Music Teachers Blog

Do you provide practice charts to your students? Do you have them make their own charts? Or do you have them mark their practicing into a lesson book?

Sometimes I use charts, and would like to use them more often. They’re very helpful for many students. We all know that practice results in progress, but having a written record of practicing rewards us with concrete evidence of having put in the time.

My motto about practicing is, “The more you play, the better you get; and the more you play correctly, the faster you get better.”

Not everyone would agree with me. Some feel that if you play a lot with bad habits, you’ll get worse. But I think that if someone plays a lot, it’s because they enjoy it, and habits are fixable, especially if someone has the motivation that comes from enjoyment of the instrument. On the other hand, some people who are dedicated to perfect habits can also be so afraid of making mistakes that they don’t practice enough to make progress and enjoy themselves.

What should a practice chart display? The number of minutes spent practicing per day? I think only a few students respond well to demands that they practice a certain number of minutes per day. Sometimes this demand just chills the motivation of students. It happened to my daughter, anyway.  She used to practice piano often during each day–a little at a time as she passed by the piano. Then her teacher required one hour per day, and she stopped playing. She said she felt any playing she did was a drop in the bucket towards that day’s required hour, not to mention the hour she missed the day before.

Of course, some students love the challenge of organizing themselves to meet the required time allotment per day, and for some, having a time slot is the only way to practice regularly.

But I prefer to focus on frequency rather than quantity of time. If someone practices frequently, they become conversant with their music, and with the challenges they are tackling. They usually can’t help becoming more intrigued with their own progress, the more frequently they play.

I ask students who make charts to mark off not how many minutes they played, but simply whether they played that day. They use check marks for exercises that just need to be done, and then for musical pieces they are working on, I like them to use symbols, smiley/frowny faces, stickers, or numbers, to grade themselves.

Having them grade themselves allows them to play a piece however they play it, even badly, but still to mark down that they played it that day.  This gives them permission to play even if they didn’t do so well–and they get to make clear that they recognized they didn’t play so well that day.  It also provides an interesting history of how they feel they did on that piece, sometimes going from bad marks to better, sometimes going from okay to worse to better.

Having said all that, I wish I could say I use charts for everyone but I don’t.  I do think charts can make practicing more fun, and concretely rewarding. After all, a student’s playing may improve incrementally, but they may not really feel that way for a while, so having a chart to show for their work is a nice touch.

Maybe you have a tip on how to make or use charts. Do you use them? Do you use rewards for practicing? It would be great to hear from you–just click on “Add Comment” below.

Posted in Teaching Tips, Practicing |