I have a student who's going to be taking his grade 1 cello in March. Very sweet kid, and also very clever (10 years old). But every week when he comes for his lesson he never seems to have made any progress from the week before. He can easily learn the notes in a piece of music within a week or 2, but when there are rhythmic or bowing etc problems, it doesn't matter what we do in the lessons, he always comes back with the same mistakes still there. He's also very distracted when he plays, and always seems to be thinking about something else. I've been trying to advise him on how to practice, but nothing seems to be making a difference. Yesterday we sat down and talked about exactly how he practices, and this is what he told me -

"When my mum's there she makes me practice for 15 minutes a day, play through each piece, think about it, then play through it again. When my dad's there, he makes me practice for 20 minutes a day, and play through each piece 4 times back to back."

Now I can see why he's getting bored so easily(!), but am not sure how to persuade him to concentrate on the more difficult parts when this is the advice he's getting from his parents... Any ideas?

Perhaps you need to talk to his parents and explain to them why his current practice regime isn't working. It sounds as though he is having difficulty focussing, even when you are sitting beside him in a lesson. One thing I have tried successfully with a few students is to take a photocopy of their music, cut out the few bars that are in need of intensive practice, paste them in the notebook, and take away the rest of their copy for a week. It is a good way of getting them to focus on the bits that really need practice - give them 3 or 4 snippets to concentrate on.

Good luck

Talk to the parents. Thank them for their help and involvement. Explain what you would like to see done in a practice session to make it effective.

Wow... that's a very clever idea! Nothing at all to distract the student, or to tempt the parents.

I can't claim to be the originator - it came from the CT course. Not a very musical solution to the problem, but it does work when used sparingly!

My daughter does regular practise bur if she's in a chatty mood, as sometimes happens, 15 mins of practice might in reality only be 5.

As a parent I wonder if the child can remember what the pieces sound like. Do they have the exam CD or a recording of the pieces? Playing through a piece 4 times back to back should offer some improvement if it's in the childs head what it should sound like and they are striving to progress. wondering if there's a lot going on at the time of practice or if the TV is on in the same room.

I like the idea of just giving them a few bars of the music.

It's a great idea!
Just leaves me wondering why I haven't thought of it before.
Thanks, SueHM!!

I've yet to actually hear the result (lesson later today) but when I was in school yesterday one of my pupils can up to me to tell me that she'd got her piece sorted 'with no gaps'. There were differences in tempo and fluency across the piece.
It seems she followed my suggested practice routine and got results which have made her feel very proud of herself.
It's a 16 bar piece and we split it into 4 phrases. I then asked her to order them form easiest to trickiest. We numbered them 1-4. The instruction was that every time she played the bars numbered 1 she did the '2' section twice, the '3' section 3 times and the '4' section 4 times. I did say that if this was too much she could cut down the repetitions, particularly the 4. I went over ways of approaching the trickier parts.
I'm looking forward to hearing the result and hoping this will have been the thing that shows her the value and effectiveness of 'real' practice.

Yes, I've also done this sort of thing - sometimes cutting out and copying and sometimes sticking "post its" either side of the bars to practise. I started doing this because with the long school day and excessive amounts of homework French children get, practice time can be very limited so they do need to concentrate on essentials.

However, I found it didn't really work fully until I made hearing those bars the first priority in the following lesson. At that point they realised that I actually did expect some improvement from the previous week. Once it was establised that these bars were a priority and I meant it they started to arrive saying "Its bars
so and so to do first."

I think this focussing of their attention is something that is lacking in general in education and I'm sure
what instrumental teachers do will spill over into other areas Pupils have so much to learn they really do need economic working methods.

Perhaps you could try writing him a practice schedule, with different parts of the practice session itemised and a brief explanation of what he should be doing and how he might approach it. Tell him that, after the warm-up (whatever that consists of) he can do the items in a different order if he likes, for variation. This will give him the information he needs to practise what he finds difficult, and will also act as a guideline for Mum or Dad, so that they know how he should be going about his practice.

Bright children can sometimes have a short attention span especially if they are not really being stretched. This is especially true of boys. I can quite understand that you are doing some 'finishing off' for an exam but is it possible that your pupil just isn't finding it interesting and challenging at the moment because he found the basics quite easy?

Kids can be good liars, I'd check with the parents if they've been telling the truth!

There are good practice tips on the Practicespot website, and also Philip Johnson's 2 books (which you'll also find on there.)
http://www.practicespot.com/home.php

He's also brought out another book http://www.practiceopedia.com/. I believe you can get his first 2 from amazon, but not sure about this latest one.

I have begun this year to do some lessons which are just focused on how to practise. We begin the lesson identifying what's been mastered recently and what still needs work. Then I've tried to explain I'm not trying to increase the practice time but to make it more effective- and have laid out in their books a very detailed plan of warm up activities to help impprove on the weak areas, ways of using scales to , say, improve articulation or tone, or breath control (I teach clarinet teacher). With one 9 year and an 11 year old, it worked a treat. Huge progress made after , with one of them, 2 terms of very little progress and being in a rut.
However, I tried it with another pupil (aged 9) recently and it just didn't work. I wanted her to remember what I was telling her (I don't think she reads her note book much). Her mum helps her all the time, but she didn't understand what I was getting at- so I invited her to the lesson a couple od weeks ago- and she came , and we went over what we are trying to imporve and ways of improving- and do just the difficult bits etc - and it worked really well. The mum has helped her all week- this week, she had just 'got' tongueing- and we've been working on this just over 4 terms but as the mum didn't understand what we were doing, things didn't get better as the re-inforcing out of the lesson wasn't good.
Maybe inviting the parent into a lesson on how to practise would work for the OP.
I know I'll invite parents who want to help but don't know how to in earlier now as it's making so much difference. I now know that the mum will be at home saying 'That should be tongued, ' or 'Don't overblow, play quietly'. Progress will be faster and the pupil will be happier as it will be more rewarding.

Good luck.
By the way, I like the idea of photocopying the extracts and taking the book away!!!!

This just sums up the differences between students and what we can expect from them.
I've experienced one student this week really struggling to get an exam piece started (I've mentioned her on another thread) and then yesterday another girl, actually quite a lot younger than the first one, who sailed through the same piece after one week's practice without any problems, and with great enthusiasm.
Both are working towards the same grade, but this just highlights the difference in attitude and ability. Never a dull moment in our job!

Not necessarily...

Say I've got a 5 minute Bach piece on the go. I can play most of it quite well, but there's an awkward bar with one hand moving in 6ths and I'm struggling to get my fingers round it.

If I play through the piece 4 times back to back, nothing much is going to change. I'll just play the piece fairly well each time, with just a stumble or two. But those stumbles will be in the same place each time - in that awkward bar.

And that's 20 minutes of practice time gone, with nothing achieved.

4 swift passes through that bar, without even stopping at it, won't have fixed the problem. But if I spend that 20 minutes working very carefully at that bar, playing it slowly and accurately, gradually speeding it up, taking some time to concentrate on just the RH part, then fitting it back in with the RH, playing it isolation, then adding a few notes either side of it, making sure that I have a working fingering for it, maybe even memorising that little section - all that should result in some improvement to the way I play that bar.
If I do that every day for a week, and just play right through the whole piece once every other day to keep it up to scratch, there's a chance that by the end of the week I may be able to play the whole piece fairly well - without a stumble in that bar.
If I just play right through the whole thing several times a day, it will probably sound very much the same at the end of the week. In fact the stumbles will be even more ingrained, as I'll have been practicing them!

I agree with you, and this surely is the main argument against 'playing through.' I'm constantly trying to persuade my students NOT to just play through, because then the difficult bars won't improve. But I have a feeling that some of them, if not most, still do it.

I think there /is/ a place for playing right through pieces, but if that's all that's happening then it'll be difficult to make progress.

I like to play right through from quite early on in the learning of a piece - I like to get a feel for how it all hangs together. And when all the problems have been sorted out, it's important to make sure it all flows and that everything works in context and that I can get through the whole thing OK. But, in between, I need a lot of focus on small sections, getting the glitches ironed out.

It's probably more fun to play right through a piece though, so the detailed practice can easily be missed out in favour of just playing through things. If pieces are already rock solid, they don't need playing through very often - just enough to keep them in order or when you feel like playing them for fun. If they're still accident prone, playing through is worse as it doesn't just waste time but can cement the mistakes.
Some of us have taken a long time to learn this though and still don't always apply it. I certainly know what I'm supposed to do, but sometimes I don't do it.

If the parents don't understand the difference between playing and practice, a kid can get away with doing hardly any practice at all, while the parent is under the impression that plenty is being done.

My friend used to say about her daughter (my goddaughter) 'It sounds lovely when she practices'.
I don't think she ever got the point when I suggested that if it sounds lovely there's probably not an awful lot of actual practice going on.

Speaking for myself when I practise - I find it very hard to play/practise without a feeling of producing music - so I'm pretty guilty of playing through far more than I need to in order to improve a small section. I like to hear the 'lead into it' and how the music progresses out of it. Playing one ot two bars, and playing hands seperately (unless it's Bach or similar) are things I rarely do - and never did as a child. If I'd been forced to do more of this as a child I might have given up as the pleasure would have been gone for me. I think that's something we need to be aware of when trying to encourage constructive practice in our pupils; sometimes it might be better to be pragmatic rather than advise what we know to be ideal. I try to be democratic with pupils in that we decide together what specific bits need work, and suggest that they maybe consider playing through these bits just a couple of times before the inevitable playing through of a whole page/episode/whatever. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't but I think we know which individuals can be pushed a little to work on little bits, and which can't.