Inside the Bookstore:
When students won't practice
What if...for a fortnight, they were never allowed to practice in the same place twice? Promise a reward if they can log practice sessions in the 14 different locations—one for each day in the fortnight—and then sit back and watch this strangely compelling trick work its magic. Their focus will be on earning the reward, and coming up with fresh practice locations, but in the meantime, almost without noticing, they will have practiced every day for two weeks.
So what are their options? Starting gently, it could be as simple as having the student rearrange their practice room so that their music-stand faces in the opposite direction to normal. Maybe they practice sitting down instead of standing up.
When was the last time your students practiced in the bathroom? (Singing in the shower sounds so good, why wouldn’t their clarinet scales sound better with the extra reverb?)
What about learning some new notes in the garage? Or sightreading in the backyard? Or inside their cubby house? Or while sitting in a tree? Or a practice session at grandma's house…
Whatever the setting, the change of scenery for each of these sessions can help turn otherwise here-we-go-again practice experiences into something new and fresh. Just remember how much more fun homework seemed for a while when your bedroom had been freshly rearranged...
It might work for your student. It might not. You won’t know until you test it.
What if......you looked harder for pieces they might actually want to play?For ideas on finding repertoire gems in unexpected places, check out our IMT monster guide to Finding Great Repertoire. Pianists might also want to check out a new way of previewing concert repertoire at IMT's repertoire browser.
This is no time to be puritanical about content though. TV themes, movie music, pop songs, advertising jingles, hackneyed classics…all the things that make us as musicians cringes and cry “why would ANYONE want to play that?”. But these pieces still need good intonation, appropriate phrasing, precise rhythmic control, good fingering...think of the piece, painful though it might be, as a delivery vehicle for more important ideas, rather than an end unto itself.
You need to remember that your students were not brought up in conservatoriums the way you were, and being allowed to play the theme music to the Simpsons might just have them reaching for their instrument more often than you think.
It might work for your student. It might not. You won’t know until you test it.
What if......they worked on several pieces at once, rather than just focusing on one? (Or vice-versa) Different students respond differently to this— some enjoy the uncluttered desk of only one item to think about, others are bored unless they are working on six different things at once. If your students all seem to be working on exactly 2.5 pieces though, then it’s time to start tailoring things a little more to the individual.
The next time you have a student who is not practicing, look at how many pieces they are wrestling with (or supposed to be wrestling with) each week, and change their load. Drastically.
It might work for your student. It might not. You won’t know until you test it.
What if.........your students were to practice in several small doses each day, rather than a single session? (or vice-versa)The spin you can put on this is that you are offering students a choice, which means that they have some ownership over the type of practice that follows:
Again, you've turned things upside down.
It might work for your student. It might not. You won’t know until you test it.
What if...you negotiated a few days in every week that are Practice-Free Zones?Practice-Free Zones are days on which there are no expectations that they will practice at all. Even their parents are not allowed to nag them.
So instead of practice being an invariable and inescapable daily grind, their schedule might look like this:
• Monday PRACTICE
• Tuesday PRACTICE
• Wednesday **Practice-Free Zone!**
• Thursday PRACTICE
• Friday PRACTICE
• Saturday **Practice-Free Zone!**
• Sunday **Practice-Free Zone!**
This would mean that they are never more than two days away from a holiday of some sort. (And isn’t that how life should be?)
It may feel as though this compares badly to seven days a week of practice, but remember, this is a student who has not been practicing at all until now. So the comparison is not four days instead of seven—it’s four days instead of one (or less!).
What if...whether each day is a practice day or a day off is determined randomly?Taking the last suggestion a step further…Let’s imagine that the student is going to practice for four days in the week.
What if the student didn’t know in advance which days were Practice Days, and which were Practice-Free Zones? They would have seven cards—four would say “Practice”, the other three would say “Holiday!”.
They shuffle the cards, and at the start of each day, they would draw one. (they obviously don’t replace the card in the deck once they have read it.)
If it says “Practice”, then today is a Practice Day. Bad luck, off they go to the practice room.
If it doesn’t…well, if put your ear to your window, you’ll probably hear the “woo-hoos” coming from their house. Good luck to them, and they deserve to enjoy the break.
As long as they continue to be bound by the “Practice” cards, their parents will agree to be bound by the “Holiday!” cards. No nagging.
Sounds fair to me.
It might work for your student. You won’t know until you test it.
(For lots more ways to intelligently randomise the entire practice session, see pages 262-269 in Practiceopedia)
What if...you dressed up the whole thing as a Quest?Many students respond well to a challenge – particularly if the challenge is an acknowledgement that they are special in some way. You can’t use this idea every week, but as an occasional tonic for students with vivid imaginations, it’s hard to beat.
Let’s imagine that you have a student who has been doing some intensive rhythm reading work with you. At the end of one of the lessons, you might want to quietly mention to them: “Listen, you rhythm reading has improved so much that I was thinking…hang on…nahhh….you wouldn’t be interested…forget I said anything…”
When they press you to find out “wouldn’t be interested in what???” (and they will), tell them that there is a piece in the cupboard that defeats all but the best rhythm readers. A legendary piece that is covered in dust, because most students are too scared to even try it…but there was something about how you were counting those eighth notes today that made me think…here…let me show you.
Go to the cupboard with great ceremony, pull out the piece…slowly, like you are an archeologist unearthing a great ancient treasure.
Tell them that many have tried to learn this piece in a week…but none have succeeded. Blow on it to remove some of the cobwebs. Most younger students will be wide eyed at this point, with their full attention on the book itself, as if waiting for it to illuminate the room with some ancient magic.
Let the room fall silent, and look at them with all the earnestness of a legendary figure commissioning a great quest. Lower your voice to conspiratorial levels, and tell them that if they succeed, you will put an inscription on the book with their name on it, so that all future students will know they were the first to master it. Tell them that whatever happens in the challenging week ahead, their counting today was awesome. And that you have the oddest feeling they will succeed.
Place the book in front of them, and let nature, and curiosity, run its course.
Ask yourself, if you were the student, what would you do?
It might work for your student. It might not. Although it often does :)
What if...you change the weight of the workload for the student? Not to be confused with varying the number of pieces they're working on, this targets the the weight of the workload. There are some students who will immediately resolve not to do any practice at all if they think their task for the week is too demanding. They figure that since it’s impossible, there is no point in trying.
And there are others who won’t start practicing in the first place because they think their workload is light enough that they can breeze through it in a few minutes the day before the lesson.
You’ll need to spend quite a few weeks trying different numbers for this particular combination lock. If in doubt, err towards giving them something you know they can easily get through – that way they start to free-associate “practicing” with “easy” and “completed tasks”. Then, taking advantage of that mindset, you can gently crank up the expectations without them noticing. (I know, I know, you have to be sly to be a music teacher J)
It’s an easy thing to tweak, but getting it wrong – and more importantly, allowing it to stay wrong over a period of several months – might not only discourage the student from practicing, it may have them quitting lessons altogether.
It might work for your student. It might not. You won’t know until you test it.
What if...you change the type of work the student does at home? Not practicing is not always a message from the student that they aren’t interested in working at home at all. It might not even be a message that they are getting too much or too little work. It just might be that they aren’t interested in doing the sort of homework you currently set them. Find the right sort of work, and they’ll practice it.
For example, there are some students who are quite happy polishing existing pieces, but loathe learning new notes. If their to-do list for the week reads “Learn the Gigue and your new etude”, don’t be surprised if they come back the following week with nothing done.
Similarly, if you have a student who doesn’t mind playing pieces, but would rather saw their own leg off than practice scales, you are wasting your time – and theirs – setting large quantities of scales for them to look at at home (they won’t). If scales are that urgent at the moment, find some pieces that are scale intensive, and sell those pieces to your student instead.
Given that most students’ preparation is a mix of technical work, learning new pieces, polishing old ones and theory drills, there’s plenty of scope to turn the dials to try different ratios in the mix – and if necessary, temporarily abandoning one type of activity altogether. You’ll be able to talk them into that activity at some point in the future.
But you won’t be able to talk them into anything if they quit first – and there are few ways of alienating a student faster than consistently setting them work that they can’t stand. (For lots of ideas on different work requests you can issue, see pages 360-363 in Practiceopedia).
It might work for your student. It might not. You won’t know until you test it.
Experimenting to fine tune your motivation skills is a powerful technique…but I haven’t been completely honest with you.
The central argument has been that you run need tests to find out what motivates your students, and what leaves them flat. After a while, the tests will have done their job, and you modify your teaching to reflect what the experiments revealed.
The only problem is, we’re talking about people, not French Fries. You can’t just run the tests once, and then apply the results into perpetuity.
At the very least, every time a new student walks through the door, you’ll need to experiment all over again to find out what makes them tick.
But more importantly that, every time that student shows signs of changes of any sort, you’ll need to run the tests all over again. What works for them when they are 6 years old probably won’t work for them when they are 8. And certainly won’t work when they are 14.
When they stop being a beginner, and are working on intermediate repertoire for the first time, you’ll need to test all over again. And every time something external to music happens that can affect their outlook on the world—a divorce or bereavement, problems at school, a sudden discovery that they are gifted at tennis, moving to a new house, a new sibling, a new instrument, new friends, a new cultural craze or Harry Potteresque phenomenon…you’ll have to test all over again.
Every time they even start to dress differently, or talk differently, or their body language changes, or their musical tastes alter, or their lesson time changes, or they come back from holidays, or they change subjects at school, or pull a face that you just haven’t seen them use before, or suddenly talks less than usual in a lesson, or suddenly won’t shut up,. you need to test again.
The thing is, these changes are not aberrations. They're guaranteed. There will be something every week.
So what does this mean? That as teachers we are condemned to having to experiment, tweak, observe & adjust all the time? That the goalposts that are our students keep shifting?
You bet! And it’s the single most exciting part of what we do. Not only does it make for dynamic, motivated students, but it will ensure a stronger sense of connection between the teacher and every single student in the studio. Teachers are forced to discover dozens of surprising things about their students that they never suspected before.
And for all the talk about experimentation, and different ways of practicing, there is no motivational tool—nothing—that is as powerful as that connection itself.
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