Metacognition in Teaching Music Performance, Part 8: The 1-to-3 Rule

As mentioned in article #6, it’s difficult to generalize about specific problems that arise from acquisition goals. But the biggest acquisition goals of them all, such as “begin learning new piece” or “continue learning piece,” are quite a different story. While these goals may sound too general to be worthy of explicitly assigning, their open-endedness leaves room for the student to exercise their own metacognitive skill, provided of course the student possesses such skills. The other extreme, such as “measures 17-32 hands alone first 2 days, then hands together,” might be too challenging or not challenging enough for one week of work, not to mention taking the student out of the strategic driver’s seat altogether. Respecting the independence dilemma presented in the previous article in more general terms, some amount of open-endedness is preferable, but only when the student has the metacognitive skills needed to approach new material strategically.

The most obvious metacognitive guidance to give to accompany these open-ended goals is to first analyze the piece: identify key, look for difficult spots to start practicing now, find patterns, etc. This is great advice, and also commonly advocated by many teachers. But this advice just isn’t enough. What is less obvious is how to get students to use metacognitive skill in planning, executing and evaluating the practicing of new material when the teacher did not necessarily offer any specific strategies. These skills include:

Prioritize: practice material that is in the worst shape first each day;
Chunk size: work on manageable chunks of music each day rather than being a musical snow plow, playing through way too much material mindlessly without much repetition;
Daily progress: work on chunks with enough repetition so that daily progress is significant rather than barely noticeable;
Practicing backward: work from the end of the piece to the beginning.

Of course, a teacher can explicitly tell students to do all of these things, and maybe some students will be successful. But most won’t be successful with even half of these things just because they are told to do so. To accomplish all of this at once, there is one single rule which acts as an algorithm that is simple to follow, killing all four metacognitive birds with one stone.

Before introducing this stone, let’s clarify the idea of “practicing backward,” which means different things to different teachers. Most teachers define this to be always starting at the end of a piece, and working toward the beginning. Even when beginning a new piece of music (the first day the student ever practices the piece), the student works on the last couple lines or last page. The common argument in favor of this strategy is that the student experiences more and more comfort/security while performing the piece as the piece progresses, because the closer to the end the student approaches, the more total practice time has been spent on the material. There may be some truth to this, but unfortunately, this is a zero-sum gain: it also means the student will be less secure in the beginning of the piece. Students tend to be more nervous when they first start playing than they are after a minute or two and they start to approach the end of a piece, so it would seem that more security would be needed for the first 10-30 seconds than at any other point in the piece. This assumes the piece is well-prepared; if the piece is not well-prepared, then the likelihood of heart rate and nervousness increasing as the performance progresses goes up as the student inevitably accumulates mistakes throughout the performance.

But no matter, because the idea of “practicing backward” used in this article has nothing to do with gaining psychological comfort as a student performs; it has to do with minimizing temptation to pleasure-seek (i.e., play all the way through) as the student practices. If one practices measures 8-12, then 24-34, then 56-60, etc., every single repetition of those chunks carries a huge temptation to go on and continue playing prematurely, before enough repetition has occurred. Sometimes students willfully give into this temptation, or perhaps they accidentally get distracted and forget they are drilling. But if these spots are drilled in reverse order (108-112, then 88-98, then 56-62, etc.), the student’s temptation to “keep going” is greatly reduced or eliminated. To keep going would mean to quickly approach material they just finished drilling five seconds ago. A student would be mentally and emotionally tired of that spot they just practiced, so the student doesn’t goes on. Finally, when the student reaches the beginning of the piece, they perform all the way through as “dessert” for the discipline of drilling, reaping the benefits of all the drilling they just finished (but still stopping to drill more if additional problems are encountered).

The benefits of careful prioritization, intelligent choice of chunk size, daily progress from sufficient repetition, and practicing backward are produced with the 1-3 Rule.

The 1-to-3 Rule

Suppose we define a “security scale” from 1 to 10 for how well a piece (or section of a piece) is prepared:

Unknown: Not started yet (resembles sight-reading)
Very Uncomfortable: Frequent stops/stumbles at any tempo
Uncomfortable: Still frequent stops/stumbles, comfortable to play only at an extremely slow tempo

Barely Comfortable: stops/stumbles infrequent or nonexistent at a slow tempo
Comfortable: stops/stumbles infrequent or nonexistent at a somewhat slow tempo
Very Comfortable: stops/stumbles infrequent or nonexistent at a moderate tempo, often partially memorized
Extremely Comfortable: stops/stumbles infrequent or nonexistent at a faster tempo, almost all memorized

Secure: Memorized, ready for an informal performance such as a group class
Very Secure: Ready for a recital or festival
Owned: Ready for a competition

The 1-to-3 Rule is as follows.

EVERY DAY:

Bring some part of the music that is in the 1-3 category into the 4-7 category that same day
Improve previous 4-7 material
Improve previous 8-10 material
Play entire piece

One could write this more concisely and just explain it to students in words:

1-3 –> 4-7
4-7
8-10
Play

Here is what is accomplished by this seemingly simple, almost juvenile rule/algorithm. Suppose a student has already been applying it on a new piece for a couple weeks:

First, the student is forced to evaluate and quantify exactly how well they think they know various parts of the music. They are forced to prioritize each day, which in turn helps to avoid stagnation. They know they can’t begin with what is familiar (pleasure-seek) because the algorithm says to work on 1-3 material first.
Once the student identifies the first place in the music that falls in the 1-3 category, the student must strategize about how large of a chunk to work on. The student might think, “I know my teacher won’t be happy if I just bring one single measure into the 4-7 category today, and I know I could never do 8 measures. Maybe I’ll try 4 measures today.”
In order to bring the selected material up into a 4-7 range the same day, the student is forced to engage in more repetition than most students normally would, deriving great benefit from small amounts of time. Because the student is constantly trying to optimize chunk size and repetition, the student makes daily progress that is sometimes magnitudes beyond what was previously experienced with the non-strategic “play from the beginning until I get tired” strategy.
Supposing the “1-3” material one or two days ago was measures 36-40, today’s “1-3” material might be 41-45. The next newest (more secure) material today would be 36-40 (yesterday’s “1-3” material). After that it would be 46-50, and so on. While learning or securing a learned piece, even though a student is progressing “forward” through the piece from one week to the next, this automatically causes a student to practice backward from one minute to the next. When a piece is fairly strong (i.e. when everything is “8” or above), the practice routine will continue evolving to the point where a student jumps straight into all the weakest parts of the piece (whether it is backward or forward), practicing those spots first, then performing the piece, which is an ideal general strategy in preparing for performances.

Very often, a chunk that is raised from the 1-3 category into the 4-7 category drops back down a little the next day. For example, “1” material might be brought up to “4” on Tuesday, but then on Wednesday when first starting to practice, it feels more like “3.” It’s fine for a student to begin with this “3” material again that day since it is still part of the 1-3 category (but by the end of practicing that day, it should be at a “5” so it doesn’t fall down to a “3” the next day). Even if students take a couple days to solidify each chunk, this still avoids stagnation.

Over the course of weeks and months of doing this, the student builds extensive metacognitive knowledge about themselves. Having to continually quantify (assign numeric values to) previously practiced material causes students to continually adjust their idea about what it feels like for material to be “learned” or “secure.” Practicing weak material first produces progress that is more rapid, not to mention higher quality as mistakes are more likely to be caught. This in turn helps students to learn just what they are capable of doing in a day’s practice, not to mention rapid progress experienced over the course of many weeks will often become addictive and “fun.” Students learn through experience the difference between playing and practicing – they learn to stop lying to themselves when they say “I practiced” when they really just played.

Most of all, one could almost call this routine the “Delay of Gratification Algorithm.” The 1-3 Rule trains students to seek out weakness first rather than sitting down and immediately pleasure-seeking at the piano.

Article #9 (the final article) in this series will discuss MetaPractice.

References

Son, Lisa K., and Nate Kornell. “Simultaneous decisions at study: Time allocation, ordering, and spacing.” Metacognition and Learning 4.3 (2009): 237-248.