For a teacher, watching a student struggle can be a dispiriting experience. Teachers want their students to do well and to enjoy their learning, and to experience the same feelings of ease and fluency they themselves feel when performing a task in which they are highly skilled. These creditable motivations can make it seem intuitively correct to prevent and avoid prolonged difficulty and struggle during lessons.
The problem with this approach is that it runs counter to the latest research by cognitive psychologists into the most effective ways to learn. Key to this new research is the concept of ‘desirable difficulties’, pioneered by Robert and Elizabeth Bjork at the University of California, Los Angeles. The research shows that we learn the best not when we are working with ease and fluency, but when we are engaged in a mental struggle, working against difficulties that cause our neural pathways to be reinforced and strengthened, giving us deeper and longer-lasting learning. The experimental evidence for this effect is wide-ranging, and shows significant benefits for students’ learning and understanding over alternative approaches. For music teachers, there are four overarching strategies that are most useful for introducing desirable difficulties into a music education context.
Recall practice
This is the process of trying to recall something from memory. Although it doesn't sound like an advanced learning strategy, the mental struggle of trying to remember something without having the information in front of you has been shown to give a huge boost to recall over rereading or repeated listening. In one study published in the journal Science, students who read a passage of writing and then took a short test on the contents retained approximately 50 per cent more information when retested a week later than others who had just read the material repeatedly, or drawn diagrams of the material as they read. In academic study, recall practice can take the form of tests or quizzes, but it can also be used in a more practical way – here are some ideas:
Memorising scales and arpeggios
Students should be encouraged to try playing from memory as early as possible. It will seem difficult, and they will probably make more mistakes initially than when reading from the page, but that difficulty is the thing reinforcing the strength of the memory, so when they need to draw on it in a performance or exam, it will still be there. Help them resist the temptation to read scales from notation – the familiarity they feel when doing that is an illusion, and will melt away at the end of practice. The written material is there to check how they did afterwards, or prompt if they're absolutely stuck, but the struggle of spending a few moments racking their brains before checking will help their memorisation become more secure.
Quizzing in lessons
The best way of employing recall practice in lessons is by asking questions wherever possible instead of just giving the information. Whenever you're about to tell or remind students of something they might know already, change tack and phrase it as a question. This has the dual bonus of giving you (and them) a clearer idea of their current knowledge, and allowing them to engage in recall practice that will help them remember the material in the long-term.
Performance practice
Doing a practice run-through of a piece is a form of recall practice, with the student testing how well they have embedded the technical and musical ideas they've been working on. But the best recall practice for performers is playing something in front of an audience for the first time. The volatility and challenge of a performance situation is a great desirable difficulty; encourage students to play in front of an audience as much as possible, both as a learning tool and in preparation for important performances.
Memorising a piece
Being able to play a piece without sheet music is far from the only benefit of committing a piece to memory. Learning a piece using recall practice, to the point where it can be sung from memory with relatively accurate pitch, gives a student the tools to perform it confidently and proactively, imposing their musical intentions on the music rather than just reacting to what's on the page.
Interleaving
This is the process of switching between lots of different – but related – challenges. By switching between tasks, students are forcing their brains to reconstruct the mental model for each activity every time, creating a desirable difficulty that boosts learning. This contrasts with a strategy we have all used at one time or another, ‘massed practice’, which involves repeating the same task over and over again, meaning the mental model only needs to be constructed once.
Many scientific studies have shown how interleaving can be beneficial for motor skills as well as cognitive tasks. One famous experiment involved eight-year-olds practising throwing beanbags into buckets. One group (the interleaving group) practised throwing from a mixture of 2m and 4m distance from the buckets, and the other group (the massed practice group) practised only from 3m distance. After twelve weeks of this, both groups were tested at 3m and the first group, who had never thrown from 3m away, out-performed the group who had done all their practice at that distance.
Learning technically difficult passages
Students should be encouraged to avoid repeating the same phrase multiple times in a row (massed practice). They should instead cycle between several different passages, playing each one once and returning to it once they have completed all the phrases they are working on. This added difficulty will strengthen their learning, meaning the improvements they make are more likely to be retained.
Interleaved practice session
Musicians regularly practice in ‘blocks’ or sections – exercises, scales, piece 1, piece 2 and so on. But by applying the principle of interleaving to a whole practise session, students could start to really mix things up – playing a section of a piece, a scale, an exercise, a section of a different piece, and so on. Switching between activities regularly is a lot less repetitive, and the added difficulty of doing so makes all the improvements more likely to stick.
Understanding musical styles
Recognising styles and differentiating between them requires much of the same knowledge that students need to play a style in a characterful and authentic way, so this is beneficial for academic and practical purposes. Use interleaving to create blind listening quizzes, where the challenge is to identify jumbled up clips from different composers or performers. By having to listen to different clips and compare them, students will gain a better understanding of the important differentiating characteristics than they would if they were just immersing themselves in one recording or style at a time.
The spacing effect
As we know, trying to make up for a week's lost practice in one day is not a good strategy. One reason for this is a loss of stamina or concentration in a long practice session, but the other crucial factor is the spacing effect. Spacing adds desirable difficulty to our practice by making us remember and recreate the things we are working on each time, instead of keeping them all in short-term memory as we would in a single long session.
Little and often
As many teachers know, a little practice every day is much better for long term recall than longer sessions every few days. If students can overcome the mental barrier of getting the instrument out of its case, doing smaller chunks of daily practice can really make their practice more productive. We can even encourage them to take it further, and try spacing their practise during the day too, when their schedules allow, such as on a weekend. Half an hour's practice could be made much more productive by doing 15 mins in the morning, and 15 mins in the evening, with the space between the two creating an added desirable difficulty that will boost their recall.
Multi-instrumental
Students with multiple instruments to practise could try getting them all out and switching between them, rather than practising them in separate blocks. This would also create an interleaving effect, with the challenge of adapting to different instruments helping to boost learning further still.
Elaborate and listen
Elaboration means taking new material and changing it, adding to it, or connecting it to something you already know. A simple example of an elaboration strategy is a mnemonic, where a piece of information (e.g. lowest space in treble clef is an F) is connected to other information (the other treble clef spaces going upwards are ACE) making a simple word you already know (FACE) to create something that's more memorable than just the single bit of information on its own. Elaboration can be used in academic contexts to aid memorisation and understanding, and in practical situations to develop familiarity and fluency.
Elaborate something tricky
Students can try to analyse a difficult passage, spotting patterns such as melodic sequences or scales and arpeggios. By connecting the material to technical exercises and patterns they are already familiar with, students are often able to decode the music and see it in a more familiar way, aiding understanding and technical fluency. A more advanced approach is to help the student use the hard passage to create an exercise, taking the patterns and elaborating on them to produce variations that will cement the student's understanding of how the phrase works in terms of both technique and theory.
Elaborate on a great tone
The student should become familiar with a recording that features exceptional tone quality, and practice trying to hear it in their head with as much detail as possible, occasionally checking their mental version by listening to the actual recording (this bit is actually recall practice). The elaboration twist is to then try to imagine that same great tone, but playing a different tune. Cellists could imagine Jacqueline du Pré playing Happy Birthday, or, for flautists, Emmanuel Pahud could perform Mary had a little lamb. By changing the notes, students are elaborating on their memory of that great tone, and so making their conception of it stronger and more flexible. Once they get good at this, they can start to imagine this sound playing whatever piece they are working on, which can lead to remarkable improvements.
Put it in your own words
How to be sure a student has understood something you've explained to them? Ask them to explain it back to you, in their own words. As well as serving as good recall practice (if you do it later in the lesson) the challenge of rewording your explanation helps the student remember it, and gives them a much deeper understanding than just repeating a definition word-for-word.
Transform improvisation
To incorporate a new phrase into their own playing, a jazz musician will often go through this process: work out the notes and rhythm of the idea, then transform it by transposing it into different keys. Then, begin to alter it by playing with its harmonic and melodic content, turning it into an adaptable piece of language that can be used in new improvisations. This is a great example of elaboration that can be used at all levels of improvising – the student is taking new material and then changing it, rephrasing it and adding to it using things they already know, to develop a deeper familiarity and understanding.
Although many of these ideas won't always help students’ playing feel more fluent or easy right away, the desirable difficulties they contain will make lessons and practice more engaging, interesting and challenging, all while helping them to get better faster by retaining more of what they are learning. Try experimenting with some of the suggestions above, and you'll soon find other ways to incorporate the key elements of recall practice, interleaving, spacing and elaboration into your teaching.
