Metacognition in Teaching Music Performance, Part 9: MetaPractice

“I often wish I could see my students every day, the way public school teachers do. But, this is a practical world, so we have to find ways to follow through at home, to be with them in every practice period, even without being there personally.”
Louise Goss

Most students lack metacognition, or they don’t demonstrate metacognitive skill by putting their metacognitive knowledge to use. Articles 2-8 attempt to remedy this as much as possible through tangible, practical strategies for both teacher and student. But there is still an upper limit to what we can do when we only see students once each week. This and numerous other limitations of metacognition-oriented teaching are addressed effectively by MetaPractice. MetaPractice is an app (for both web and also iPhone) into which I’ve poured my life blood (literally countless hours) over the course of almost a decade, based on all of my obsessive research into metacognition. I designed it, but I didn’t code it – I paid 85 bajillion dollars (give or take a kajillion) to have it coded, and it is released through Orange Note. It is actually two apps: MetaPractice Teacher, for assigning and evaluating goals, and MetaPractice Student, for practicing goals. The introduction video is here.

Article #1, Defining the Problem, outlines a number of metacognitive issues in musical study. Perhaps the most serious of these issues is the tendency for students to play all the way through a piece / pleasure seek / practice while in stage 3 “autonomous” mode. Even when students cognitively know how they should be practicing, they still tend to practice like musical snow plows since we are not there with them. MetaPractice significantly helps to address this issue by allowing the teacher to set each student to Beginner, Skilled or Advanced mode, and these modes affect how many goals the student is shown at a time (one goal at a time, one piece at a time, or their entire goalbook at a time). This powerful tool is demonstrated in this video (1:47). Also relevant is the tendency of students to practice certain things more than others or to skip over some things entirely, and this is addressed in a video students see about pausing and postponing practice (4:41).

Article #2, Quantifying Practice Quality, discusses the benefits of giving tangible feedback to students in the form of Trouble Goals and scores, which also encourages teachers to assign goals that are specific and measurable each week. MetaPractice gives teachers the option to use trouble goals and scores to make their feedback to students and parents more effective. This video (4:59) demonstrates how Trouble goals work in MetaPractice.

Article #3, PIT Practicing, outlines a simple framework that students can use in practicing and that teachers can use in helping students reflect on their practicing (see article #6, Reflection). This framework is especially useful for spot goals and spread goals, both of which are discussed in article #4, Goal Types. Not only does MetaPractice allow goals to be assigned with these goal types, it also adjusts students’ practice routine based on how the goals are assigned. MetaPractice also offers “goal guidance,” giving students a way to engage in a drilling game for individual goals analogous to the “jelly bean game” discussed in Article #3. PIT Practicing and goal types are even explained to students in videos that are available in Help areas of MetaPractice. See the following videos for both teachers and for students:

Teachers

Spot goals (3:31)
Spread goals (1:20)
Universal goals (1:42)
Once goals, reordering goals (3:53)
Goal guidance (3:18)

Students

Spot goals & PIT practicing (6:16)
Spread goals (4:18)
Universal goals (1:30)
Once goals (1:24)

A critically important aspect of Article #8, The 1-3 Rule, is backward practicing, and MetaPractice offers this option via its Goal Sorting feature shown in this video (4:06). Note that Article #5 (Goal Interactions) discusses the importance of recognizing strategy in how goals are ordered. The teacher’s Universal goals video above touches on this, showing that teachers can specify whether Universal goals are listed first or last when shown alongside other goals.

MetaPractice also offers a lot of what might be called “convenience” features, such as its core ability to organize the goalbook with categories, subcategories and goals (2:11), a media library (2:55), templates (3:04) that allow teachers to save and load commonly used lesson plans, an audio scratchpad (1:42) that makes quick temporary recording for review easy, badges (2:39) that help teachers identify what was neglected in the previous lesson, an interface for completing pieces and a powerful repertoire list (4:42), and goal memory (2:14) to help teachers know when a previously completed goal reverts to a bad habit.