If you struggle with the routine of practice

If you’re interested in learning how to play piano this year but you know that you’re going to struggle with the routing of practicing every day, I have a suggestion for you that will not only honour your creative flow but is also backed by educational science.

Ready?

Rather than choosing a behaviour-based goal (such as practicing 30 minutes a day), instead choose a project-based goal (such as a song you want to learn next). Here’s why that works.

The beauty of a project-based goal is that it opens you up to having many different ways to demonstrate progress every day that don’t require just sitting at your piano over and over again. When you’re not overly-fixated on time spent at your piano bench, there are a million interesting things you can do to support your learning!

Let’s imagine your project-based goal was that you wanted to learn to play the Moonlight Sonata. That means that on some days, you’ll want to sit at your piano and practice it. But on the days when you don’t feel like sitting at your piano, you can find other ways to progress in learning the music.

Maybe one day you decide that you’re just going to look at the sheet music and try to notice patterns you hadn’t noticed before, or to try to identify the differences between section A and section B.

Maybe another day you decide to watch YouTube videos of different people playing the song, and you could spend that time reflecting on their performances and deciding which performance you liked better, and why, and deciding for yourself how you’d like to perform the song based on what you saw on YouTube.

The beauty of a project-based goal is that it opens you up to being able to show your musical progress in many different ways outside of the typical measure of how many minutes you sat at your piano. It honours your creative spirit and your ability to choose for yourself how you want to show up for your music that day.

Good luck!