lesson. Review what you worked on with your teacher. It makes an enormous difference in the days to come.

So friends, there you have it: my Starter List of 7 Things Students Should Know About Their Practice.

I’d love to know what practice tips land on YOUR list. If you happen to be listening on Spotify, feel free to leave a comment and tell me what YOU try to instill in your students about practice. You can also come find my on Instagram and Facebook at Beyond Measure Podcast.

Before we wrap all the way up for today, let’s share a toast!

Studio music teacher friends – today we seize the opportunity to remind ourselves that it is OUR responsibility to teach our students how to practice. They’re not going to learn it elsewhere. It’s on us to do the research. Communicate the information. Help shape the expectations for students AND their parents. This is one of the reasons we all roll our eyes when someone says we have THE FUN JOB, right?  I mean, we do, but it’s not FUN to help students understand they need to give up precious minutes from their day in the name of practice. We ALL guard our time fiercely. No one wants to be told they have to give up more time. And yet – it goes with our territory.  So here we are, collectively raising our glasses as we go forward this week, inspired once again to help students learn the power of investing in practice time. Cheers to us, my friends!  Hear, hear.

Be sure to check out today’s shownotes, friends!  I’ve linked all the books mentioned at the top of today’s episode, as well as several related episodes. Be sure to check out information on becoming a SuperFriend of the show; that’s a community I adore more with each passing day, and I have some great plans for this coming year over there.

In the meantime, friends, onward and upward we go!