The Perils of Unsupported Practice

I’m sure that you, like me, have students who don’t practice, and therefore don’t progress. It’s frustrating, but understandable.

But occasionally we get students who ARE practising, and yet somehow not progressing. This is not so easy to understand. How can they be practising every day (according to their parents, not just them!) and be making such disappointingly slow progress?

The Illusion of Practice

From a parent perspective, practice is definitely happening! Their child sits at the piano, playing their pieces. It all sounds fine. They are doing their practice, right?

Not necessarily. What they are most likely doing is:

Playing familiar pieces they already know
Avoiding new and difficult passages
Ignoring mistakes (and in fact practising them in)
Not addressing anything the teacher asked them to do

They are playing piano, but not actually practising. If the child is fairly new to piano, or fairly young, this is not at all surprising! Practising effectively is a skill that builds over time. The teacher must teach how to practice, and the parent needs to oversee this at home.

An analogy

In a previous post I explored the idea that learning piano is a lot like learning to ride a bike. When a parent helps their child learn to ride a two-wheeler, they set times to go out and practice. During these practice sessions, they hold the seat, run alongside, yell encouragements, help the child up when they inevitably fall over, and slowly reduce support as confidence increases.

My point in making this analogy is that the parent would never expect the child to go and practice bike-riding on their own from the very beginning, and that the same support is needed in piano practice – but it’s over a period of years, not weeks. And this can be really hard to maintain!

But what if the child did go and practice on their own? It’s certainly safer than bike-riding, and a lot less time-consuming for the parent. Can this actually work?

At the risk of pushing the analogy too far, let’s keep looking at this in the context of learning to ride.

Imagine you’ve sent your six-year-old outside to practice riding their bike. They go outside and look at it, but they know they can’t yet ride a two-wheeler very well. They know it’s hard to get started, hard to keep going without falling over, and it all seems too hard. Then… they spot their old bike that still has training wheels on it. They hop on that and happily ride around, injury free.

When they come back inside, the parent asks, “Did you do your practice?”

And the child says, “Yes!”

You can see the problem here. Did they actually practice the new and difficult skill of riding a two-wheeler? No. They spent their time doing something easier, safer, and most importantly something they could already do.

This is exactly what happens when a child goes off to practice piano on their own. They’re playing, but they’re not practicing. And it’s fair enough too – practice is hard work! My own children, even though they were marinated in music from birth, still needed a lot of support from me and my husband during practice time, probably through until their early teens.

What Supported Practice Looks Like

Supported practice doesn’t mean the parent must sit with their child every minute of practice time. That would be amazing, but is usually not viable in 21st century life. Supported practice can be, at the bare minimum, knowing what the child is meant to be doing during their time at the instrument.

As a teacher, I write very specific notes for my students on what and how to practice, and we always go through it in the lesson. If the parent is there during lesson time, they can see my approach and hopefully try to emulate it at home. But if not, the instructions are always there!

Phrases I often write down are:

“Work on bars 12–16 ONLY this week”
“Play slowly and repeat correctly three times”
Follow the EXACT fingering on the music

Supporting the practice means making sure that these instructions are followed.

Useful questions parents can ask

Here are some specific questions that can help a parent be supportive at home.

Instead of ‘Have you done your practice’ try:

“Did you go through the notes Miss Samantha wrote for you?”

“What did you work on today that was hard?”

“I heard lots of lovely playing, but was there anything you practised?”

If the answer is no to any or all of these, there’s a good chance the practice session looked more like riding on training wheels.

A final thought

Yes, practice is hard work, and unsupported practice can mean no work is actually being done at all. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that playing piano should be joyful, and that unstructured time just playing anything is an extremely valuable thing to do. There should definitely be times when we don’t stress about trying to learn something new or fixing up a difficult passage… we just want to play the things we know, or make stuff up (an important skill!) or maybe try to figure out how to play that song we love (an even more important skill!).

Learning how to structure a practice session is essential for progress, but sometimes we do just sit down and play – which is essential for joy.

So parents shouldn’t worry if they hear their child playing through their pieces or ‘mucking around’ on the piano – as long as there is also time spent doing the ‘harder stuff’. Just like bike riding, it’s all about getting the right balance. 😊