Metacognition in Teaching Music Performance, Part 3: PIT Practicing

Those who practice effectively utilize strategy (planning) when practicing. Some do it naturally and may not even realize there is strategy in their routine, while others might do it deliberately in one way or another. Regardless of how deliberate a student’s strategic effort is during practice, the results of planning / strategizing (or as Hallam describes it, “practice organisation”) are undeniable:

“…those musicians who were well organised also exhibited high levels of concentration, those who reported low levels of organisation had either low or moderate levels of concentration, while the moderate planners tended to have high levels of concentration. It seems that there is some relationship between level of organisation in practice and level of concentration.”

Susan Hallam (2001)

It makes no difference whether a student is naturally organized or the student imposes organization onto themselves to compensate for a perceived disorganization. Organization will greatly help any practice routine, whether it is achieved naturally or artificially.

Around 2013, I realized that the best way to get students to approach the practicing of a single goal metacognitively is to model a system of organized practice modeled directly after the three parts of the metacognitive skill cycle discussed in the first article (planning, monitoring, evaluating), which I call PIT Practicing:

1. Prepare
2. Isolate & Drill
3. Test Yourself

I have found “PIT” practicing to be a profoundly powerful tool in helping students to display far greater levels of metacognitive skill in their practicing of a single goal. Steps 1 and 2 might even seem trivial to many. But as you will soon see, none of these steps are trivial – there is a lot more to each step than it seems, and plenty of room for error in every step. In fact, in my experience over the years, when I ask students questions to determine what went wrong in practicing a goal, there is no practice step failure above that dominates other failures. Practicing failures seem to be spread quite evenly throughout all three steps/categories.

1. Prepare

Preparing a goal essentially consists of fully understanding and experiencing the kinesthetic, audio and visual differences between playing the goal correctly and incorrectly. A good tip for students to follow for this practice step is, “When you prepare a goal, if it doesn’t sound, feel and look strange or at least very different, you’re probably still doing it wrong.” If a student practices the goal incorrectly on their first try, chances are, the student will practice the goal incorrectly all week long and show up to the lesson falsely believing the goal to be done. It is vitally important that students perceive the “first time they practice a goal” as a distinctly different step than the second step of isolating and drilling.

When preparing a goal, the student should isolate to the most extreme degree possible. In other words:

• Take the smallest chunk that makes sense, possibly as few as 2 or 3 notes.
• Go extremely slow to ensure 110% certainty of correctness – it should be so slow that it “doesn’t sound like music.”
• If the error involves only one hand (most errors do), only play that one hand by itself.
• Be able to play the goal both correctly and incorrectly on purpose.

I like to tell students that this step is kind of like putting up a target before starting to shoot at it. It would make no sense at all to execute the command, “Ready, Fire, Aim!”, and yet that’s exactly what students so often do when they go straight to steps 2 and/or 3, skipping over step 1 completely. In reality, it’s often more like “Fire!” since there is no readying or aiming involved; many students are content to fire the gun while it’s still in the holster.

Self-error-correction motivates a brain to commit an experience to memory far better than when errors are corrected by teachers, and that is why playing the goal both correctly and incorrectly on purpose is a hugely helpful step in the preparation process, as it simulates self-error correction. In fact, in the words of Robert Duke (2012), “Learning is error correction.” Memory that results from self-directed error correction is more persistent, understandable and generalizable than memory from a correction directly from the teacher. This carries the additional benefit of drawing more significant distinction between “right” and “wrong” in the student’s mind, making future successful error detection more likely.

For maximum retention of goals, a student can also spend just 5 minutes carefully going through just the “prepare” step of practicing, once for each goal, immediately after getting home from the lesson. Students who do this retain more of their goals than students whose first practice session is 24 hours after the lesson.

The importance and difficulty of this preparation step is magnitudes more difficult for goals involving the correction of rhythm. It’s possible a student may have to spend more time preparing rhythmic goals than they spend drilling them. As an extra preliminary step, sometimes I will tell a student to put their music down on a desk or on their lap and tap the correct rhythm while counting out loud. They must tap loudly with a single finger, always tapping below the note that is being tapped, so that the correct rhythm can be heard and the visual tracking of the music is shown by the finger.

While rhythmic difficulty can obviously be caused by rhythmic complexity, it can also ironically be caused by simplicity. A good example would be when students play dotted rhythms and 8th notes in a method book’s “Jingle Bells” arrangement that doesn’t have any dotted rhythms or eighth notes, because that’s how the student is used to hearing the song. In either case, the ideal solution is still the same: the student must be taught to break themselves out of the auditory prison they’re trapped in, either because of practicing a wrong rhythm for a week or because of hearing it a different way their whole lives. (A full discussion of teaching rhythm is too far outside the scope of this article series. The point here is to recognize that while the “Prepare” step of PIT Practicing is always important, it is magnitudes more important for temporal goals involving meter, rhythm, accelerando, ritardando, rubato, etc.)

Isolate & Drill

If “Prepare” is analogous to setting up a target before shooting at it, “Isolate & Drill” would be the part where you back up and practice carefully shooting at the target. Unlike goal preparation, which takes a goal out of context, isolating and drilling puts the goal back into context – enough to perceive whatever challenges are built into the goal, but still isolated enough to be able to accumulate a decent number of repetitions over a short amount of time and ensure the goal is still easy to concentrate on. When a student isolates and drills, they practice:

• A larger chunk (i.e. 2-4 measures), starting a little before the goal and ending one or two notes after
• Faster, but slow enough to have confidence in detecting errors
• Hands together

This is where I become like Darth Sidious as I tell my students to “listen to your feelings.” “Do you feel that you will easily remember how to play this goal correctly tomorrow even if you are not reminded of this goal? If not, keep drilling.” “Do you feel that you are barely able to play this goal correctly with 100% of your concentration / by the skin of your teeth? If so, keep drilling.” Sometimes students are overconfident, and their feelings betray them as the goal cracks under pressure in their next lesson. This is a learning experience for the student: I tell them that they need to aim for a higher feeling of security in the practice room than the feeling they thought was good enough.

The “jelly bean / M&M / pencil / whatever objects are nearby” game can come into play to make the process of drilling more fun. In this classic drilling game, a student might start with two jelly beans (let’s just call them “points”), and each time the student completes a correct repetition, the student gets one point. When they drill incorrectly, they lose a point. The game isn’t over until they have 5, 7, 10, or 15 points, depending on the difficulty of the goal. A teacher should specify starting and ending points for this game if the student is to play it all week, because if, for example, a student always starts with 2 points and goes to 7 points no matter what the goal, this may not be enough for some goals and might be too much for others. Ultimately, jelly bean game or not, a student must still learn how it feels for a goal to be done.

Test Yourself

After studying 20 vocabulary words, students intuitively know to cover up the words, quizzing themselves at the end of each day in order to simulate how a vocabulary test at the end of the week will go. This gives a good sense of whether or not to conclude studying. This natural intuition is a rare commodity in the context of music lessons – most students must be taught to do this. Just because a student can play a goal correctly when drilled in a 2- or 4-measure chunk doesn’t mean they will remember to do it correctly after being distracted by the 39 measures that comes before the goal, let alone after spending 24 hours away from the piano. Repetition will lead to ease, but this ease doesn’t become permanent until several days of practicing correctly, and it’s easy for students to mistake temporary ease (ability) for permanent ease (habit). It is rare for a student to naturally possess the healthy amount of self-doubt necessary to see past this illusion.

Concluding our analogy, once a student has placed the target and has spent some time shooting at it, it’s time for the student to run through the entire biathlon race to see if they can still hit the target even after doing some cross-country skiing. When testing a goal, the student takes:

• Much bigger chunks (i.e. 8+ measures)
• Up to speed (or whatever current performance tempo is)

If a piece has many goals to work on (wrong notes, rhythms, articulations, etc.), the student could possibly wait until isolating/drilling is done on all of the goals before testing themselves. The student could play the whole piece, stopping to isolate/drill some more on various goals that need more work.

But whether the student tests themselves after each goal or after all goals have been practiced, playing the entire piece should always wait until the end anyway, for many reasons. When students engage in what is sometimes called “whole to parts” practicing (play the whole piece before working on spots), as opposed to “parts to whole” practicing, it means:

1. Reinforced mistakes: Mistakes that haven’t been habituated yet are reinforced at the beginning of every practice routine, every day.
2. Fatigue: Boredom or frustration happens sooner during the practice routine since a good amount of mental energy was already spent playing the entire piece.
3. Dopamine effect: The student goes into “play” mode (go fast, ignore even the biggest mistakes, pleasure-inducing, dopamine-releasing), making it harder to switch into “practice” mode (go slow, correct even the smallest mistakes, not pleasurable). It is the opposite of “delay of gratification,” like eating a candy bar before every meal or like playing video games before doing homework. The act of practicing with discipline causes a student to “hunger” more for the “dessert” of performing the piece and causes the performance itself to be more focused and discipline-oriented, while performing first lends itself to less disciplined performance and spoils the student’s “appetite” for practice.

The main exceptions to practicing “parts to whole” would be when:

• a student has completed all of a teacher’s assigned goals and doesn’t know what to work on. The student could perform the piece first, searching for weaknesses, stopping to work on weaknesses as they are encountered.
• a student is quite experienced/advanced and already possesses (and chooses to use!) decent metacognitive skill. (In this case, practicing “whole to parts” is not an advantage, it’s just that with enough metacognitive skill and discipline, it’s no longer a huge disadvantage.)

Special Cases of PIT Practicing

There are at least a couple types of goals that require modifying PIT Practicing to “TPIT” Practicing. In other words, Test Yourself first, then use the test results to inform PIT practicing. These two goals are:

• Adjusting starting tempo: The student should begin performing without the metronome, stopping after a few measures to see if the starting tempo was accurate. Otherwise, there is no way for the student to truly know if they can conjure the tempo out of thin air, which is exactly the point of the goal and what the student will be expected to do in the next piano lesson.
• Memorizing: One doesn’t know what is in need of further memorizing until one attempts to play from memory. This is one goal that should never (not even in the beginning of the week) begin with “practicing with the music,” unless of course the piece is brand new and the student literally has nothing memorized. Some students of course memorize very naturally, but for other students, I tell them to make three “attempts” each day, where an “attempt” is defined as (1) performing with the music closed until your memory completely fails (unable to fight/think your way through), and (2) opening up the music and correcting/drilling the failure. This would essentially boil down to “TPI-TPI-TPI” practicing. (With an extra “T” at the end if the student so desires.)

It is helpful to remind students in the context of these two goals that part of the reason we practice is to simulate what will happen in the next lesson so that the results of the next lesson are not surprising to the student. If a student doesn’t test themselves first before practicing these two goals, the process of isolating/drilling runs the risk of “tainting the test” at the end, delivering a false positive to the student when the goal really isn’t secure. With this in mind, the third step of PIT Practicing could be thought of as “practicing performing” or “simulation training.”

Finally, there is one more exception. In this case, we use PIT Practicing, except that the last two steps (Isolate/Drill and Test Yourself) are combined:

• Securing tempo: While adjusting starting tempo is a problem of initially conjuring a tempo, securing tempo is a problem of maintaining a tempo that is correctly established in the beginning of the piece. Because a performer always believes their self-directed tempo is steady when performing without a metronome, even when it isn’t steady, it is not possible to drill tempo steadiness without the metronome, nor is it possible to test oneself without the metronome. Thus, steps 2 and 3 of PIT Practicing cannot be distinguished from each other. While the student drills with the metronome on, they are also continuously and simultaneously testing to determine if more work with the metronome is needed. This testing/evaluation must take the form of continuous microscopically-sensitive detection of the slightest urge to deviate from the metronome. Even if the smallest urge still exists, the metronome must still be used. As soon as the metronome is removed, neither drilling nor testing oneself can occur. The metronome can only be removed when the student is 100% certain the goal has been habituated by finally feeling continuously and perfectly “at one” with the metronome.

To summarize these exceptions:

• Adjusting starting tempo: TPI Practicing
• Memorizing: TPI TPI TPI with an optional additional T.
• Securing tempo: I and T are the same step (metronome can’t be removed until the goal is completed)

This simple, general framework for organizing the practicing of a typical goal is extremely beneficial to students. The next article on Goal Types will give teachers and students more detailed tools to use in service of strategizing both the assigning and practicing of goals.

(c) 2022 Read Twedt

References

Duke, Robert A. “Their own best teachers: How we help and hinder the development of learners’ independence.” Music Educators Journal 99.2 (2012): 36-41.

Hallam, Susan. “The development of metacognition in musicians: Implications for education.” British Journal Of Music Education 18.01 (2001): 27-39.