It's no secret that one needs to practice in order to become better at their instrument. "Practice makes perfect" is the refrain that we hear over and over again. And maybe you've said those words yourself.
But my high school orchestra teacher (Mr. Shedd) made it a point to emphasize that practice does not, in fact, make perfect. Instead, "perfect practice makes perfect." That is to say that practice in and of itself isn't necessarily worthwhile unless the practice is done correctly.
But how can we instill good practice techniques in our students? Well, we first need to know what even constitutes good practice in the first place.
In 8 things top practicers do differently, Dr. Kageyama describes a study that examined the study habits of music students pedagogy. Seventeen piano and piano pedagogy majors agreed to learn a 3-measure passage from Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 1. It turns out that there are 8 practice techniques that were implemented by the top performers in the study, and less often in lower performers.
These were:
The three that were used by all of the top performers were 6, 7, and 8.
If we read down that list, from 1 through 8, we can see that the strategies increasingly hone in on understanding what the problem passages were, and then focusing on those.
This is, in effect, what Mr. Shedd taught us as well. When you're practicing, the temptation is to play the parts that we are confident in. Because, let's be real, those are simply more fun to play! But those are the parts that we should be focusing 1% of our energy on.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!
As I remember, the strategy that Mr. Shedd said was used by students he knew at conservatory was to set 10 index cards (or some such number) on the left side of their stand. Then, essentially, to play through a piece until we hit a section we couldn't play. And then stop right there. Practice that bit slowly, over and over. Each time you play it "perfectly," move an index card from the left to the right. If you screw it up, you move all of the index cards back to the left side. Ones you've moved over all of the index cards, then practice the transition into this section, slowly, until the transition and the section itself were perfect 10 times. Then do the same thing at progressively faster speeds until you're up to tempo.
Once you have the segment and transition perfect, then you can play the section before the transition, the transition, and the problem part. Again, 10 times to perfection.
And once you're here, the temptation is to do this and also continue through the piece. But that's where the trouble is. If you're playing from the beginning of the piece on every practice run, you get really good at the beginning and...not very good at the ending.
So the solution is instead to start your next practice segment at the previous problem section. This will allow you to focus on problem segments throughout the piece, along with the transitions in and out of them. Then you can work on connecting the various segments together, until you are eventually practicing the entire piece all of the way through. How many times? You guessed it, until you can play it through 10 times perfectly.
An alternative approach that gets you to the same result is to practice "backwards," focusing on the very end of the piece, and then working your way backward.
Now, there's obviously some nuance, here. "Perfect" is relative to the level of the person practicing.
With memorization specifically, I also find that when I memorize a passage in a particular space, I can only best recall it in that space. So if I have my music stand set up in a corner of the room, and I try to play the memorized passage in the other corner, then I have trouble. So my anecdotal recommendation here, from personal experience, is to really try to vary the environments in which you are playing any given thing.
You can probably point to your own personal experiences and find similar strategies that you weren't taught, but instead learned on your own over years of practicing. Playing music is really just the practice of learning to practice, and then practicing your practicing until you die or become Itzhak Perlman.
Alright, now we know what good practice looks like. But how can you teach your students how to practice? Well, the same way that you teach them anything else. You introduce a concept to them, focus primarily on it for some period of time in your lessons, then move onto teaching a new primary concept while ensuring that they continue to effectively integrate the previous concept into their playing in an ongoing basis.
That is to say: the best way to teach students how to practice is to enforce good practice habits during your lessons. And to make sure that students understand what the habits are, why they are doing them, that they are doing them, and that they continue to do them.
Make sure that you are having them work on specific passages during their lesson. And the transitions into and out of those sections, but not on the entirety of the piece. If you're teaching an instrument that can be moved, try teaching some lessons in one corner and others in another corner.
Instill in your students that they should be thinking about every note they play before they play it. They won't need to focus on every single note so intently all of the time, but that level of focus will pay dividends if it's kept in mind during specific parts of practice sessions. Whether that's for the sake of focusing on anything from intonation to intention.
In some ways, teaching good practice habits is probably easier than anything else that you'll teach your students. It really is foundational technique, like how to hold a bow. And it's something that you can reinforce in every single lesson.