Perfect Practice Part 3: Interleaved Practice

What is interleaved practice?

Interleaving is the process of structuring practice so that students move frequently from one topic to another. As opposed to blocked practice, which repeats the same skill with little interruption, interleaved practice rotates concepts frequently, even if they’re not yet mastered. While this practice model seems counterintuitive, it increases long-term learning and retention. We call this the contextual interference effect. Contextual interference has been studied in a variety of fields—most notably in sports—and, more recently, in music. In addition to enhanced learning, interleaved practice has been shown to boost executive functions like goal-setting, planning, and focus. (Carter and Grahn 2016).

How do we implement interleaved practice?

While it’s clear that interleaved practice is beneficial, implementing it in real life comes with some challenges. Some students don’t feel immediately comfortable changing tasks quickly; they may have anxiety about perceived incompleteness of a concept. Blocking is also still a predominant practice strategy among musicians—it’s likely that repetition is how many music teachers learned to practice when they were students. To deviate from what we’ve known for the majority of our musical study can feel unnatural and intimidating.

As with any practice strategy, I’ve found that the most practical way to encourage interleaved practice among students is to model it within the lesson so that it becomes familiar. Because highlighting practice strategies in every lesson is already a major part of my own teaching philosophy, creating context interference through faster lesson pacing has been relatively easy to do. My personal challenge with interleaving the lesson structure is trusting that learning is happening despite a student’s in-the-moment performance occasionally decreasing. According to the literature on context interference, this is to be expected!

A Basic Interleaved Structure

I like to have clear-cut topics for interleaved practice (or any practice session). These could include learning a brand new piece, reviewing an old piece, doing technical work (via exercises, etudes, or in specific passages of a piece), doing memory work, improvising, practicing performance etiquette, or working to make a piece more expressive. Each topic warrants different practice strategies, so rotating among them provides the context interference we need for long-term learning and retention. The names of practice topics don’t necessarily need to be explained; by using and modeling them frequently in everyday teaching language, students seem to catch onto the idea quickly.

Student-Led practice plans

This student noticed that the pattern of repeated notes ends in the last two measures, so he put a practice square around them.

I have found that marking specific practice points is conducive to successful interleaved home practice. Having students mark challenging passages with squares or highlighting tape has been useful in my teaching practice. I always have students find and mark the passages themselves and explain why a particular section is more challenging. However, the word “difficult” is something that I’ve removed from my vocabulary in this context. Rather, we call difficult passages “the fun part,” “the impressive part,” or, as one of my students puts it, “the spicy part.” This reframes challenges in a fun way that fosters a positive attitude toward practice. Students can cycle through the practice squares from all their pieces, creating context interference. The key is to practice each section only until it begins to feel easier—not until it is note-for-note perfect. This allows the brain to stay engaged.

“With blocking, once you know what solution to use, or movement to execute, the hard part is over. With interleaving, each practice attempt is different from the last, so rote responses don’t work. Instead, your brain must continuously focus on searching for different solutions. That process can improve your ability to learn critical features of skills and concepts, which then better enables you to select and execute the correct response.”

— Steven C. Pan

Real-life Results

Since actively encouraging interleaved practice, I’ve made some general observations. Students seem to be:

• less frustrated by making mistakes and more self-compassionate

• more reflective on their work, verbalizing what they missed and why they think they missed it before moving onto the next repetition of a passage

• more thoughtful before playing rather than diving headfirst into a piece

Although a great number of factors can engender these positive behaviors, I believe that the de-emphasis on perfection inherent to interleaved practice might play a role.

Further Reading

A Short Read: The Interleaving Effect: Mixing It Up Boosts Learning

A Deeper Dive: Optimizing Music Learning: Exploring How Blocked and Interleaved Practice Schedules Affect Advanced Performance

Carter CE and Grahn JA (2016) Optimizing Music Learning: Exploring How Blocked and Interleaved Practice Schedules Affect Advanced Performance. Front. Psychol. 7:1251. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01251

Perfect Practice: Part 2

Five More Strategies for Successful Practicing

Positivity is Contagious

Approaching practice with excitement and positivity is crucial. There will be days that you don’t feel like helping your child practice. There will be days where your child doesn’t feel like practicing. These days might even overlap! Nonetheless, as adults, we are tasked with creating and controlling the practice atmosphere. Announcing that it’s time to practice with a friendly—not demanding or nagging—tone is a good place to start.

Although part of piano practice is identifying and correcting mistakes, it’s also important to focus on what the student is doing well. While I don’t recommend undue praise as a way to motivate or lift spirits, it’s a good idea to keep a healthy positivity/negativity ratio: for every constructive criticism, try to mention two areas in which the student is excelling in a given practice session.

Avoid Mirroring Tension

Sometimes, tension will build in at-home practice sessions. Perhaps your child is reluctant to practice altogether, or is frustrated with challenging parts of their assignment. It’s important to not greet your child’s tension with more tension. Adults are responsible for identifying and diffusing tension; young children do not always have the emotional regulation skills to do this themselves. Diffusing tension may including pausing for a moment to tell joke and have a laugh, offering praise for effort if the student is working diligently on something challenging, or keeping communication open by having the student evaluate their own work. What do they feel is the hardest part of a particular practice session? In what areas do they feel like they are excelling?

Be Fair and Follow Through

To feel safe, communicate openly, and be freely creative, students need to trust that their teachers will not give them more than they can handle, hold them to unrealistic standards, or be inappropriately picky. The same is true for at-home practice, where the parent temporarily becomes the teacher. Avoid asking the student to do more than is listed on the weekly assignment, and be consistent with requests—it isn’t fair to have a student play a passage ten times if five times was the agreement. When children feel like they are being treated fairly, they will be more likely to put in more effort.

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Deep Dive: Give Rewards—But Know How to Use Them

Although I do not use studio-wide incentives that reward practicing on a regular basis, it’s fine if parents choose to reward practice. Using rewards without considering how they impact motivation, however, has the potential to be problematic. In the book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink discusses the psychology of rewards, including their potential pitfalls. Two main categories of rewards are discussed: If-Then rewards, and Now-That rewards.

• If-Then rewards are given upon completion of a task (e.g., if you do this task, then you will get XYZ Reward). They are usually anticipated by recipients.

• Now-That rewards are also given upon completion of a task, but they are usually a surprise and do not incentivize completion itself; instead, Now-That rewards recognize less-concrete qualities like good effort, divergent thinking, and focus.

If-Then rewards ultimately stifle creativity and inhibit deep thinking. This is because the focus is on the short term and the reward itself—it’s like chasing a carrot on a stick. Pink also explains how If-Then rewards can deflate motivation: “If-Then rewards require people for forfeit some of their autonomy…And that can spring a hole in the bottom of their motivation bucket, draining an activity of its enjoyment” (36). When an enjoyable task becomes a job, our motivation to perform the task out of genuine excitement interest declines.

If-Then rewards are also hard to maintain because they are anticipated by recipients, who come to then expect rewards upon completion of similar tasks. Pink notes, “…before long, the existing reward may no longer suffice. It will quickly feel less like a bonus and more like the status quo—which then forces [the use] of larger rewards to achieve the same effect” (53).

Now-That rewards, on the other hand, foster intrinsic motivation because they allow students to see the relationship between their behavior and rewards. What do Now-That rewards look like in the context of piano lessons and practice? Here are a few examples:

• When the student accomplishes their practice goals before their practice session is finished, reward their focus and effort by allowing some time for games via music apps. Explain that the surprise app time is a result of their focus.

• When the student successfully uses visual aids included in their take-home pouch (e.g., fuzzies, picture cards), reward them with some fun, affordable manipulatives like Iwako erasers or finger puppets. Mention that since they know how to use those aids so well, you got them some new, cool ones!

• When the student uses practice strategies independently, reward their ownership with a treat.

Because they are a surprise, Now-That rewards should always be followed up by explaining why the reward was given—this will get the student eager to show off their good attitude and effort in the future!

What I Don’t Use as Rewards

I personally avoid using creative and improvisatory tasks as rewards in any context. I believe that these activities are inherent parts of music-learning, not fun embellishments to be added as a treat or taken away as negative reinforcement.

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Thank you for reading this long-overdue addition to my Perfect Practice series! For more a in-depth look at rewards and motivation, I recommend reading Daniel Pink’s book or giving this episode of Ashley Danyew’s podcast, Field Notes on Music Teaching & Learning, a listen.

The Art of Marking Music

Yes, it’s an actual skill!

Marking music with purpose and clarity makes for more efficient lessons and practicing. Perfecting this art has been an ongoing goal of mine.

The Issue

Piano teachers are in a constant race against time—there’s so much content to fit in during the 30-60 minutes per week that we see a given student. I am in never-ending pursuit of spending less time talking and writing down assignments and more time making music! My quest to find the most effective way to mark scores is motivated by two questions that I’ve found myself repeatedly asking over the course of my career: “I marked this mistake on my sheet music—why am I (or why is my student) still making it?” and “Are assignment sheets actually useful? How can they be made more practical?”

Why do we mark our music, anyways?

A marking is a call to action—there’s something we want our students to do, and marking their music is a way of getting them to do it. The marks my students and I make usually fall into distinct categories, and sometimes the categories overlap. These categories are not something I thought of before using them; they are borne from reflection on my teaching. Some examples include:

• To analyze

• To encourage phrasing

• To prevent mistakes

• To reinforce a new concept

• To give meaning to an abstract concept

• To guide practice

How Students Interact with Their Scores

I also think of markings as existing on two independent spectrums: passive vs. active and fixed vs. flexible. The former describes the way students interact with a marking when it’s made (usually during their lesson), and the latter describes how students interact with a marking over time (usually during independent practice).

Fixed markings aren’t necessarily better than flexible ones (or vice versa). However, I almost always consider active markings to be better teaching tools than passive ones. It is easy to pinpoint issues and mark them for students to save time, but this passive approach doesn’t provide students with much ownership of their music. It has been my experience that an active approach—when students engage with their scores and make their own marks—ultimately results in greater understanding and retention.

Fixed and flexible markings function exactly how they sound. Fixed marks go on the page and stay on the page—think of circling or highlighting accidentals, denoting formal sections, or marking harmonic events. Flexible marks live and breathe with the student, allowing them to track progress. They are moveable, removable, stackable—the list goes on. I like to use removable highlighter tape, but I have also used erasable colored pencils. The goal is that flexible markings be eye-catching, engaging, and fun.

Glenn Gould’s score to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. (Source)

More About Flexible Markings

I anticipate that most musicians are familiar with fixed markings. Flexible markings, however, probably warrant more explanation. They are great for denoting:

• sudden dynamic changes

• sudden position changes

• practice strategies for particular sections of music

• errors made in a run-through of a piece

• places where memory slips occurred if a student is working toward memorization

In these situations, I use flexible markings for a few reasons:

• The tape can be removed when the student solves a problem. Errors can also be highlighted again in another color to show that a concept still needs another week of practice. Asking students if they think the tape is ready to be removed also sets the tone for self-evaluation.

• Visual clutter doesn’t accumulate over the weeks. Students won’t likely practice the same way each week; practice techniques can be swapped in and out.

• I can spend less time writing down instructions in a practice notebook and more time teaching.

• Students love taking ownership of their scores by choosing colors and applying tape on their own. Even my high schoolers enjoy picking the week’s tape color.

• There is no way to “forget” practice suggestions when they are adhered to the score with fluorescent tape. ;)

How does this relate to practicing?

If we expect students to practice independently, these conditions must be met:

• The teacher has shown the student how to practice their material in the lesson.

• The student has successfully replicated the practice techniques more than once in the lesson, under teacher supervision.

• There is a clear, concise explanation of these techniques where the student can review them, like a practice notebook—or, better yet, right on the score where they can’t be ignored.

Therefore, thoughtful, intentional, and dynamic markings that extend the practice notebook onto the score in an engaging way can be considered a student motivator. When we know what to do and how to do it, we’re more likely to take action.

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Examples

Burgmüller Op. 100, No. 9: The Chase

Here, we have a few flexible markings that outline which practice technique to use in specific passages.

O.F. = on the fallboard

G.P. = ghost practicing

S/P = stop/prepare

I don’t always use abbreviations, especially with younger students. Practice technique shortcuts like these are only useful if the student knows what they mean and how to execute them, so I write more detailed instructions in an assignment book, if necessary. Many of the nicknames I use for practice techniques are from Piano Safari’s Practice Strategy Cards. Students can buy their own and print the cards on cardstock for under $8.

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Kabalevsky Op. 27 No. 13: A Little Joke

Since different practice techniques will be used to master the rapid position changes and left-hand speed and clarity, this passage is a great place to use flexible markings.

B.P. = blocked practice, with circled notes practiced together in a “block” to aid with the rapid position changes in the notorious B section of this piece.

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Rachmaninoff Prelude in G-sharp Minor, Op. 32 No. 12

I wanted to include an example using fixed markings to illustrate the potential for creativity; fixed markings don’t have to be passive circles on the score. Here, I’ve quantified the gradual crescendo (an otherwise abstract concept) that begins in the first measure of this page. This activity is a great opportunity for advanced students to listen to recordings of concert pianists, observe the artists’ varying interpretive decisions about the crescendo, and decide for themselves how and when the volume will increase in their personal interpretation of the piece.

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The Takeaway

• The marks we make on our scores can be active or passive, fixed or flexible.

• Categorizing markings allows us to be more specific, making practicing easier for our students because they know precisely what to do and how to do it.

• Students should mark scores themselves whenever possible. Older students may also write their assignments down in their assignment books.

• Flexible markings extend the assignment notebook onto the score in an interesting way. They also allow students to self-assess and see their progress.