In my previous post, I laid out the project I’m undertaking to build a curriculum around the idea of deliberate practice. While there’s a lot of conceptual material on deliberate practice, I have yet to find a hands-on, practical guide on how to deploy it given a skill you want to learn. If you’re interested in trying deliberate practice, the info below might come in handy.
Before I could build a curriculum for someone else to use deliberate practice, I want to experience deliberate practice myself. I am looking to answer the following questions: What are the necessary ingredients to do it “right”? What sort of gains would you see? What are the challenges? Is it just a faddish thing?
In this first step I’m trying to isolate the learner experience - I don’t yet want to tackle the teaching side. So I wanted to pick a skill where I felt there was an established deliberate practice approach that I could leverage. Given my research on the subject, it appeared that either sports or music were the best places to start (see here for why).
I also needed to be able to find a coach nearby that a) fit the deliberate practice approach and b) didn’t cost a fortune.
I chose piano. I’ve always wanted to learn it and there are plenty of teachers around.
The next step was identifying the right teacher. How could I find someone who would employ deliberate practice as their approach?
I started with Google - maybe there was someone in the DC area who was both an expert piano coach and a vocal advocate of deliberate practice. Some googling revealed that while some piano teachers used deliberate practice, none were nearby. Damn! I guess I need to actually do some work.
I developed the following plan to find a teacher:
1) Build a group of teacher candidates that seemed qualified and were nearby.
2) Send them some questions on their approach to see how well it fit a deliberate practice mindset.
3) Winnow the group down to a few - do a trial lesson.
4) Pick a coach.
1) Build a group of candidates
I used three methods to build my list: Thumbtack, Google search, and a site called Musika.
I reviewed a whole lot of profiles. Many teachers seemed to specialize in teaching children - no big surprise there. A lot of teachers were more general music teachers, teaching piano, guitar, drums, etc. A lot seemed to do it “on the side” - this seemed to be typical of the music store type rosters.
I honed in on those who a) specialized in piano, b) taught as their primary job, c) had a lot of experience and piano training, and d) had experience teaching adults.
After reviewing a bunch of profiles, I ended up with eight candidates (6 Thumbtack, 1 Google, 1 Musika). The Musika one quickly dropped off as while you can browse profiles, you can’t actually contact the teachers. Instead, their service matches a teacher for you. That wasn’t a great approach given my goals. One of the Thumbtackers was unavailable. I was down to six.
2) Evaluate their approach
I didn’t want to come out and say “do you like deliberate practice?”. They’re trying to land a student so they might be more apt to embellish their interest in it. Instead I created some questions that would reveal if they utilized deliberate practice or something like it in their teaching approach. Here’s the note I sent:
Hello,
I'm an adult beginner with basically zero experience on the piano. I'm planning to take weekly classes and do one hour of practice at home each day. I have an electronic keyboard at home that I'll use.
My goal is to improve my piano playing as quickly as possible given those time constraints.
I'd like to understand more about how you structure your lessons or curriculum. Specifically I'm looking for answers to the following questions:
1) Can you describe how you sequence lessons and why?
2) What are the key skills that excellent piano players have that I need to acquire?
3) How would you direct my at home practice time?
4) Are there any broader learning philosophies that you follow?
Thank you!
Best,
Roman
I received a range of responses. Three said that answering that would require too much time and I should call.
I called one and she didn’t seem able to articulate her approach beyond “every student is different”. I tried to dig in a bit - although every student is different, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a common set of skills to learn and order to learn them in. I still didn’t gain much clarity on her approach.
When I mentioned my goal of learning as fast as possible she seemed to think I was looking for some sort of faddish “get good fast” scheme. She seemed to dislike the very idea of examining the teaching/practice method in order to speed up learning. Needless to say, she was crossed off the list.
A few people responded with more detail and a couple were enthusiastic that I asked these sorts of questions. They had details on their approach (three used the Faber method), why they used that approach, and how they’d use my practice time. One went into some detail about the importance of learning the right habits of hand placement and technique. Based on those responses I winnowed the field down to three.
I sent a follow-up:
Hello,
My goal in learning the piano is two-fold and the 2nd reason is probably very unusual. I work in education and I want to master the type of practice termed "deliberate practice" so that I can utilize it when teaching others. So my 2nd reason to learn piano is to have some hands-on experience with trying different practice techniques.
This article does a good job applying the principles of deliberate practice to the piano:
http://www.portlandpianolab.com/deliberate-piano-practice-part-2/
I'm curious your thoughts on structuring practice around these principles?
Thanks.
Roman
I wanted to see how tolerant they’d be of my unorthodox goals. One of the three had heard a bit about deliberate practice and was supportive of the approach. The other two were happy I was taking practice so seriously and were open to these ideas. I decided to arrange a trial lesson with all three.
3) Trial Lessons
I ended up doing three trial lessons in about a week. Two of the lessons were really interesting as the teachers used the same method (Faber) and covered the exact same material. So I had a chance to contrast teaching styles. The first was good, while the second, named Josh, was excellent. Looking back, if I hadn’t arranged a trial with Josh, I would’ve been satisfied with the first and not realized how much better the teacher could get.
What made Josh so good? It was evident he had broken down piano playing into smaller skills that had to be mastered and had developed techniques to do that. Three of these skills were emphasized in the first lesson:
Wrist/hand/finger placement - he used an exercise where I held a ball in hand to show me how my fingers should look.
Finger control - when you play piano you want to have all five fingers above the keys and be able to use any single finger without the others moving. This is surprisingly hard! There are a lot of involuntary hand movements - sort of like if you try to do the Spock “Vulcan salute” that you can’t - some fingers move together. I found that when I played my middle finger the pointer finger liked to jump all over. Sometimes up, sometimes down. My pinkie was also really clumsy. Josh did a great job of emphasizing this and identifying practice techniques to work on it.
Reading music - Josh used flash cards here to build quick recall of reading notes.
Josh also built my practice plan as the lesson proceeded - identifying areas I had trouble with where I needed to focus my practice time.
The third teacher had built his own curriculum, which I was impressed with. However, upon visiting him it seemed he specialized more in teaching kids and in more instruments, with piano just being one.
One thing that jumped out for me after going through this is how important a music teacher is versus trying to learn on your own via YouTube or a book. I had twice attempted to learn piano before on my own - once with a book and once with software. Neither time did I have any appreciation for the physical skills I needed to develop - the way to sit at a piano and how your hands need to work. Continuing to learn on my own would have created some bad habits and likely placed a fairly low ceiling on how far I could progress.
4) Pick a coach
Recall Ericsson’s quote from Peak:
As defined, deliberate practice is a very specialized form of practice. You need a teacher or coach who assigns practice techniques designed to help you improve on very specific skills. That teacher or coach must draw from a highly developed body of knowledge about the best way to teach these skills. And the field itself must have a highly developed set of skills that are available to be taught. There are relatively few fields—musical performance, chess, ballet, gymnastics, and the rest of the usual suspects—in which all of these things are true and it is possible to engage in deliberate practice in the strictest sense.
What is a “highly developed body of knowledge about the best way to teach these skills” for piano? From my limited sampling this seemed to be the Faber method. I wanted to leverage this highly developed body of knowledge, so I was down to the two teachers who used Faber.
Josh was the clear winner. If you want to read more about him, check out Fells Point Piano.
One other outcome of this was that I realized my home equipment was not up to par. I needed a new keyboard with weighted keys - my existing keyboard had no “touch sensitivity” - you couldn’t differentiate soft versus hard playing of the keys (piano and forte in music lingo). Josh recommended the Yamaha P-45, which I bought. I also bought a piano bench that allowed me to sit at the right height relative to the keyboard. This is another example of the type of stuff I totally missed when trying to self-teach!
Going forward, I’ll practice for one hour every weekday (to mimic what I imagine the time commitment would be in my school). That breaks down to one session with Josh and four home practice sessions each week. I’ll add updates (including performance videos!) to my deliberate practice experiment log as I progress.
background on My School project
This post is part of a series on developing a new type of school. Click to see the other posts on this school project. If this is new to you, I’d suggest starting with the vision for the school. If you’d like to get notified of new posts, sign up below.