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Section 2: Weekly Planner
Working out how to get it all done in time

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Actual dimensions of spread is 12x9 inches.

What's the thinking behind this? View the student's guide from the book (270kb)

Notes from the author
PracticeSpot Headquarters, Australia

Children don't come to your studio pre-equipped with project management skills. Which means that if you don't help them organize how they're going to get the job done, you have no right to be annoyed when they turn up unprepared.

In fact, you can count on them turning up unprepared.

Their Weekly Planner allows them to break down their weekly task into a series of daily jobs. Filling it in will be the best ten minutes of practice they do all week.

Their practicing is then focused on one thing - completing the Job for the Day. 

Once that's done each day, they can stop practicing. But until they have, they can't.

In other words, they won't know exactly how long each practice session will last when they start working. It depends on how they work.

End result? They'll look for ways to get their job done sooner. Which means being smarter about how they practice, and concentrating hard once they do. 

As teachers, that's exactly what we want. Students who are willing to practice efficiently and focus while they do. Whenever a student comes to me and says "I spent two hours learning this", the first thing I ask is "That's great, but how could you have practiced smarter so that you could achieved the same thing in 90 minutes?"

The core of the Practice Revolution is making practice outcomes based. The irony of the Practice Revolution is that students end up spending more time anyway - because they don't notice the time.

• To quickly see what their job for the week is in the first place, students should turn to their Lesson Diary - but to save them time, the top of every Weekly Planner spread tells them exactly which page to jump to. 
  
  

• Their planner also comes with a Practice Scheduler (p 118-119) so they can commit to when they're going to practice in the first place. Based around events in their day, and not just times.
  
  

• And to make sure that they never forget a key point again, their Piece Coach (p 85-104) ensures that notes you make about each piece stay in one easy-to-find place.

In the history of music, there has never been as much help with practicing as your students are about to get.