Metacognition in Teaching Music Performance, Part 4: Goal Types

In the quest to help students practice more effectively through the use of metacognitive skill, we must empower students to select and implement various practicing strategies based on the nature of goals they encounter, and we must also have our own strategy for notating these goals in a way that facilitates practicing the most. All teachers to some degree (some more than others) give students “practice this way for this goal, practice that way for that goal” instruction, which of course works in service of these endeavors. But it is hugely helpful for both students and teachers to understand goals in more generalized ways. Parts 4 and 5 of this series will outline a generalized framework for understanding, assigning and practicing goals.

It makes the most sense to classify goals according to how drastically practice routine is affected. Musical duration of the goal (i.e. number of measures) is the best way to accomplish this:

• Spot goal: occurs in a small spot in the music.
• Spread goal: occurs over the course of a few lines of music, a section, or even a whole piece.
• Universal goal: occurs all the time, in all pieces.
  • Body map goal: involves changing one’s body map.

We should also be aware of the orientation of any given goal:

• Process-oriented goal: a goal that explicitly tells a student how to practice.
• Result-oriented goal: a goal that explicitly tells a student what to achieve.

The Spot Goal

Examples of the spot goal would be:

• m.6 – fix wrong note
• m.12-13 – play LH detached
• m.15 – gradual crescendo
• no stop/stumble on repeat

Applying PIT Practicing to the spot goal is straight-forward for students. We can advise a student to employ something like a 2-to-7 jelly bean game each day for the typical spot goal. But something like 2-to-15 might be necessary if it’s a more difficult spot goal, such as changing fingering in rapid passagework when it’s already up to (or near) full speed.

Also, when doing step 1 of PIT Practicing (Prepare), spot goals will often take a little more careful attention than other goals since there is more locational information to decode in a tiny little spot goal (which measure number, which beat, which hand) as well as sometimes the goal itself being nit-picky (“don’t chop phrase off abruptly” or “play the staccato note more staccato”), as opposed to spread goals or universal goals (below), which require less decoding on the part of the student. It is for this reason that I always put the locational information of a goal first, followed by the goal. For example (deliberately making up as complicated a goal as I can), instead of writing this jumbled nightmare:

• RH more gentle lift m.4 at the end of the phrase on beat 3

I write:

• 4R3 – more gentle lift at the end of the phrase

This “code” explodes out to “measure 4, right hand, beat 3.” I don’t have to use beat numbers very often, so most goals in measure 4 would just start with something like “4R” or even just “4,” which students learn pretty much immediately (the first time I explain it to them).

The Spread Goal

Examples of the spread goal would be:

• m.1-16 – keep LH soft
• middle section – no rushing or dragging
• whole piece – faster tempo
• remember to take repeat

I often tell students that spread goals are usually a whole bunch of identical spot goals, one after another. For example, in the case of the first goal above (keep LH soft), supposing there are 4 LH bass notes / chords in each measure, this is like having 64 spot goals in a row [4 beats x 16 measures]. Thus, it wouldn’t make sense for the student to engage in as much repetition as with a spot goal; each repetition of the musical chunk yields greater benefit to the student than a single repetition of a spot goal (in this case, one repetition yields 64 opportunities to practice the goal), and it also takes longer to complete each repetition. While a typical spot goal might call for the jelly bean game to end at 7 points, a spread goal would end at anywhere between 2 and 5, depending on the length of the section. A goal that spans an entire piece might only require a single correct repetition each day, or essentially a silly “0-to-1” jelly bean game.

Because of this and the fact that spread goals tend to involve more generalized concepts that are hard to ignore instead of nit-picky details that are hard to notice, students tend to be more successful habituating spread goals than spot goals. This can seem counterintuitive at first since, psychologically, “smaller” goals seem “easier.”

The threshold that distinguishes between a spot and spread goal (5 measures? 8 measures?) will of course depend on the density of material in each measure. What’s important is that the student understand that larger musical chunks require less repetition because of (a) the time it takes to complete a single repetition and (b) the benefit derived from each repetition.

There is one exception to this. Note that I define “remember to take repeat” as a spread goal, while I define “no stop/stumble on repeat” to be a spot goal. This is because remembering to take a repeat is a very different goal than merely being able to take it. Being able to take a repeat smoothly (without stops or stumbles) might be as easy as drilling two measures 5-10 times. But remembering to take the repeat in the first place relies on what we might call structural audio memory. Part of our audio memory includes the structural length of certain sections of music, so when we have a problem of simply forgetting to take a repeat, unfortunately there is no shortcut to fixing this. We must start at the beginning of the repeated section and practice hearing all of it twice before going on to the next section (and be sure to go on for a measure or two after that before stopping). Once we have this structural audio memory in place, this effectively sets an “alarm” in our mind so that when we perform the section, it sounds incomplete after only playing it once, while it sounds complete after playing it twice. Unfortunately, depending on the length of the repeated material, it can take a long time to achieve just one repetition of this goal, so true habituation of this goal can take a long time.

The Universal Goal

Examples of the universal goal would be:

• louder f‘s
• be able to count out loud

To clarify these examples, a beginning student who has had only a few lessons will commonly have trouble playing loud enough when their music indicates forte, so the goal of playing “louder f‘s” wouldn’t just apply to one single piece – it would apply to all pieces. As for the goal, “be able to count out loud,” perhaps a transfer student plays with incorrect rhythm in all of their pieces, so when they start two or three new ones, their primary goal that week is to be able to count out loud in all of their pieces. Neither of these examples are inherently universal goals. These examples show that many goals can become universal goals as long as the failure that produced the goal is present in all of the student’s playing.

A subcategory of the universal goal would be the body map goal. First, the term body map refers to the brain’s knowledge of the body and how it moves in 3D space (often automatically, without deliberate thought). To demonstrate the idea of the body map to my students, I will position myself just within reach of grabbing a pen on my piano. “I’m not reaching for the pen yet, but somehow I just ‘know’ that my arm is now within reach of it. That’s because my brain is reading a kind of ‘map’ of my body, telling me how close I need to be to this pen before I reach for it because my body map already knows how long my arm is.” I then grab the pen and explain all of the amazing things my brain did “in the background” to accomplish this seemingly simple task, lifting from the shoulder joint, arm rotation, and moving a couple fingers to grab the pen, all without any deliberate thought. Then I might say, “Contrast this with what a 6-month-old baby would do with his or her incomplete body map…”, and I proceed to grab the pen again, this time accidentally grabbing 4 or 5 other objects along with it (2 or 3 of them fall onto my keyboard) because all 5 fingers of my hand are acting in clumsy unison, with the imprecision of a tractor claw.

A body map goal is a goal that requires changing the body map – the way the body generally moves – every time a certain action is performed at the piano, no matter what piece is performed. Here are a couple examples of body map goals:

• no collapsing fingers [i.e. 2nd knuckle in each finger should maintain its curve rather than bending backward when depressing a key]
• sit up straight

Sitting up straight might not seem like a body map goal at first, but a student has to think about sitting up straight during the entire performance of all of their pieces, not just when they first sit down at the piano. As it turns out, the example of sitting up straight is always a universal goal. The other goal, no collapsing fingers, is also always a body map goal. If a student is bending their index finger backward in one piece whenever the finger depresses a key, then they’re bending that finger backward in all pieces, because that’s just how their finger naturally moves to depress a key in any context.

Remember that the 16-measure “keep LH soft” spread goal could be considered 64 instances of the same spot goal. Universal goals and body map goals can be viewed this way as well. In fact, this phenomenon is greatly compounded with universal goals. If a student plays 950 notes during their entire practice routine, this is 950 opportunities to habituate the goal. Assuming a 5-day practice week, that would be 4,750 goal-habituating opportunities. In light of this, shouldn’t universal goals be the easiest kinds of goals to complete in a week’s time?

Unfortunately, no – not even close. While universal goals are typically very easy to cognitively understand (step 1 of PIT Practicing is often trivial), the universal goal is the most challenging type of goal to actually practice effectively, because it requires constant, obsessive, mind-numbing concentration throughout the entire practice routine. This can easily become tedious and produce boredom long before enough successful repetitions have been achieved. In my experience, in the rare best case scenario, a student gets a universal goal completely habituated in two weeks.

Above and beyond the general universal goal, the body map goal is additionally difficult to habituate. While it might take 50, 100 or even 200 repetitions of other universal goals to habituate, changing one’s body map takes thousands of repetitions, because the body map is so slow to change. In fact, despite the high metacognitive skill that correlates with those who have high IQ, overconfidence can easily get in the way of progress on body map goals due to underestimating the amount of repetition necessary to reprogram the body map. Many students with high IQs are accustomed to being able to get high grades in school with minimal work compared to other students, but this academic talent means nothing in the realm of retraining one’s body map. Ironically, despite the fact that high IQ students tend to have the highest levels of metacognitive skill, in my experience, the students who seem to have the most trouble with body map goals are disproportionately academically gifted students. I call this the Midvale Effect, after Gary Larson’s famous “Midvale School for the Gifted” cartoon, which unfortunately I can’t get permission to display in this article. (Spoiler of the cartoon: an academically gifted child is attempting to enter the school by pushing as hard as he can on a door labeled “pull.”)

Generally, if possible, we should try to notate goals in either chronological order, or even better, reverse chronological order. (More on that in article #7.) Either way, the universal goal should always be notated first in a goal list. Unlike spot goals and spread goals, we know that all universal goals begin on the first note of measure 1 and end on the last note of the last measure. There is no goal in the entire piece that is unaffected by the universal goal. If we are serious about helping students to practice as efficiently as possible, we should present students with the possibility that their first day practicing will be error-free. Just because this probably won’t happen doesn’t mean we still shouldn’t aim for it. If we put a universal goal at the bottom of the goal list, it is practically guaranteed that the student will continue reinforcing the bad universal goal habit until they finally encounter it in their list of goals.

Ideally, we would love to be able to write a universal goal over and over again as the first goal listed for all of the student’s pieces and exercises that week. My “workaround” for this when writing goals on paper is to write the universal goal at the top of the paper with a “cloud” drawn around it. If I want to notate it with even greater urgency, I draw rain and lightning bolts coming out of the cloud, figuratively drenching and electrocuting all the other goals that week.

Process-Oriented and Result-Oriented Goals

Examples of process-oriented goals (goals that tell a student how to practice) would be:

• Drill m.5-6 10x each day
• Ghost the LH

To clarify the second goal, “ghosting” a hand means to play hands together, except with one hand playing so softly that the notes literally don’t make any sound. Keys still move, but they don’t touch the bottom of the keybed, so no sound comes out. This is a useful technique to use when helping students to play one hand louder than the other hand for the first time.

Process-oriented goals like this are wonderful tips, but they are also difficult or impossible to evaluate. After ghosting the LH for a week, the student may still have just as much trouble playing the LH softer, so the teacher has no way to verify whether any ghosting was actually done. Conversely, the student might not have ghosted the LH at all that week, but they still managed to achieve playing the LH softer than the RH. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as these goals were not assigned with any intention to “evaluate” them; the only way a teacher can evaluate process-oriented goals is to take the student’s word for it. If the aim is to assign goals that can be objectively evaluated the next week (to help quantify a student’s practice quality as described in part 2), the teacher should make sure that a process-oriented goal should be assigned underneath the result-oriented goal it supports.

Result-oriented goals such as “play LH softer than RH” or “fix wrong note” are easy to evaluate. They are either done or they aren’t, as evidenced by what the student habituated that week. To reiterate, process-oriented goals should be assigned in support of result-oriented goals. When writing goals in a paper notebook, I precede result-oriented goals with a hyphen, as with a bullet list. When writing supporting process-oriented goals, I use indented L-shaped arrows underneath result-oriented goals that visually show the supportive nature of the goals.

In part 5, Goal Interactions, I will continue developing a framework for both students and teachers to understand goals, helping them to strategize in practicing and teaching, respectively.

(c) 2022 Read Twedt