Can We Really Control Piano Practice? Here’s What We Can Influence

Let’s Be Real About Practice

If you’ve taught for more than five minutes, you know practice is the constant puzzle.
We can’t control family calendars or parental involvement. What we can control is what happens in our lessons and the tools we send home.

● Teach students how to practice, not just what to play
● Keep the conversation alive each week
● Build routines that fit real life, not ideals

Scrappy Tip: Guide the minutes they do have instead of guilting them for the hours they don’t.

Why I Tried a Practice Workshop

Every September my studio kicks off with a group week, so this year I turned it into a Practice Workshop. The goal was simple: make sure every student heard the same message about practice and left with a tool they’d actually use.

Workshop goals

● Define practicing, playing, and performing
● Help students spot when practice fits in their week
● Teach a few concrete “how-to-practice” strategies

Inside the Workshop

1) True or False Warm-Up
A quick icebreaker with silly prompts like “You’ll practice better with a cat in your lap.” Laughter loosened everyone up and opened honest conversation about home setups.

2) Map Your Week
Students listed school, sports, jobs, and family routines, then found small “practice windows.” Linking practice to existing habits—after homework, after a snack—made it realistic.

3) Practicing vs Playing vs Performing
We opened their pieces and discussed how each looks different.
Run-throughs are playing. Playing in lessons is performing. Practicing means isolating tricky spots, slowing down, and looping short sections.

4) Brain Pathways Demo
We watched a quick video on how the brain learns, then used a bead-and-paper-tube “leaky pathway” experiment to show why repetition matters. Students loved it.

5) A Tangible Tool
Everyone made a small abacus-style bead counter to track reps at home. They decorated them with cats, rainbows, and music symbols—because why not?—and many still use them.

The Results

Since the workshop, students talk about when they practice instead of if they practiced.
They’re isolating problem spots faster and thinking like mini scientists.

No one-size-fits-all solution exists, but teaching the skill of practice—just like teaching scales—pays off long-term.

Try It in Your Studio

I put together a Practice Workshop Resource with all the warm-ups, worksheets, and brain-pathway experiment details.

Get it here: [Insert Practice Workshop Resource link]