I’ve been teaching for 30 years, and you might reasonably assume that by now I’d have worked out how to get pupils to practise.
I haven’t.
Sorry.
If you came here hoping for Seven Proven Ways to Make Your Music Pupils Practise Every Day, I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you. If I knew how to do that, I’d probably have retired from teaching and made millions selling the secret to the rest of us.
What I have learnt is that there are things we can do that make practice more likely. And there are definitely things we do as teachers that make it considerably less likely.
“Have you practised?”
It’s the classic start to a music lesson.
“How did you get on this week? Did you manage to practise?”
Pause.
“Yeah.”
“How much?”
Another pause.
“Quite a lot.”
Excellent. We’re getting some really solid data here.
Then they start playing and it becomes apparent that “quite a lot” may have meant eleven minutes on Tuesday, or possibly thinking about their instrument while walking past it.
I used to find this much more frustrating than I do now. You’ve spent time planning the lesson, carefully chosen something appropriate, written down what they need to do, demonstrated it, perhaps provided a backing track or a link, and then they come back a week later having done absolutely none of it.
But there’s a fairly obvious thing we sometimes forget.
It matters more to us than it does to them.
We’re music teachers. We chose to spend our lives doing this. Many of us were the weird children who actually did practise.
The 12-year-old sitting opposite me may quite like playing the drums, but he also likes football, Xbox, seeing his mates and watching complete strangers fall over on YouTube.
Drumming has competition.
“Practise this” is a terrible instruction
One thing I’ve become much more conscious of is how vague we can be.
“Practise this for next week.”
What does that actually mean?
How long? How often? From where to where? At what speed? What are they trying to improve? What should they do when it goes wrong? How will they know when they’ve finished?
We understand what practice means because we’ve been doing it for decades.
A beginner often doesn’t.
So these days I try to give pupils a small number of very specific things to do. Usually three practice points.
Not twelve.
Not everything we covered in the lesson.
Three.
For example:
- Bars 1–8: slowly, concentrating on the sticking.
- Play the groove with the track three times without stopping.
- Spend five minutes on the fill, starting at 70bpm.
That’s something you can actually do.
“Practise page 27” isn’t.
Make starting ridiculously easy
I think one of the biggest barriers to practice is simply starting.
If practising means finding the music, finding the notes from the lesson, remembering what the teacher said, finding the backing track, working out where you got to and then finally playing something, we’ve already lost.
This is one of the reasons I’ve become increasingly interested in the technology around teaching. Not technology for the sake of it. God knows we have enough apps and passwords already. I mean anything that removes a bit of friction.
A link straight to the track.
The exact bar numbers written in the lesson notes.
A PDF with something circled on it.
A tempo written down.
A reminder of what we actually did.
None of these things magically makes somebody practise.
But it makes not knowing what to practise a much less convincing excuse.
I’ve written more about using simple technology to remove these little obstacles in The Best App for Music Teachers Might Not Be a Music App. Sometimes the most useful teaching tool isn’t a specialist music app at all.
Five minutes counts
I think we sometimes accidentally make practice sound like a much bigger undertaking than it needs to be.
“Try to practise for half an hour every day.”
To a busy 13-year-old, that can sound enormous. So they don’t have half an hour tonight, which means they don’t practise tonight.
And tomorrow they don’t have half an hour either.
Suddenly it’s next Wednesday and they’re sitting in front of me saying, “I was going to practise yesterday, but…”
I’d much rather they did five focused minutes than no minutes.
Pick up the sticks. Play the thing three times. Fix that one bar. Done.
Quite often, five minutes turns into ten anyway.
And if it doesn’t?
They still played for five minutes.
That’s five more than zero.
There’s a related point here about measuring practice by results rather than minutes. In Practice Till It’s Done, Not Till the Timer Goes Off, I explain why giving a pupil something specific to achieve is often much more useful than telling them how long to sit with their instrument.
Give them something they actually want to play
This sounds painfully obvious, but I think it’s easy to forget when we’re busy trying to teach properly.
Sometimes the best way to get someone playing their instrument is to let them play something they like.
That doesn’t mean every lesson has to become You Choose the Song and I’ll Follow You Around for Half an Hour. There are still techniques to learn, reading to do and foundations that matter.
But if the pupil is desperate to learn a particular song, that’s useful.
Use it.
The boring technical thing might even make more sense when it solves a problem in music they actually care about.
Not all pupils are going to practise
This took me longer to accept than it should have.
Some pupils simply aren’t going to practise very much.
You can provide brilliant notes, perfect resources, achievable goals, inspiring repertoire, backing tracks and encouragement.
Still nothing.
And at some point you have to decide what you’re going to do with the half-hour you actually have with them.
I could spend ten minutes telling them off for wasting the previous week.
Or we could play some music.
I generally choose the latter.
That doesn’t mean pretending practice doesn’t matter. Progress is obviously much quicker when somebody plays between lessons. But repeatedly making a child feel guilty about not practising isn’t necessarily going to turn them into someone who practises.
It may just turn music lessons into something else they feel they’re failing at.
I’d rather they leave having played something, achieved something and perhaps, just perhaps, feeling sufficiently pleased with themselves that they pick up the sticks again before I see them next week.
There’s another side to this, too. Some pupils rarely practise but genuinely enjoy their lessons and never miss one. I explored that in The Pupil Who Never Practises But Never Misses a Lesson, because progress isn’t always the only measure of what a pupil gets from learning an instrument.
So, how do you get pupils to practise?
You don’t.
Not really.
You can make the task clear. You can make it achievable. You can remove obstacles. You can give them music they want to play. You can notice when they’ve improved. You can help them understand how to practise rather than repeatedly telling them that they should.
And you can keep trying different things.
After 30 years, that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve learnt about practice.
There isn’t a magic system.
If I ever discover one, I’ll let you know.
Although I may charge for it.