Help Your Students Practice Effectively With This Practice Tracker and Practice Strategies Guide

Practice. 

It's the only path to improving in music and really anything in life. 

The challenge is learning how to do it well so that we are making progress rather than spinning our wheels. We as teachers spend countless hours helping our students learn their music for performances. We work tirelessly to help our students unlock their musical potential and help them learn the skills they need to practice effectively. 

This is why I developed a Practice Tracker for my students and have been spending time helping them learn strategies they can use in their personal practice or at school to make consistent growth.

In this blog, I want to share this resource with you in the hopes that it will benefit your students as well.

Practice Tracker

After considering how to help my students learn how to actually practice effectively I created a Practice Tracker for them. It is designed to help them set goals, track their progress, and learn to use a variety of practice strategies to make improvements. 

Practice Strategies Guide

I also created a Practice Strategies Guide so my students could reference ideas during their practice sessions. 

During class time, I focused on helping them learn how to practice and taking them through several days of the practice tracker. 

In class we targeted specific measures in their music and used a variety of strategies to solve the problems in their music. I then had my students log the strategies we used and the measures we covered. 

My goal in this was to model effective practice strategies so students have tools that they can use to work independently and make progress on their own. The below strategies can be found in the Practice Strategies Guide I created for my students:

• Isolate The Hard Spots - Before you begin to work on a piece of music, identify the difficult spots in the music. Circle those spots and practice them until they become more comfortable.
• Slow Practice - Start by practicing at a slow tempo that will allow you to get through the entire piece or phrase without any mistakes. 
• Mark Your Music -Take your pencil and mark in any tempo changes, key signature changes, fingerings, dynamic markings, or articulations. 
• Just The Notes and Rhythm - Remove the slurs, articulations, and dynamics and only practice nailing the correct notes and rhythms. Once you are confident with those basics - add them back in.
• Air Bow - “Air bow” a difficult rhythm to get the feel in your bow before incorporating the left hand notes 
• Just Left Hand - Finger the notes in your left hand only. This will help to build muscle memory in your left hand.
• Record Yourself - Record your practice, listen back, and critique your performance. 
• “Chunk It” - Practice short sections of music. Take one, two, or four measures at a time and focus only on those challenging measures. Repeat those measures till you master them.
• Use a Metronome - Use a metronome to keep your rhythm steady and to build your internal sense of time. Start slowly and gradually increase the tempo of whatever you are working on.
• Whole - Part - Whole - Run through your entire piece of music without stopping. Now, go back and practice sections you may have made errors on. Lastly, perform the entire piece again and evaluate your progress.

Conclusion

After using the Practice Tracker for a week in class, modeling practice habits, and talking about strategies with my students I feel as though they have become better practicers. It's been fulfilling seeing them be able to talk about how to solve issues in their music.

If you like this resource you can download it at my Teacher's Pay Teacher's store - just follow the link below. 

Also, want to read more about helping your students practice effectively? I've written two other blogs that you can check out here and here.