I’ve received some questions about the latest practice incentive that I uploaded to the website, so I thought it would be helpful to give a few more details here for those interested in possibly using it in their studios. It’s called Mastering the Mystery of Music. This is the one I used with my students […]
Practice Incentives
Reigniting Enthusiasm – Cultivate Creativity
What makes you really excited? Studying music history? Sight-reading new repertoire? Dreaming up game ideas? Improvising arrangements of familiar tunes by ear? Capitalize on your own area of interest to build the enthusiasm of your students. Invest your excitement into putting together creative assignments for your students. For example, plan a group class around composers […]
Monday Mailbag – Lesson Games
You have a lot of games. Do you do them just with the student at their lesson or do you incorporate these games into group lessons? Do the students enjoy doing these games during their lessons? How do you do that? Yes to all of the above! 🙂 Ask any of my students and they’ll […]
Rethinking the Assignment Book
Chris Foley has posted an interesting collection of ideas and thoughts from teachers on how they write lesson notes for their students. As much as I love and try to utilize technology in my studio, I just can’t seem to break away from the handwritten weekly assignments. Part of this, I think, is because I […]
A peak into my practice incentive for this year…
Well, after many hours of brainstorming, praying, revamping, and planning, I’ve finally pulled together a practice incentive theme for the upcoming year. Hooray! Several weeks ago, I posted 4 Components of a Good Practice Incentive, so I kept these in mind as I was developing the theme. There were a couple of ideas floating around […]
4 Components of a Good Practice Incentive
There is much debate in the educational community about whether to use extrinsic motivators (i.e. practice incentives) to encourage students to perform required tasks or meet certain objectives. Those in the non-incentive camp tend to assert that motivation should be intrinsic and that the completion of the task or the attainment of the objective is […]













