Intelligent Practice is the Key

Talent is overrated – Intelligent Practice is the key

There is not necessarily a correlation between how much practice the kids do and how confidant they feel while playing a recital. But there is a direct correlation between intensity/amount of practice and how well they play!

I offer two recitals each year to prepare the children for playing in public. This is not an easy thing to do and can actually only be practiced by doing it! Theoretically, it is also possible to practice performing in your head by imagining performing and everything is going well. This relaxes the overactive and jittery limbic system. But the kids are too young to really take the responsibility for practicing this way.

I went home after the recital and worked on some notes that might interest you.

Purposeful, deliberate, intelligent practice

Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there.

The right sort and amount of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.

Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches the level of “acceptable” performance and automaticity, the additional years of “practice” don’t lead to improvement. Automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate efforts to improve. You have to push yourself to get better.

Purposeful practice has several characteristics that set it apart from what might be called naïve practice, which is essentially just doing something repeatedly, and expecting that the repetition alone will improve one’s performance.

 Purposeful practice is much more deliberate, thoughtful and focused. It has the following characteristics:

• Deliberate practice involves well-defined, specific goals and often involves improving some aspect of the target performance; it is not aimed at some vague overall improvement.  It knows where it is going and how to get there. Develop a plan for making a series of small changes that will add up to the desired larger change.

For instance, “Play the piece (or section) all the way through at the proper speed without a single mistake three times in a row.” or “Accent each first finger in the scale/run to give the brain a kind of anchor to hold on to.”.

Without such a goal, there is no way to judge whether the practice session has been a success. A well-defined, specific goal, broken down into baby steps if necessary, plus a plan: What exactly do you need to do to … (play at performance tempo/play three times without a mistake…) What exactly will you do to get there? You will need to figure out what is preventing you from reaching this goal. My job as a teacher is to lead the kids to this way of thinking. Parents can too!

The key thing is to take that general goal – get better – and turn it into something specific that you can work on with a realistic expectation of improvement.

•  Purposeful practice is focused. You seldom improve much (if at all) without giving the task your full attention with conscious actions. The student must concentrate on the specific goal for the practice activity so that adjustments can be made to control practice. No computer or phone distractions, no babies “helping”, etc. Focus and concentration are the key.

• You need feedback from someone – yourself, your teacher, your friend, a recording or a parent. You have to 1) know when you are doing “it” right and, 2) you need help to find out how to do “it” correctly if you are wrong. Simple, direct feedback after every attempt – correct or incorrect, success or failure. “How many times did you play it correctly?” I can send you recordings of the pieces or we can record them in the lesson (smartphone) for home study. Mom, Dad, Grandparents, older siblings can listen in and give constructive feedback. “Something sounds funny!” may not be enough. ;-)

•  Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. This is perhaps the most important part of deliberate practice. Many students show no signs of ever pushing themselves beyond what is familiar, comfortable and relatively easy.

This approach just doesn’t work.

This is a fundamental truth about any sort of practice: If you never push yourself beyond your comfort zone, you will never improve. Playing the same set of songs in exactly the same way over and over again may accumulate many “practice” hours, but will never lead to mastery and unconscious excellency. That’s a recipe for stagnation, not improvement.

Getting out of your comfort zone means trying to do something that you couldn’t do before. It means constantly trying things that are just beyond current abilities. It demands near-maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable. Finding ways around barriers is one of the keys to purposeful practice.  It is surprisingly rare to get clear evidence in any field that a person has reached some immutable limit on performance.

People more often just give up and stop trying to improve. It’s so easy to blame it on lack of “talent”!

 Maintaining the focus and the effort required by purposeful practice is hard work, and it is generally not fun. Some people are able to motivate themselves anyway. Most don’t and never reach their full potential.

The most effective forms of practice are doing more than helping you learn to play a musical instrument; they are actually increasing your ability to play. With such practice, you are modifying the parts of the brain you use when playing music and, in a sense, increasing your own musical “talent”. Regular training leads to changes in the parts of the brain that are challenged by the training. The brain adapts to these challenges by rewiring itself in ways that increase its ability to carry out the functions required by the challenges.

But, the cognitive and physical changes caused by training require upkeep. Stop training, and they start to go away.

The reason that most people don’t possess (these) extraordinary capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they are satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of “adequate”. We learn enough to get by in our day-to-day lives, but once we reach that point, we seldom push to go beyond ‘good enough’. We do very little that challenges our brains to develop new gray matter or to rewire entire sections.

Doing the same thing over and over again in exactly the same way is not a recipe for improvement; it is a recipe for stagnation and gradual decline. Unless you are using practice techniques specifically designed to improve those particular skills, trying harder will not get you very far.

 Yet it’s important to remember that the option exists. If you wish to become significantly better at something, you can.

The goal is not just to reach your potential but to build it, to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires challenging homeostasis – getting out of your comfort zone - and forcing your brain and your body to adapt.

Mental representations are patterns of information – facts, images, rules, relationships, and so on – that are held in long-term memory and that can be used to respond quickly and effectively in certain types of situations. A mental representation is a conceptual structure designed to sidestep the usual restrictions that short-term memory places on mental processing.

The main purpose of deliberate practice is to develop effective mental representations. Then the mental representations play a key role in deliberate practice.  This opens up new possibilities for improved performance. (Kids smile at my “pinkie popcorn” and “squashy” but they are mental representations of harmonic chords. Ta, ti-ti, To-a are also rhythmic representations that stick in the brain and can be identified immediately on sight, recognizing chords (broken and block) and their inversions as well as scales and scale fragments in the music are other representations.)

When practicing a new piece, beginning and intermediate musicians generally lack a good, clear idea of how the music should sound, while advanced musicians have a very detailed mental representation of the music they use to guide their performance of the piece.

A clear mental representation of the piece allows a player to recognize most of the mistakes, remember them the next time, and correct them.

One form would be an aural representation – a clear idea of what a piece should sound like, including dynamic and agogic changes, harmonic relationships, etc. Another is a visual representation (not seeing that the notes are on spaces but recognizing immediately that it is an F major chord), which chunks the information together so the player doesn’t “reinvent the wheel” each time he learns a new piece. (If a child is having trouble playing a measure, I just say “C major broken chord” and they can play it immediately! But not until they have established that representation in their brains.)

Maintain close attention to every detail of performance, each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit. This is the recipe for maximum improvement from practice.

Shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster. Just “filling up time” doesn’t get us far.

How not to practice: just doing the same thing over and over again without any focused step-by-step plan for improvement.

Get past the New Year’s resolution effect and make deliberate practice an ongoing part of your life.

If you stop believing that you can reach a goal, either because you’ve regressed or you’ve plateaued, don’t quit. Make an agreement with yourself that you will do what it takes to get back to where you were or to get beyond the plateau, and then you can quit. You probably won’t.

What matters is that teachers divide up what can look like an infinite amount of material to learn into a series of clear steps, making the student’s progress more concrete and more encouraging. That is why I have Piano Karate, Note Mastery, Practice Clubs, etc. The kids need to know where they are going and what the steps are to get there. Have the positive results posted for all to see (and to inspire and motivate others).

Students are supposed to practice and meet their goals (they're enjoying the games & other incentives while they're being trained), and then they celebrate their skills sharing the beauty of music with others at their recitals.

© Linda Langeheine, December 2016