Improving Student Practice at Home

Improving student practice at home

Me: Did you practise your piece this week?

Student: Yes, I practised it every day.

Me: Fabulous! Ok let's hear it.

Student plays the piece, with all the same mistakes and hesitations as last week.

We've all been there. And what it tells us is that the student's idea of practice and our idea of practice are worlds apart. If your student practises by playing their pieces through from start to finish, maybe once, maybe twice, maybe even three times, then they're probably still turning up next week with most of the same mistakes.

So, what's the answer?

Teach them how to practice

I believe this is one of the most important jobs we have as music teachers. We get 30, 40, maybe 50 minutes with our students once a week, and then they spend hopefully multiples of that time at home practising. If we haven't taught them how to use that time efficiently and effectively, their chances of becoming good musicians drop dramatically.

So, spend time teaching how to practice in your lessons. This includes teaching students how to break hard bits down into sections, quantify what slow practice means, repeat correctly before moving on, and use specific techniques like pausing before a note they usually get wrong.

My rule of thumb is that students must be able to play something three times in a row correctly before moving on. If one repetition is wrong, they start again with their practice strategies.

Spend time actually practising with them in their lesson. When a student hasn't practised during the week, I often use that as an opportunity to turn the lesson into a guided practice session. Start by identifying one difficult section, give them five minutes to improve it, and then sit back and watch. You will quickly see how effective their practice actually is.

Once you've observed, guide them through how to practise more effectively. Don't just tell them what to do and have them do it once. Treat it like a real practice session and have them do the repetitions needed to make progress. Part of effective practice is also recognising when continued repetition stops producing meaningful progress. When to Move On From a Piece (and When to Stay) explores how to judge that point.

Ask questions such as: What is the problem here? Why do you think this note keeps going wrong? How could you solve it? Do you need to change the fingering? Is there another way to practise this besides simply trying to play it?

Don't skip letting them actually do the practice in the session. This is one of the most important things you can teach: how to solve their own problems when nobody is watching.

Use lesson notes and tools effectively

Use sticky note flags to mark problem parts in their pieces that need attention. Instruct students to begin their practice sessions by working through each flagged section with the practice strategies you have taught them. When they demonstrate those bars correctly in the next lesson, they get to remove the flag.

Write clear notes and instructions about their practice. A vague note like "Practice the Etude" is not enough. A useful note sounds more like: "Focus on the Etude this week. Start by working on bars 22-28, then 45-55. Keep your wrists and arm loose. Do it slowly first at least three times in a row, shaking your arms between each repetition to stay relaxed."

The amount of detail will vary depending on the student. Older and very competent students may need less specific instruction if they already have strong practice strategies. Younger students generally need more structure and clearer steps.

The key is to make notes easy for you to write, easy for students to read, and important enough that you follow up on them next lesson. If you're trying to make practice instructions more specific and actionable, How to Write Better Lesson Notes goes into much more detail about what effective notes actually look like. If you circle back to what you wrote, students learn that the notes matter.

Help them develop their motivation to improve

Motivation varies from student to student, so knowing your students matters. This becomes especially important with adult learners, whose reasons for learning are often very different from children's. Why Adults Learn Piano (and What That Means for How You Teach Them) explores those motivations in more depth. Some want to complete exams. Some want to play in a school concert. Some want to play pieces they know. Some want to sight-read fluently or play from lead sheets in a band. Knowing their goals helps you decide with them what they need to do to achieve those goals.

I begin each teaching year by documenting each student's goals and pinning them to the top of their lesson notes, so they remain visible all year.

Give students regular performance opportunities, both large and small. Nothing motivates practice like the tangible prospect of playing for someone else. These do not need to be formal recitals.

Arrange a play-through for another student. Organise a low-key practice performance with students only. Use online performances if in-person sessions are difficult. The goal is to create a real reason to prepare without making the pressure overwhelming.

Octavia includes an Online Performances feature that allows students to share recordings safely and privately with the people they choose.

Help them build a structure that makes practice easy

Quantify how much practice students should be doing, and help them create a structure that makes it possible. Discuss how much time they can realistically set aside, how many days they can practise, what they hope to achieve, and what the minimum requirement is for those goals.

For some students, charts, tick boxes, stickers, or practice trackers help turn intention into action. The structure matters because it removes some of the daily decision-making.

Habit stacking is useful here: attach practice to something the student already does every day. Practice after breakfast, after school snack, after homework, or before screen time. Then place something enjoyable after practice so the routine has a natural reward.

Over time, the goal is for practice itself to become one of the student's normal daily habits.

The real goal

Some of the most gratifying moments in teaching come when a long-term student can identify what is not working, think through how to fix it, and then fix it independently.

That is what all of this is working towards: not students who play well only because their teacher told them how to play every note, but students who know how to keep getting better when nobody is watching.