PPP213: Interleaved Practice (Couldn’t they come up with a better name?)

With my own students, I try different approaches to learning new music and how to practice it at home.

1. Varied approach – try hands apart, slowly, work in layers – correct notes and rhythms, dynamics, phrasing, etc. but never really get to musical fluency and expression

2. Small sections, small sessions – play the same part over and over, mindless repetition but not really making neural connections. Feels successful at the end of that practice session but when you come back to that piece or section, you can’t remember how to play it. It never reached long-term memory.

With interleaved practice, a lesson might look more like this. The student and I will work on one song or concept for a bit, then take a break from that to work on something else and come back to the first thing once more. This helps me know if the student is really starting to understand the concept.

At home, rather than playing one song 9 times and another song 9 times, a piano kid might practice each song 3 times in a row and then alternate for three rotations. They will still get the same number of repetitions but switching songs sooner and more often will help make stronger neural connections in their brain. This approach is much harder on the front end and much more effective on the back end.

There are a couple of different theory workbooks I like to use with my students. As I’ve learned about interleaved practice this summer, I’ve come to appreciate them both for different reasons.

One book focuses on one concept for an entire lesson, 3-4 pages. If it is identifying notes on the staff, students will have a page full of notes to identify – lots of repetition of that single concept. The next lesson might be all about writing counts for rhythm patterns. Once again, they perform that task over and over before they learn a different concept.

The second book includes 5-7 different concepts in a single lesson. The student will identify 7 or 8 notes on the staff for one question and the next question will have 4 measures for them to write the counts. A third question will ask them to identify key signatures. In the next lesson in the book, some of the same types of questions are asked and new ones are introduced.

The second theory workbook is my go-to for most students. The first workbook is the resource I use if a student has completed the interleaved theory book but still need some review to master that level of theory. Even with the ‘one-concept-at-a-time’ book, I don’t have students complete a full page of the same thing, mindlessly repeating without really learning and retaining. They like it when I tell them to do only half the page or every other measure. This prevents reinforcing the wrong thing if they misunderstand the question and it leaves room for more review if we need it later.