How to Practice Your Instrument – Introduction.

As teachers we can very easily start off with good intentions. We know that if the student practices for a good 30 minutes to 45 minutes, they will make progress, indeed, they will make sufficient enough progress to achieve all of their aims, and they will become great musicians! We know all of this – in theory at least!

Sometimes it doesn't work out as planned. Sometimes our students insist that they have been practicing for their allotted 30 minutes every day – religiously in fact – but still not achieved anywhere the level that you feel that they should, and that you know that they can.

It's not always the student's fault. Sometimes the problem lays in the fact that we as teachers have been taught that the time to practice is 30 minutes. Our teacher made us do it, we were taught to teach it and all of our co- teachers do it. It's the done thing!

The problem with this is that it's fundamentally broken – sometimes.

Some students it works just fine with! Those students will always succeed on them. The problem is with the students who use the 30 minutes per day to simply “go through the motions”. They sit down at 6:30pm and they will set the alarm on their Nokia for 7:00pm. They are putting in the time, but that's about it. They may not be including everything that they need to include for the practice because they are so “time – focused”.

This may be one of the occasions where it's better to use a check list for some of those students, but bear in mind that such an approach also has it's own drawbacks!

• Different Strokes for Different Folks

I guess the point I'm making as I labor the point that a strict regimen of 30 minutes or 45 minutes may not work is: everyone is different. I tell this to all of the teachers at my school. We need to understand that each individual student is just that: An Individual.

There is no one size fits all approach at my school, and I think that's the best way. If one size fits all, then we would have very easy jobs, and most of our students would be incredibly good at their instruments with the minimum of effort. However, we know that's not true!

So as we (in other articles on here) look at different approaches to practice from “Check – Lists” to “Detailed Practice Logs” to “Practice Development Plans” and other novel (and common sense) methods, we can tailor our practice requirements to the individual student.

• Blended Approach

On that note of “tailoring an approach”, we really need to understand the relative pros and cons of different methods of musical practice. We need to be like chemists who add a little bit of one thing, and another measure of another thing, and get it just right for the student. In the long run the student will thank you for it, and you will thank yourself for it – as a teacher. It's a win-win and it carries great results for all involved.

• Progress Reports

An important thing for us and our students is progress reports. All students – and if they are children, their parents – will want to know how they are progressing. They want to know how they are doing. If we have assembled the correct “concoction” of our approach to practice for each individual student, then we can give progress reports, and the better we get at making the best decisions for the practice of our students going forward, the more likely we are to have glowing praise in our progress reports for our students, and that's what makes our job worthwhile as teachers!