The Method
Welcome to Practice Prescriptions!
Practice Prescriptions is a platform that allows music teachers to assign structured practice assignments to their students. This method helps students understand how to achieve quality music practice at home. Research suggests that music students struggle with knowing how to practice—that is—how to engage in mindful, deliberate practice. Music students often find practicing alone at home to be a difficult and sometimes tedious experience. Some reasons for this common struggle are: they don’t know what to work on, they don’t know when to practice, and the duration of practice time seems too long. Here, teachers can assign timed practice tasks of varying lengths that allow students to problem-solve while they practice. Tasks can include isolating specific sections of music, identifying sections of music that are similar to others, learning musical material in and out of context, working on specific skills, practicing how to perform, and the list goes on!
The Research
Why Practice Prescriptions?
The importance of a structured, organized approach to practicing music is a familiar topic to music educators. Self-regulated and deliberate practice behaviors provide a framework through which to focus on the ways musicians practice their instruments. A significant amount of research into self-regulation and deliberate practice demonstrates the positive effects these behaviors have on musical achievement. Researchers studying musical practice have found that learners begin as unsophisticated practicers and slowly acquire a broader repertoire of practice strategies over time. By preparing students for how to problem-solve on their own, music teachers can help students become independent musicians as a result of developing strong and effective habits of deliberate practice and self-regulation.
Psychologist Anders Ericsson coined the term “deliberate practice” more than two decades ago. Through researching experts from a variety of fields, he dismantled the common belief that expert performers are born with innate talent. Instead, Ericsson discovered experts attain high levels of skill through how they practice. Deliberate practice involves activities that have been found most effective in improving performance. Deliberate practice is characterized as having seven primary traits: (1) developing skills that other people have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have already been established, (2) stepping outside of one’s comfort zone and trying things that are just beyond current abilities, (3) setting well-defined goals that involve refining a specific aspect of an upcoming performance, (4) requiring a person’s full attention and mindful actions, (5) receiving feedback and making modifications based on that feedback, (6) establishing effective mental representations, and (7) building and modifying previously acquired skills to make them even more effective.
In contrast to the action of playing, deliberate practice involves highly structured activities in which the explicit goal is to improve performance. Engaging in deliberate practice activities changes and evolves brain plasticity by challenging the body’s desire to maintain balance. This process results in the body’s ability to overcome weaknesses. Understanding the long-term benefits of deliberate practice is important, however, because the process is not inherently enjoyable, especially for beginning students. Deliberate practice is intended to be an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day to avoid exhaustion and to maximize gains. While this process is not inherently enjoyable, it certainly can be. When the specific tasks to overcome weaknesses are engaging and the instructor monitoring the cues is motivating, deliberate practice can become deliberate play.