Metacognition in Teaching Music Performance, Part 2: Quantifying Practice Quality

When I moved across the United States in 2012, I went from a studio of 45 intermediate and advanced students to zero students. As I waited for my first students to trickle in, I had a lot of time to reflect upon what I feel should be the highest priority in teaching piano: how to get students to practice efficiently. I knew that teachers should all be aiming to turn students into independent learners. In fact, I had known for a long time that practice efficiency has a 1-to-1 relationship with independent learning; you simply can’t have one without the other. This led me to do extensive research into metacognition, reading every study, article and chapter I could get my hands on.

Before I detail the changes that resulted from this research in parts 3-9, I will first describe the way I had already quantified practice quality (and still do), starting probably around 2003. I don’t remember a time in my teaching career when I wasn’t focused on aiming to “teach myself out of the job.” Getting students to be independent learners was always my primary aim, and even before my formal research began, this naturally led me to focus obsessively in each lesson on trying to make sure the student knew how to practice efficiently.

It didn’t take me very long after I started teaching in 1997 to realize that I needed a way to deliver feedback to students and parents that would be both accurate and useful, just like the valuable feedback we get in school from good teachers on homework assignments, or for that matter, like the instant feedback we get from video games when we get squashed by a boulder because we jumped too late or ran too slowly. This led me to a system of scoring goals in the notebook.

Before continuing, it’s helpful to coin a couple simple terms dealing with goal evaluation that I will use in this article and in future articles:

• Trouble goal: a goal that is “unacceptably incomplete” – a goal that should have been completed that week, but wasn’t.
• Reassigned goal: a goal that is “acceptably incomplete” – a goal that was expected to take longer than a week to complete when it was assigned.

A Simple Quantifying Scenario

The following would be a common example of one piece of music with its goals notated in the notebook. The typical student would have 3-4 pieces like this in addition to theory and technique assigned, but for the sake of simplicity in discussion, suppose this is all a student is working on:

Beethoven

– m.5 – fix counting
– m.13 – diminuendo
– m.24 – remember repeat
– LH always softer than RH
– speed up to q = 112

Suppose the next week the student gets everything done except the first and last goals. The student’s notebook will then look like this:

Beethoven

1 – m.5 – fix counting

1 – speed up to q = 112

Since it was fair of me to expect the student to achieve the first goal in one week, the student received a 1-point penalty for not fixing counting in measure 5 (a red-colored Trouble Goal). However, the goal to speed up to 112 (or similarly, a goal to “memorize”) might take more than one week to complete, so it is a neutrally Reassigned Goal with no point penalty (thus still written in black). The black number just acts as a counter showing how many weeks it has been reassigned. The student’s total score this week is the total of the Trouble goals (1), with a perfect score being 0.

Suppose next week the student speeds up successfully, but again fails to fix the counting. Their notebook would then read:

Beethoven

2 – m. 5 – fix counting

The student’s total Trouble goal score would be 2, signifying two weeks the student failed to get the goal done (and in this case, forming a “double Trouble goal”).

When a student completed a piece after performing it in a recital/group class (or simply after the student plays it at performance quality from memory), I would write “Done!” next to that piece in their notebook with a red-colored -1 (negative one) in the margin. This acts as a bonus point to cancel out a Trouble goal penalty point.

I also used a different color to assign Bonus goals once in a while, such as “m. 17 – add rubato.” If the student completed that goal, I’d score it as a -1 (negative one), but if the student never completed the goal, it was fine with me. Finally, if a student received an overall negative score one week, the negative points carried into future weeks until they cancel out Trouble goals.

When using this system, it is also critical to give students a clear definition of what it actually means for a goal to be considered “done” or “completed.” A goal is only done when it is habituated. This carries a few implications:

• If a student plays the goal wrong in the lesson and immediately corrects it, the goal is still considered incomplete and is marked as a Trouble goal. Demonstrating mere intellectual awareness of the goal by saying “darn it” immediately after failing to do it right isn’t enough.
• If a student already completed a goal last week, but the goal reappears this week, this is proof that the goal was not habituated last week but was instead learned only well enough to barely scrape by with deliberate concentration in the previous lesson. The Trouble goal score continues from where it left off. If the goal already had a penalty of 2 attached to it before, it now has a penalty of 3.

The Benefits

This simple system quantifies practice quality. Not only does this give students feedback they need so they can make immediate adjustments to ineffective practice strategies, the score itself makes it easy for parents to know at any time exactly how well a student is doing. In terms of metacognition, I always make it clear to students that while black (Assigned / Reassigned) goals teach students about music, Trouble goals teach students about music and about practicing. Thus, in terms of getting value out of each piano lesson, Trouble goals are students’ most valuable goals. They are the metacognitive goals, the goals that offer the student the most potential to grow.

Without this quantification system, when all goals are notated neutrally in the notebook, teachers will sometimes forget that certain notated goals were already reassigned from previous weeks, and more importantly, students will almost always normalize the reassignment of goals, thinking it’s no big deal for a goal to repeat from one week to the next, which is not conducive to students making adjustments to their inadequate practice strategies.

This system forced me to become a much better teacher since I had to rethink the way I delivered goals to students. Every goal I assigned needed to be both specific and measurable in one week, meaning there was no more writing down things like “more secure” or “louder forte.” These goals may sound good on the surface, but they present a huge problem to both the teacher and the student. Suppose the student received both of these goals for a piece last week, and after just hearing it this week, you notice the forte is indeed a little louder, and maybe the piece has less stumbles than last week, but still both unsatisfying (i.e. you were looking for 100% improvement, but you only got 25%). Unfortunately, you are now backed into a corner, facing two bad choices. You must now either (1) tell the student “good job” for making miniscule improvement (which most likely resulted from inefficient practicing) since, technically, the student did exactly what you asked them to do, or (2) opt for the more cold-hearted, “Sorry, that wasn’t good enough” to make sure the student learns your standards of improvement even though doing so is clearly unfair.

Of course, there is an option (3) here, which is the option I would take: “Sorry Jake, my bad. I was apparently out of my mind last week when I assigned these two goals to you, so even though you did exactly what I asked, I have to reassign them, this time written differently.” And of course they would be written in black so as not to penalize the student.

Not only does this force a teacher to become more precise in defining goals, it also forces teachers to ensure that goals are achievable in one week. There are exceptions. For example, very often when I tell a student to memorize or speed up to a certain tempo, I will precede the goal with the word “eventually.” This signals to the student that I won’t be penalizing them the next week if the goal isn’t complete. It is a goal that must be completed, but not necessarily this week.

The other big teaching benefit of using this system is that it is freed me from having to get the student to care about incomplete goals. To illustrate exactly what I mean by this, bear with me as I describe an interesting poster presentation at the 2009 MTNA National Convention titled “Tell The Truth Or Not” (presented by Yuking Mühlböck-Chou). Yuking detailed two talent scenarios that educators encounter and shows two possible choices for each scenario: if a student is talented, do we tell the student or not? If a student is not talented, do we tell the student or not? In correspondence with Yuking, she noted that the U.S. and east Asia seem to be polar opposites of each other: in the U.S., untalented kids are often told they’re talented (emphasis on self-esteem), while in east Asia, talented kids are often told they’re untalented (emphasis on pushing to work harder). Europe would be more of a middle ground, with educators always delivering the truth no matter how flattering or devastating it may be (emphasis on professional duty to the student).

Which is the best way? Whether we teachers are consciously aware of it or not, this dilemma is always present. Every student is different. Do I walk on egg shells and give my suggestion as gently as possible? Do I light a figurative fire under the student’s britches and motivate them to work harder? Or do I deliver the neutral truth? If only all of our students were little Spocks who only cared about improving and didn’t ever attach any part of their ego to their practicing each week, we could always do the latter.

The bondage of this constant, annoying feedback dilemma was broken when I implemented this system of scoring. Students already instinctively cared enough about Trouble goals they received, so I no longer had to try to “get them to care.” My feedback system acted as an unbiased mirror that made illusion impossible and forced students to see themselves as they actually are, and this was liberating. I felt free to teach with more gentle honesty than I ever had before (“gentle honesty” is one of the core philosophies I live by in my teaching), because my students didn’t like seeing that red pen no matter how nice I was about using it. No school teacher feels good marking a homework assignment or test question wrong, and the best teachers empathize with you when you mess up. But the best teachers are also the ones you can always trust to deliver to you the absolute truth about your playing. Students need to be able to count on honest, reliable, accurate feedback every minute of every lesson.

In retrospect, it seems so obvious: students earn grades in their academic pursuits. Without grades, school teachers would have a nightmare job of constantly trying to get students not only to understand their progress clearly each week but to also care about it, and since almost every child is afflicted with a disease I call “workophobia,” this would be a hopeless battle. Contrary to some fringe opinions about education, I believe that grades do far more good than harm to student motivation, whether in school or in private lessons.

Although there is a benefit of convenience in making marks directly in sheet music (as opposed to notating goals in the notebook), I’ve always had a minimalist philosophy in marking music. I don’t want to inadvertently train students to ignore composer/editor marks in the music when those marks aren’t circled by their teachers (notebook-notated goals train students to notice the marks in the music without the help of other visual prompts), and equally as important, I also want the notebook to serve as an ongoing dated record or log of goals. It takes a bit more time to notate goals this way as opposed to writing and circling things in the music, but in the long run, it benefits both the student and the teacher. (As an accidental side benefit, it is excellent practice for adjudication, in which the multitasking of listening while writing comments on a separate sheet of paper is essential.)

Some teachers may have a philosophical objection to writing scores down, such as “Students are already graded in school; I want music lessons to be a recreational escape for them.” Students are motivated by grades, and research supports this – although, frankly, I don’t think we needed research to reach this conclusion. All we need to do is imagine what kids would do in school if the notion of “grades” were abolished in school. I’ve been assigning grades for years now with nothing but positive results, for all the reasons discussed above. But for those who are not swayed, consider this: even if you don’t write a final “score” on the page each week, you can still write week counters next to reassigned goals and even use a red pen for trouble goals. Whether you officially tally up the total grade each week or not to produce an actual “score,” you’re still giving students and parents specific, useful feedback. But I think writing down the score is even better.

Part 3 on PIT Practicing will outline a general and practical metacognition-based strategy of practice routine organization.

(c) 2022 Read Twedt

References

Zimmerman, Barry J., and Magda Campillo. “Motivating self-regulated problem solvers.” The psychology of problem solving (2003): 233-262.