Practice Motivation in a Class Setting
In a perfect world, students would practice consistently and effectively in order to achieve personal success and satisfaction and to help optimize their ensemble’s performance. Unfortunately, this is more the exception than the rule.
For 3 years, I have taught an after school non-graded Elementary Orchestra program. Finding ways to motivate these students to practice has been difficult, especially because I cannot attach a grade to practice time (although my experience teaching in a public school has proven this to be fairly ineffective as well). I’ve decided to experiment with a new group practice plan.
The idea behind the plan is that all students in the class need to be held accountable for preparing their music adequately and the group will receive a reward for accomplishing the goal. I decided to have a pizza party after our last concert for classes who meet or exceed their class goals.
The first part of the plan is the individual student record. It allows students to easily track the number of minutes practiced each week and determine if they met their personal goal that week. Each week, one of my student assistants will record the total number of minutes achieved in each class.
The second part of the plan is a group achievement chart that will be posted during class time to show progress made by the group.
Hopefully this plan will help students to all feel accountable and motivated to work together to achieve their goals. I will follow up in a couple of weeks with an update of how things are going. I’m definitely still in the experimenting phase with this! If you’ve got ideas of ways to motivate practice (in a private or group setting) please post them under the comments section!
Topics: Classroom Teachers, Basic Skills |