Piano Planners: The Tool That Actually Gets Students Practising
It’s 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon and 8-year-old Benjamin has just arrived for his lesson. After getting his books out and sitting at the piano you ask. ‘So, how has practice gone this week?’. Ben looks at you with that all too familiar expression, somewhere between sheepishness and creative concentration as he starts to answer, ‘Well, I did do some practice but, you see, I was really busy, because on Thursday I had swimming and then at the weekend we had a barbecue in the garden and…’
Sound familiar?
Encouraging our students to commit to regular piano practice can sometimes feel like a losing battle, that nothing will ever change no matter how much we explain the value of practice, make suggestions about scheduling practice and do our best to make practice part of their routine.
But there are ways to help our students move from that desperate place of no practice to a realistic achievable practice routine.
The Challenge We All Face
Piano practice is probably the most discussed topic amongst piano teachers, and it’s no surprise why: we all know how much dedication regular practice requires and how most students struggle to establish a reliable practice routine at home (except for those few magical ones, you know who they are!).
The challenge of student practice is impacted by a lot of factors, piano parent role, home environment, student intrinsic motivation, extracurricular activities, amongst many others.
Developing a Solution
A few years ago (at the time of writing) I created some weekly practice sheets after a parent asked if I had any worksheets to encourage her daughter to practise. After seeing the direct improvement in this student’s practice habits, I decided to roll out these practice sheets to the rest of my young students.
The results were very encouraging and the impact on their practice, and therefore progress, was clear to me, to their parents and most importantly to the students themselves.
Seeing them come to their lessons eager to show me their progress really demonstrated the value of this simple change. These previously unmotivated students had now experienced for themselves the benefits of practice and how great they felt being able to play that piece or even that section of a piece.
For those who already practised regularly, it gave them the opportunity to have a tangible representation of their efforts, further boosting their confidence.
Having these practice sheets also provided opportunities to set termly goals of e.g. practising at least 4 days per week for the autumn term. These were some of the most successful goals for my students!
It wasn’t a perfect fix however, the practicality of practice sheets was a little challenging: they were easily lost (either forgotten at home or scrunched up in their music bag) and so the practice reminder could easily be overlooked.
In addition, it required some hefty printing (17 child students x 13 weeks per term) and I would end up with enormous stacks of practice worksheets that I wanted to keep for records but then realised it wasn’t sustainable (in any sense of the word!).
This is what started me thinking about creating something much more substantial that still created that accountability for students to practise, but also encouraged them in working towards goals, being able to see their achievements and to celebrate their successes along the way.
In the 2024 summer holidays, I set to designing a piano planner that would suit my young students. I had a lot of fun designing these planners and loved the fact that I could include all the things I wanted my students to have at their fingertips, such as reference pages for important theory concepts.
I thought through the things I normally do in lessons, the supplements I refer to in this book or that and incorporated all those elements into the planners. Not only did this make the teaching more streamlined, but the students then had these pages to reference in their planners at home, providing even more support for practice between lessons.
At the start of the autumn term, I presented all my young students with their very own brightly coloured Academic Year Piano Planner and explained how we would be using them. These planners replaced the little A6 notebooks that I had been using since I started teaching all those years ago, which incidentally were frequently misplaced or lost by some students, being so small.
The following weeks saw these planners being opened regularly by nearly all students (we can never expect 100% success of course!), ticking off which pieces/ scales/ theory pages had been practised/ completed on which days of the week. Some really enjoyed adding their feedback on practice in the Reflections box, and others took to making the planner their own by colouring in the little images. The frequency of lost or forgotten practice notebooks dropped dramatically too.
Seeing for myself that these planners really did improve practice habits in my young students, I decided to create planners suitable for my adult students. I created a short Google Form to collect ideas and preferences for different layouts and styles from my adults and ended up with two versions: one with daily tick boxes (Weekly Detail Edition) and the other with open space to make notes and tally practice sessions if desired (Weekly Overview Edition).
The basic function of these planners was still to encourage regular practice amongst my adults, but it serves as more of an accountability/ reminder for these students, which has helped keep piano practice higher up the priority list for many of them.
We’re now almost at the end of the academic year and I can honestly say these piano planners have improved not just the practice habits of my students but enabled a smoother lesson flow by being quick to input practice details and also allowed easy setting and tracking of goals for each student.
To learn more about what’s included in each planner follow the link below:
I’d love to hear from you if you have any questions or equally if you’ve bought a planner and want to give feedback, leave a comment below!
