Week 4 Reflection

Chapter 4 from the William I. Bauer book Music Learning Today focuses on performing music. Learning to play an instrument requires psychomotor skills, a combination of motor and perceptual skills. I observe my students progressing through the different stages of learning psychomotor skills everyday. Beginning string players start at the cognitive stage and need to concentrate on every aspect of their playing. This is why when I am first teaching bowing technique I have them use open strings so that they can just concentrate on the bow. At a certain point students enter the associative stage in which less thinking is required but movement is still not automatic. When students are at this point their bowing technique is improving but when they stop thinking about what they are doing their bow travels up the fingerboard or becomes crooked. They still need to be reminded to pay attention to their bowing because they haven’t quite reached the next stage, which is called the autonomic stage. Students’ achieve this stage when they are able to bow in the proper place, with the correct speed, and with a straight bow without thinking about it and the motion has become automatic. Of course, like Bauer (2014) mentions the skill at this point may still need further refining but in general the student will be able to effortlessly maintain proper bowing technique.

I found it interesting that there is research that supports the fact that distributive practice is more effective than practicing for many hours at one time. From personal experience I can understand why it may be better but can I also see the benefit of practicing all at one time. I know certain students would find it difficult to concentrate for long periods of time and some students need frequent breaks. However, it is likely that some students may not take out their instrument more than once a day. When I was younger I enjoyed practicing for longer periods of time all at once. Bauer (2014) says that distributive practice gives time for the skill to “solidify newly developed neural networks.” I think I achieved this by having several pieces of music to practice every week and switching pieces during my practice session would give my neurons time to develop. I have also found distributive practice to be effective because I have experienced being unable to play something one day but after sleeping on it I am able to play it the following day.

I have found it challenging to teach students how to practice effectively and efficiently. I have given them advice such as not to always play a song from the beginning to the end but to identify difficult sections of music that should be repeated over and over until there is improvement. I also show them how to practice slowly with a metronome and how to gradually increase the tempo. Some students have issues with audiation and they do not know when they have played an incorrect note. This is why I encourage students to purchase SmartMusic to use as a practice tool. This program gives students immediate feedback as to whether they played an incorrect note or rhythm. This immediate feedback is important so that the student may correct the mistake right away and they do not continue practicing something incorrectly resulting in it becoming ingrained. Another challenge I have is getting students to want to practice. I have used extrinsic motivation such as grades in order to motivate students. A lot of students do not have self-efficacy but it gave me hope when I read that self-efficacy is something that can be developed especially by scaffolding the lessons.  Once students know that they are able to succeed at something they will be more motivated to continue learning progressively more difficult skills. I will be discussing SmartMusic as a motivating tool as well in a future post.

Reference:

Bauer, W. I. (2014). Music learning today: digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.