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My Student Did Not Practice Again



My Student Did Not Practice Again

I am sure the sight of a student who did not practice again was not unfamiliar to many of us teachers. I understand that it is frustrating and could suck the joy of teaching; I do know teachers who threw in the towel because of this. I must admit that it was a sore point at one point of my teaching career, but I decided to adopt a more positive approach because I genuinely wanted all my students to have a positive learning experience. Let me share with you a couple of pointers that hopefully could provide you with better solutions to this issue.

·     Empathize and diagnose

It might be an instinct for many of us to immediately ask “Why didn’t you practice?” in a disapproving tone when faced with a non-practicing student. We might even launch into a tirade chiding student or institute a penalty. Perhaps naively we think that the student would feel bad for disappointing us. But trust me on this, those actions are going to have opposite the effects we desire.

We could instead try to empathise with our non-practicing students. We could ask them gently for example “I’ve noticed that you did not do sufficient practice last week, could you tell me what prevented you from doing so?” When they feel that their teachers are genuinely concerned with their well-beings, they might start to share the real reasons and you could then start to find the solutions to those issues.

There are many possible reasons that might lead to decreased motivations to practice for example: lack of proper practice environment, poorly serviced piano, overbearing parents, relationship problems, lack of palpable progress, etc. We are not going to discuss the possible solutions of those issues in this article; my main point is we need to keep a cool head and work the issues cooperatively rather than simply asking a student to practice more.

Progressively increase practice


I think many of us are probably guilty of asking our students to practice a x amount of time every day. That was probably how many of us were instructed by our teachers to practice last time during our student days. Asking a non-practicing student to do this is probably only going to be a continual exercise in frustration as they would most likely be unable to meet the stipulated practice targets.

Instead, start by setting goals that could be realistically accomplished with whatever little practice time the student would be willing to commit at first. For example, if a student claimed he could only practice half hour during the week, assign practice goals that could be completed within that half hour. And then gradually increase the amount of difficulty of practice goals that would require the student to commit more practice hours. By achieving smaller and more realistic goals, the student would improve in confidence and start to find practice more rewarding. I find this approach very effective in my teaching practice and I have successfully rehabilitated many non-practicing students this way
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