At this point, most of us have heard about deliberate practice. I use the simple image above to explain the process of deliberate practice. It seems simple, and it is, but it is not easy. What exactly does this mean in actual practice? Most importantly, how do we use this information with our students?

The Process

One simple way is to apply deliberate practice to our rehearsals – and to the work done by students outside of the rehearsal. For instance, we might play a piece of music and – upon reflection – realize that one section needs a lot of work. The plan becomes to work on that section.

(For the sake of readability,  I’ve substituted “do” with “play” in this article; of course, every time you play a section of music represents “do” in the image above.)

We might play that section and upon reflection notice that there are a couple of particularly difficult bits that seem to trip us up. The plan becomes to choose one to work on and begin.

We might play that little bit and notice it is not good. Upon reflection, we might notice several problems, but for the sake of brevity let’s say we notice one specific problem. For example, let’s say it’s a misunderstanding of the rhythm. The plan becomes to not play the pitches but to tap out the rhythm.

We might tap out the rhythm. Upon reflection, we can decide if we got it right or not. Yes? Then repeat until we get it right 5 times in a row. No? Then return to learning the rhythm.

After all of this, we might meet our goal of getting the rhythm. Then it is time to add the notes by the same process, then work them up to tempo, then move on to other sections etcetera.

The Underlying Process

You likely go through this process again and again in rehearsal, but do you teach your students the underlying generic process as you do it?  This requires a kind of reverse engineering, back toward the generalities of the process as described in cognitive science. As students begin to recognize the underlying process they can begin to apply it to solving problems as they play in rehearsal, or practice at home.

But there is a larger purpose to deliberate practice as well. It is related to meta-cognition, or thinking about our thinking, a crucial component to improving oneself. We must ask constantly,

“Why am I doing what I am doing? Is it working? Have I given it enough time to work to make that evaluation? Should I do something different?”

Let’s take that last one. Most teachers and players can relate to the dreaded plateau. That time when we worked so hard, but no matter what we did, or how long we did it, we didn’t improve. In rehearsal it may be those sections that we keep addressing that seem to take forever to get to where we want them, and they never really get all the way there. These challenges require a different perspective.

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The Big Picture

This is a time to apply deliberate practice to the big picture:

• Plan – I want to improve
• Do – Practice/rehearse hard
• Reflect – I’m not improving
• Plan – Either I can’t get any better, or there is something I need to learn in order to improve (whether it takes one or one hundred days, or I get the information by word of mouth in a lesson or have to read 5 books).

I’ll give you an example of something that can lift one right out of a plateau in rehearsal or practice that I use sometimes in my Practiclasses (masterclasses on practicing). It may sound familiar, but I’ve found that many people who try using this technique are not doing it properly. The few that do appear to be very talented as they improve so quickly. In cognitive psychology what we experience as a plateau can be described by the power law of practice. [Learn more in this study.]

There are variations, and differing ideas about cause, but the main idea is that the rate of improvement as one repeats something during learning decreases with each repetition.

Repetition is, of course, important in motor skill development and I discussed a neurobiological reason for this in my previous deliberate practice post.

• Do – Reps, reps, reps…
• Reflect – Things stopped improving a while ago

Now the plan stage is where most of us fail. The plan is usually to keep doing things the way we always have, and as a result, we never give that really satisfying performance. There always seems to be something wrong, no matter how much we practice. The problem is that we continue to practice the same way we have been practicing ever since this type of practice stopped working.

What if there was always an answer? Well, there is – there always is, and it is not something magical called “talent.” There are actually many solutions for your plan here, and we’ll look at one.

It turns out that cognitive psychology found something out about the power law. It can be kind of a reset and the significant gains present at the beginning of the learning process can be enjoyed again. [This study provides details.]

We do this by working on the same thing, but in a different way, by creating confusion, causing us to work through the confusion. This strengthens the performance of what were are working on significantly. This idea is known as desirable difficulty.

Desirable Difficulty

We can do this in music with one of those nasty passages, or with a beautiful crescendo that the orchestra can’t seem to grasp. You know, the kind of things that you work on for weeks – over and over – that still don’t come through on stage. Try this, but warn students ahead of time that at first we may look extremely untalented, confused, and will really want to give up. Most people would. Again, the few that don’t give up will appear to be exceptionally talented.

Be transparent with students. If this is a group rehearsal let them know that it will be a struggle and that struggle is what we want. Once they experience the benefits, they will become more and more receptive to the process.

First take the section and play it slowly enough to get it perfectly. We are reinforcing a neural network in the brain here, so speed does not matter, only accuracy of movement. When you’ve got it slowly and accurately play it with a metronome at that tempo.

Now learn to play it with a dotted rhythm. Focus on the section you have isolated, playing it with dotted quarter to eighth repeating. If the passage is not a bunch of the same note values then play each note evenly as if each is a quarter note then apply the dotted rhythm.

We know we are doing this right if we struggle. That is what we want. Work through this until it can be played with the dot four times in a row correctly.

If you’re unclear about the process, here is a video and a downloadable sheet that both offer more detail.

Once you can do that, or if you do not struggle and get the dotted version right away, then you need to look for something more difficult. It is time to use what I call a reverse dot (properly called a Scotch snap). Play your isolated section with eighth to dotted quarter repeating.

It’s okay for students to struggle to learn this rhythm. Reiterate that this is a struggle NOT because they are not talented, but because they are learning. This will feel mentally exhausting so take little breaks to refocus.

Once you’ve done this go back to the original metronome number from when you started. Ask your students: “Feel that? Hear that? Wow, right?” The realization will be powerful. Now begin to speed up the metronome a few numbers at a time. Pretty crazy right? Now ask students to think about how long we’ve been struggling with some things and how quickly we just made it that much better. How good can we really be? The answer is however good we’d like to be. It just depends on how much deliberate practice we are willing to do.

Teaching Students How to Work

There is a great need to teach students how to work, and the fundamental elements of all learning are necessarily present in good music instruction. We’ve had the good sense over the course of the last few centuries to separate out the complex areas of our education into their own course of study – theory, history, ear training, etc.  Yet we leave the most crucial element – how to efficiently learn performance on our instrument – to the student to figure out on their own. We use small bits of these things in our lessons, but would not expect mastery from that little instruction, yet that is about all the time we have to teach practicing isn’t it?

That is why you see differences between your most talented students and everyone else. Everyone else needs to practice the way the talented students practice. Plus there are a whole host of issues that need to be satisfied in different ways for different students so that they will want to and be able to do that work. These include:

• Mindset
• Habit pattern development
• Self-control
• Flow, etc.

You might consider exploring additional instruction with your students on deliberate practice, as well as the whole ecosystem of learning. This is why I offer practice coaching. These are 4-8 week sessions conducted between private lessons. We go deeply into how existing practice time is used to meet and exceed teacher goals, and it works at any level. Once one learns, participates in, and internalizes the process they can begin to use the same techniques in new situations (future practice).

It no longer surprises me when formerly tentative competition participants win it all after a few weeks of Practice Coaching. That is the power of learning how to learn, and anyone can teach it with the right experience. As a side effect, the confidence in performance this approach produces eliminates performance anxiety as well.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Learn how to deliberate practice, practice, practice.

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We’ve all heard that music study can make you smarter, but do we really believe it? Having taught music for a couple of decades I can tell you with certainty that the transferable skills needed for success in any domain are necessarily present in preparation for all competent music performance, and performance cannot exist without it. And if you think about it performance is the goal of all learning.

Consider this – there are no B+’s in music. Eleven percent of a 90-minute performance is 10 full minutes of errors. Not 10 errors but ten full minutes of them. The plain truth is that in order to be considered as competent as our teaching counterparts, where 89% can be considered pretty successful, music teachers must get entire performing groups to about 98% or better. The really good ones get awfully close to 100%, and we don’t do it by finding ‘talented’ students. We do it by taking anyone and everyone and know that if they will follow directions (the learning process in its purest form) they will get good – every time.

It is interesting that if we got our dry cleaning back with 89% of the stains out, or our Happy Meal missing 11% of what we paid for we would find that unacceptable, yet we can consider that a successful level of competence in other areas. The goal of all learning is competent performance, and music shows us how to teach it.

Because of this music teachers, as a natural course of doing their jobs over the last few centuries, have had to learn the essence of the learning process and immerse students within it, literally rewiring the brain physically and functionally. This process has been around as long as humanity, and is responsible for all great human achievement from the Renaissance (the apprenticeship model is excellent for developing mastery) to Beethoven’s symphonies and Jimi Hendrix’ guitar work.

The Learning Process Clarified

Around the end of the 19^th century researchers began to turn their attention toward the study of skill development and, among other things, started the unfortunately named nature/nurture debate. We have gotten past that black and white debate (See David Shenk’s introduction to epigenetics, The Genius in All of Us, to pique your interest) and have begun to understand the underlying mechanisms of all skill development, and it turns out it is the same for everything.

In 1993 researchers codified and named the process, “Deliberate Practice” (Ericsson et al). Here is a convenient overview of what this continuous process looks like.

This done, over time, will result in skill development, not ‘natural talent’.

Learning Happens in Your Brain, and You Own It

We may have heard we only use 10 percent of our brains, but actually this is a myth of unknown origin. The first part of the learning process uses a lot of the brain as we continually correct and figure out how to do what we want with each thoughtful repetition. This is a state of confusion necessary for learning that researchers call desirable difficulty (Bjork). Researchers note that one characteristic of deliberate practice is that it is not inherently enjoyable (Ericsson, et al). “Let’s run it one more time!”

Hill, Nicole M. and Walter Schneider. “Brain Changes in the Development of Expertise: Neuroanatomical and Neurophysiological Evidence about Skill-Based Adaptations.” The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Ed. K Anders Ericsson, Neil Charness, Paul J. Feltovich, Robert R. Hoffman. New York: Cambridge, 2006. (653-682). Print.

Continuous refinement informed by accurate feedback of whatever one is doing is crucial. Everything we do and think is represented by brain cells, or neurons, communicating with other neurons. Such communications are called neural networks (Doidge). In order to build these networks we first learn a skill through trial and error. Functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain learning a skill show it lit up like a Christmas tree. The brain is trying to find where this skill fits and how to best represent it. Over time, as we figure it out, scans show regions of the brain dropping out until a process efficiency change occurs (Hill and Schneider) and a small efficient area represents the skill.

The reflect stage of deliberate practice is crucial. If the neural network is incorrect at all then the skill will be learned that way and subsequent repetitions will reinforce that network. This is a very involved process and usually involves somebody more experienced guiding ones attention whenever possible. Can you say conductor and rehearsal? In fact the best players continue to actively focus in this manner, even when they are practicing alone; that is why they are the best players. Since this is a learned skill, anybody can do it to get better, no talent necessary. However good you want to get, you do so by getting better than you are at that given time and you do that by constantly applying deliberate practice.

In her three decades plus of research into what she has come to call “Mindset,” Dr. Carol Dweck’s work has become highly regarded and rightly so. Among other amazing insights she shows that those who succeed are those who understand that doing something incorrectly is fine, not trying to correct it is not. She shows that praising kids for natural talent makes them want to stay in their comfort zone and not jeopardize their label of talent among the group, but those told that their accomplishments were a result of their persistent hard work (otherwise known as The Truth, no false praise here) wanted further challenges and did not give up in the face of all of the inevitable little (and big) failures we all face while learning to do things with ever increasing levels of skill.

There is a name for these ‘failures’ in teaching – constructive criticism, and nobody gets better without it whether it comes from within oneself or without. The best place for it is from a more knowledgeable person who knows what you need at any given time. It is interesting to note that in an investigation into divergent thinking and the creative process researchers show support for a distinction between problem finding and problem solving (the reflect and plan stage respectively) (Runco and Okuda) and that problem finding does not become a distinct skill until adolescence. What this means is that it is even more critical to assist, as much as possible, a student in discovering everything that needs to be corrected.

How to Build Your Brain

The continued accurate repetition of things like scales, arpeggios, other exercises and our musical excerpts is crucial to how the brain increases skill level. The way our neurons communicate is by sending an electro-chemical impulse called an action potential from one to another. The action potential is generated by a neuron, travels down a pathway called an axon and then jumps over a gap called a synapse into the neuron it wants to communicate with. Axons are like our electrical wires. When they are insulated the current remains stronger, and travels more quickly.

There are cells attached to axons called oligodendrocytes (say that a couple of times fast!) that produce an insulating substance called myelin. Each time an action potential travels down an axon oligodendrocytes produce more of this insulating substance wrapping the axon (Araque and Navarrete). The more insulated the axon the faster the signal (Coyle). This is why correct (and corrected!) thoughtful repetitions create speed and facility in playing, and really any skill, including academics (Goodhart).

There is an additional benefit. In 2009 the Dana foundation published “How Arts Training Improves Attention and Cognition,” by the eminent education research psychologist Michael Posner and a colleague. Posner has done a significant amount of work over nearly 50 years on the brain’s attention networks (focus). He writes, “If there were a surefire way to improve your brain, would you try it? Judging by the abundance of products, programs and pills that claim to offer ‘cognitive enhancement,’ many people are lining up for just such quick brain fixes.

Recent research offers a possibility with much better, science-based support: that focused training in any of the arts—such as music, dance or theater—strengthens the brain’s attention system, which in turn can improve cognition more generally. Furthermore, this strengthening likely helps explain the effects of arts training on the brain and cognitive performance that have been reported in several scientific studies, such as those presented in May 2009 at a neuroeducation summit at Johns Hopkins University (co-sponsored by the Dana Foundation).”

Orienting selective attention, or what we might generically call focus, is a crucial part of learning, and it is not pleasant for most to do at first. Research has found the neural bases of selective attention and that, “the control structures guiding both the deployment of selective attention (i.e. fronto-parietal networks) and the resolving of response conflict arising from competing stimuli (i.e. ACC-frontal regions) show maturation that continues through adolescence” (Stevens and Bavelier).

As this maturation process occurs we can make changes to these parts of our brain by training selective attention, and recent research shows this link to music training (Zuk et al).

This is because arts training creates and strengthens control of selective attention a generic skill that can be deployed across subjects. The study, “Improved Effectiveness of Performance Monitoring in Amateur Instrumental Musicians,” found, among other things, that, “higher levels of musical practice were also associated with a better engagement of cognitive control processes, as indicated by more efficient error and conflict detection. . .and reduced post-error interference and post-conflict processing adjustments.” To put it another way it trains the brain to search for areas of error, is able to maintain focus instead of giving in to frustration, and then make adjustments based on finding those errors over and over as one works.

I believe we teachers have a word for that – learning. That is how learning works for any subject, any skill, anything. The more you do of it the better, smarter, faster you get.

Gregg Goodhart is a national clinician serving regular residencies at school such as the Jacobs School at Indiana University and the Cincinnati Conservatory. He works with all instruments and voice showing teachers and students how to apply the underlying principles of all high efficiency learning in their work. Through innovative Practiclasses (masterclasses on practicing) students learn to achieve more than they previously thought possible, no talent necessary. He writes the blog Talent Optional and was an award winning high school music teacher for 13 years. More resources and advice at www.ggoodhart.com

Bibliography

Araque, Alfonso, and Maria Navarrete. “Electrically Driven Insulation in the Central Nervous System.” Science 333:6049 (Sept. 2011): 1587-1588. Print.

Bjork, E. L., Bjork, R. A. “Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning.” Psychology and the Real World: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society. Eds. M. A. Gernsbacher, R. W. Pew, L. M. Hough, J. R. Pomerantz. New York: Worth Publishers, 2011. 56-64. Print.

Coyle, Daniel. The Talent Code. New York: Bantam Dell; Random House, 2009. Print.

Dana Foundation. “How Arts Training Improves Attention and Cognition.” Cerebrum, 505 Fifth Avenue, 6th floor New York, NY 10017. Web, 14 September 2009

Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself. New York: Viking; Penguin, 2007. Print.

Dweck, Carol. Mindset. New York: Random House, 2006. Print.

Ericsson, K. Anders, Ralf Th. Krampke, and Clemens Tesch-Romer. “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.” Psychological Review. 100.3 (1993): 363-406. Print.

Goodhart, Gregg. “Why Music Education Matters in Academics: It May Not Be What You Think.” American String Teacher 64.3 (Aug. 2014): 26-29. Print.

Hill, Nicole M. and Walter Schneider. “Brain Changes in the Development of Expertise: Neuroanatomical and Neurophysiological Evidence about Skill-Based Adaptations.” The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Ed. K Anders Ericsson, Neil Charness, Paul J. Feltovich, Robert R. Hoffman. New York: Cambridge, 2006. (653-682). Print.

Jentzsch, Ines, Anahit Mkrtchian, and Nayantara Kansal. “Improved Effectiveness of Performance Monitoring in Amateur Instrumental Musicians.” Neuropsychologia 52 (2014): 117–124. Print.

Runco, Mark A., Shawn M. Okuda. “Problem Discovery, Divergent Thinking, and the Creative Process.” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 17.3 (1988) 211-220. Print.

Stevens, Courtney, and Daphne Bavelier. “The Role of Selective Attention on Academic Foundations: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective.” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 2.1 (2011): S30-48. Science Direct. 15 Feb. 2012. Web.

Zuk J, Benjamin C, Kenyon A, Gaab N (2014) “Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Executive Functioning in Musicians and Non-Musicians.” PLoS ONE Web.

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