3 Skills Music Students Need for Independent Practice

Because I teach very young children to play the violin, their parents are an integral part of their practice sessions at home for quite some time. I literally couldn’t do it without them!

Every student though eventually makes the transition to practicing independently.

When and how this happens can be very individual, and if you’re wondering when your family will start this process, it’s an important conversation to have with your teacher.

Regardless of exactly when this process starts, it is a process that happens gradually over time for most students.

I like to think in advance about what my students need to develop in advance before they successfully practice on their own.

These skills don’t have to be mastered entirely before we start, some will be learned along the way as I coach students through the process. Others will develop more fully as they mature and get more experience.

As a teacher and a parent here is what I think makes for a successful transition:

1.The student develops an understanding of how to organize time and structure their practice.

How long should they practice?

What are the different assignments they need to get to in a given practice? Over a given week?

How do they keep themselves on track to keep everything moving ahead and progressing?

In Teaching Genius: Dorothy Delay and the Making of a Musician by Barbara Lourie Sand the author shares the 5-hour practice routine Delay would assign to her students. You can find a good summary here.

While our students are likely not practicing as long as this – it illustrates the need to have an organized plan and map out the time we spend carefully. As teachers, we can help by making a plan together in the lesson and talking through how to structure practice time.

And as parents, we can help model this by having a structure like this to practice before our children take over the independent practice entirely on their own.

2.The Mental Work Shifts to the Student

With very young students often the parent is doing the mental work at first: remembering what and how to practice, while the student is doing all of the physical work. They are figuring out how to stand, how to hold their instrument, how to produce a good sound and so on.

As we get ready to transition to independent practice, we need to shift that mental work to our children during practice. Ask them questions Ask them to self-evaluate

Ask them to remember what the teacher asked them to improve.

Ask them to look for the practice spots they hear in their own playing.

It will be a struggle to keep practice productive, if practice has always been defined as “my parent tells me what to do” and then suddenly they are left to their own devices.

It may be more efficient to get through practice without doing this, but efficiency is not the goal – developing an independent practicer is.

3.Develop a Toolkit of Practice Techniques

I ask parents of beginners to put together a practice toolkit – You can read a whole post about it here. It includes things like dice, and game spinners, and finger puppets.

As students get to the age of practicing independently, we want a whole other kind of toolkit

A list of ideas for what really works when it’s time to improve something: Slowing down

Working with a metronome

Repetitions, done carefully . . . and so on.

I encourage you to keep a list of what works and have your student pick from the list when it’s time to improve something. They may have a list of ideas already in their head, which is great. It’s also great to keep a list in our practice notebook of additional ideas so our toolbox continues to grow.

If we start making sure our children are building these skills long before they are left to their own devices to practice, they are much more likely to know how to practice well.

How are you helping your child develop the skills they will need to practice successfully on their own?