Metacognition in Teaching Music Performance, Part 6: Reflection

So far, this series of articles have described how to give students and parents clear and accurate feedback each week, as well as ways to organize and understand goals to more effectively assign and practice them. This article will examine how reflection on practicing can be used as an opportunity to further develop metacognitive skill.

First, it’s informative to consider a meta-view of how goal difficulty intersects with a student’s skill level. Depending on the student, a result-oriented goal will already be in one of the following three stages of goal completion when assigned:

1. Acquisition goal: a goal that requires the student to acquire an entirely new skill. [Highly challenging]
2. Application goal: a goal that requires the student to apply a recently acquired skill to a new piece. [Moderately challenging]
3. Habituation goal: a goal that requires the student to apply an already mastered skill to a new piece. [Not challenging]

Let’s consider goals such as, “Play RH louder than LH” or “Smooth ritardando.” This table shows what a typical student at various skill levels will need to go through to complete these goals:

Students tend to work hardest and smartest on acquisition goals. Students exercise more humility and what might be called “healthy self-doubt” when trying to acquire a brand new skill, and sometimes students will even perceive a skill they haven’t yet acquired as being more difficult than it really is. And while many articles could be written about various specific practice tips to help a student acquire this or that skill, it is also impossible to generalize about acquisition goals. Every new skill that must be learned has its own set of unique problems and unique solutions, often relating to the various unpredictable quirks of physical coordination and perception. What’s more, even when an acquisition goal isn’t completed, it is almost always improved upon, and most teachers (myself included) do not consider this to be a “failure” to the point of reassigning it as a trouble goal (as defined in article #2). In other words, failure to complete an acquisition goal in 1 or 2 weeks is often not a metacognitive failure. These are the reasons why this article will focus on the more common and less acceptable failure to complete application goals and habituation goals. When faced with these goals, students don’t naturally work as hard or as efficiently. (This is a more general version of the Midvale Effect discussed in article #3, as this overconfidence applies to everyone, not just those with high IQ). Metacognitive failures in completing application and habituation goals are more easily generalized.

Before entering “Detective Mode” (below) to have students reflect on a metacognitive failure to apply/habituate a goal, I like to first ask students the biggest metacognitive question of them all:

• Are you surprised that this goal isn’t done, or did you already know it wasn’t done before today’s lesson started?

If there is no surprise, then often the student already knows the nature of their metacognitive failure, and discussion can progress naturally from there. If the student was surprised, that’s where Detective Mode comes in.

Detective Mode

When a failure occurs on even the simplest application or habituation goal such as fixing a wrong note, I like to tell students that we are entering Detective Mode to figure out what went wrong during practice so that students are more open to self-critique. Making them my “Watson” helps them to shed a lot of potential defensiveness in the self-critiquing process. With the little ones, one could even have fun with this and utilize props such as a detective hat, pipe, spectacles and magnifying glass. This is where I might remind a student that this detective work is the most valuable part of the piano lesson; not only are they learning about music like with any other goal, they’re also learning about practicing. And make no mistake, failing to get application and habituation goals done is, without exception, always due a metacognitive failure of some kind. A teacher simply cannot let this reflective opportunity go to waste. When reassigning a goal after the student fails to complete it, the teacher should always make sure the student understands where their practicing went wrong.

Sometimes students are able to quickly state what went wrong, especially if the answer is painfully obvious, such as, “I didn’t get to this piece this week.” When the answer isn’t so obvious to the student, PIT Practicing serves as an excellent framework on which reflection can be based. When a student just can’t seem to figure out what exactly caused the failure (a more common occurrence than we’d like, as it is no surprise that a student who doesn’t have the metacognitive skill to put a staccato on some particular note after a week of practice would also lack the metacognitive skill to figure out why they failed), a series of questions for the student might go something like this, with the specific PIT Practicing failure indicated in parenthesis:

• Did you read the goal every day? (Prepare)

This is another one that is usually “obvious” to students, but sometimes not. Sometimes students are more careful their first day of practice, then they let their guard down on the second or third day, thinking it’s not necessary to prepare their goals carefully.

• Did you fully understand the goal or misunderstand the goal in any way? (Prepare)

These “detective mode” questions are only asked after some discussion of the goal has already taken place and the student now understands the goal, so if misunderstanding the goal is the nature of the metacognitive failure, this is usually revealed while initially discussing the goal, before entering detective mode. Sometimes the failure is even the teacher’s fault for not writing the goal down clearly enough. Still, this question is included here for the sake of keeping the logical progression together.

• Did you read too many goals at once and practice them all at the same time? (Prepare)

This metacognitive failure involves underestimating the difficulty of getting any single goal done and/or overestimating one’s own ability to concentrate on multiple things while practicing. Just because a goal seems easy and simple, again such as fixing a wrong note, wrong fingering, lift between slurs, etc., doesn’t mean it can be “studied in groups” like we do with vocabulary words when we study for a vocabulary test… at least not on the first day or two of practice. Since music involves timing and coordination (two dimensions that don’t exist in the realm of academics), even the simplest goals still take a decent amount of focused work to apply and habituate.

• What size practice chunk did you take while drilling this goal? (Isolate/Drill)

This question could also be asked, “Did you lose concentration on the goal while practicing it?” In almost every case when concentration is the issue, it’s because the practice chunk was too large and allowed for distraction to occur before actually reaching the goal in the score. But I prefer asking more directly about the practice chunk, as it’s an easier question for students to answer with clarity.

• How slow did you go when you isolated and drilled it?

All experienced teachers know that a teacher’s definition of “slow” is often very different (much, much slower) than a student’s definition. What’s important to emphasize here is that the fastest way to get any goal done is to do it correctly on the first try, second try, third try, and every try after that, no matter how slow 100% correctness requires.

• Did you practice it correctly all week long, but maybe you didn’t drill it enough times? (Isolate/Drill)

Merely telling the student to “drill more,” while good advice, doesn’t necessarily get to the metacognitive cause of this failure. This goes back to the “listen to your feelings” wisdom that students must follow while engaging in step 2 of PIT Practicing. The definition of “enough times” will change with every goal, but what shouldn’t change is the feeling of security that a student has before concluding the goal has been practiced enough. When this particular failure occurs (and it does for every student at some point), this is where we tell students to modify their definition of what it means for a goal to “feel secure.” There are many creative ways to convey this, such as, “You stopped practicing this goal just because you thought it was ready for this piano lesson. But you need to keep practicing a goal until you feel like you could play it on live television in front of a billion people.”

• Did you practice the goal correctly all week long, then it fell apart in the lesson? (Test Yourself)

This is a common failure. For many, the process of testing oneself (simulating the next lesson / putting the goal under pressure) doesn’t come naturally. Students are often content to read the goal, drill the goal, and move on without ever playing the goal in a larger context. These are the students who express the most surprise in the lesson that the goal isn’t done, even on rare occasions resulting in great frustration. This is certainly understandable, as there is nothing more disheartening in a music lesson than the feeling of doing everything right and still getting it wrong “on the test.” That is why this metacognitive reflection is so important. When a student learns that there is a very sensible, rational, and even predictable reason why the goal didn’t hold up to the pressure of the lesson, the frustration evaporates and turns into renewed focus for the upcoming practice week.

I certainly do not have these questions memorized or documented as a flowchart that progresses exactly the same way every time. I improvise these questions in each lesson in a manner that comes naturally in conversation, although I do have the steps of PIT Practicing in mind as I ask the questions, so they usually come out in a fairly logical fashion. Every unique student, unique piece, and unique failure will lead me to ask questions a bit differently each time. The point isn’t to turn these questions into a formal flowchart; the point is to empower the student to avoid making the same practicing mistake again in the future.

ESP Self-Evaluation

Nielsen (2001) offers a simplified model for self-evaluation, which can also be applied to in-lesson reflection:

• Successful performance –> New problem
• Unsuccessful performance –>
  • More effort
  • More effort and revise strategy
  • More effort, revise strategy and revise problem belief

To make this useful, when practicing fails, use ESP:

• Effort
• Strategy
• Problem

There are three caveats I would issue about ESP evaluation. First, there is overlap between Effort and Strategy. While the intensity of concentration is certainly 100% effort, how many times one drills a correction is part of both effort and strategy. Second, I think it’s critical that the idea of Testing Yourself is considered a distinctly separate step from Strategy, which ESP Evaluation fails to do. Instead, Test Yourself is implicitly (silently) included in the Strategy category. It is more difficult to identify a “Test Yourself” failure in one’s strategy when the idea isn’t made explicit. Finally, while the order “Effort, Strategy, Problem” does make sense when a student is in the middle of practicing, it makes more sense to approach it in reverse order when reflecting on it during a lesson (i.e. while the student is not in the middle of practicing): “Problem, Strategy, Effort,” which lines up more closely with PIT Practicing.

Our Traitorous Senses

There is one more general principle that I’ve found to be extremely useful in helping students to understand the failure to habituate certain kinds of goals (correcting rhythm, memorizing/looking at the score, and creating/correcting muscle memory), a principle relating to our three non-analytical memories (audio, visual, kinesthetic). This principle comes in the form of a quotation from yours truly that I repeat to my students frequently:

To clarify:

1. Evil ears make it difficult to correct wrong rhythms. Audio memory can be like the devil on a student’s shoulder: “Come on, just play it the way you ‘know’ it should sound. Don’t count the rhythm out loud, just play what comes naturally! You’ll love how it sounds, and if you love it, how can it be wrong?” This devil leads music students astray. The angel on the student’s other shoulder, dressed like a nerdy math teacher, says, “Forget what it sounds like – in fact, forget that you’re even playing music! This is math! Count the numbers with the steadiness of an extremely slow clock, and match the notes up with the counts!” Practicing a wrong rhythm locks students into what I tell them is an “audio prison,” and until they become very skilled in rhythmic and metric awareness, the only “key” to get out of that prison is to latch onto outside realities such as the metronome, counting out loud, tapping while counting out loud, etc.
2. Lazy eyes get in the way of looking at the unfamiliar. When memorizing music, or when needing to refer to the score after something is comfortably memorized, it requires less mental effort to just look at what is most familiar, so out of laziness, a student resists looking at their hands / score, respectively.
3. Stupid muscles make just about everything take longer than we think, especially correcting fingerings. Students may know this cognitively, but as far as their metacognitive skill demonstrates at home, many students clearly believe their muscles are “smarter” than they actually are, especially when body map goals are involved, requiring thousands of repetitions to habituate.

Reflection is the beginning of the more general process of error correction, leading directly into the next article on Independence vs. Modeling.

(c) 2022 Read Twedt

References

Nielsen, Siw. “Self-regulating Learning Strategies in Instrumental Music Practice.” Music Education Research 3.2 (2001): 155-167.