Manageable Practice

One of the the puzzles I’m constantly working on is how to make practice feel manageable for my students. I’m sure one of the reasons that I think about it so much is that I remember finding practice intimidating, mysterious, and frustrating as a child. I just didn’t have a lot of strategies other than ‘try harder’ at my disposal—so I usually felt like I was chipping away at problems randomly and fruitlessly. Perhaps most confusing of all, when I did find some practice success, I didn’t know how I had found it or how to repeat it.

I would really like my students to avoid feeling that way! Practice can be challenging, boring, and, yes, frustrating, but it does not need to feel hopeless, unmanageable, or consistently confusing. There are a few key principles and structures that I think can be really useful for students who are learning how to practice—and for the parents who help them practice when they are young:

1. Manageable practice involves guidance and structure—often an adult needs to be involved.

   Expecting a child to be fully in charge of their own practice is unrealistic. In fact, thinking that a child will have the skills to practice independently right away is a lose-lose-lose situation for child, parent, and teacher. The logistical planning and self-awareness required for successful practicing takes both time and guidance to acquire.

   Children under the age of about 10 need an adult ‘practice partner’ at home (and plenty of children over 10 still need this, too!). Ideally, there is an actively involved practice-adult who takes notes during the lesson and guides all home practice based on those notes. If the student is closer in age to 10 than they are to, say, 3 or 4, the practice partner’s job might be just staying nearby and checking off a practice list their teacher has prepared. Children over 10 will learn to keep track of their own assignments—but they still often need an adult to tell them when it’s time to practice, or how long to keep practicing.

2. Manageable practice is consistent.

   I advocate for practicing every day, simply because it removes the question of whether or not you will practice. Practicing about the same amount each day also feels SO much more manageable than cramming a huge practice session in the day before your lesson.

3. Manageable practice has an end point.

   Young children in particular can struggle with practice feeling endless, so give them a clear end point! You can practice until everything on your list is completed or practice for a pre-determined amount of time, or some other structure—as long as the amount you’re going to practice is defined before you start practicing. If you are an adult practicing with a very young student, also keep the wild-card option to end practice early when a child is still feeling positive but is clearly starting to lose steam (i.e. when practice still feels manageable but won’t feel that way for much longer!)

4. Manageable practice includes more time in the ‘comfort zone’ than you might expect!

   I find the learning zone model useful in both lessons and practice. Practice should be a balance of ‘comfort zone’ (playing review pieces, refining established ideas) and ‘learning zone’ (working on an assigned new piece or skill and/or applying a new idea to an old piece). Ideally, we will mostly avoid the ‘alarm zone.’

5. Manageable practice follows your teacher’s plan.

   A good teacher will carefully consider the balance of comfort and challenge. They are asking you to practice certain skills and pieces for a reason—if you aren’t sure why, ask!

6. Manageable practice involves repetition.

   This one might seem obvious, but I find that adults often forget how much tolerance children have for repetition! You will play the same pieces a lot and focus on the same posture points over and over. Doing the same things over and over is a feature, not a bug. As Suzuki said: “Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus 10,000 times is skill”

7. The goal of manageable practice is to make things easier.

   Our goal is to make a given skill or piece easier—even if only by a tiny bit. I find this a more manageable goal than making things ‘better,’ which is so rarely a well-defined concept in a young child’s mind. ‘Easier’ provides a useful internal rubric (and a key reminder that how it feels to play something is worth noticing).

8. Manageable practice incorporates mistakes.

   Use mistakes as tools rather than as evidence of inadequacy. This applies both in the micro (mistakes we make in the pieces we play or in the skills we practice) and in the macro (mistakes we make in how we structure practice). Giving ourselves grace and understanding makes practice manageable; approaching our mistakes with curiosity makes practice manageable.