SIX TIPS: Allow enough time for preparation
HELP PIANO STUDENTS BE READY FOR AN UPCOMING PERFORMANCE
The next of my Six Tips to Ensure Your Student is Ready for a Performance is to allow enough time for preparation. Less experienced teachers often underestimate how long it truly takes for students to be ready to perform at their highest potential.
Piano students do have to practice
Of course, it is also the student’s responsibility to practice regularly and avoid procrastination when preparing a performance piece. Cramming, frankly, does NOT work in piano playing. If your students are not regularly practicing, then you might want to try any or all of the following:
Schedule more performance opportunities at varying levels of formality throughout the teaching term
Evaluate your core curriculum and repertoire selections to make sure they are motivating for your student and at his or her correct level
Encourage students and their parents to work on forming a practice habit
So, how long does it really take for students to learn pieces?
General Timelines for learning piano pieces
Here are my general ideal timelines for learning a piece from start to finish. Of course, all kinds of factors can influence this, but this is a rough guideline. If your students are learning on much longer or shorter timelines, you may want to evaluate the difficulty level of your assignments for them.
Elementary students learning time: 2-4 weeks
Late-elementary to early-intermediate students learning time: 4-6 weeks
Mid-intermediate students learning time: 6-8 weeks
Upper-intermediate to early-advanced students learning time: 8-12 weeks
Advanced students learning time: 10-14 weeks
➡️ In addition to these guidelines, I would add 3 to 4 weeks for
“polishing” before a formal performance.
For performance where memorization is required, I advocate for analyzing and memorizing along the way rather than saving the memorization process for the end.
(More on memorization in this post. Many teachers use a memorization deadline, such as 30 days before the performance, in order to help their students know just how long it really takes to be ready.)
The polishing stage can naturally take longer with more intricate and/or lengthy works. I also find that many “bigger” pieces benefit from a break of a few weeks or months between the learning stage and preparing-for-performance stage.
It’s also worth saying that the more formal the performance, or the more pressure a student will feel during a performance, the more time he needs to prepare. If a student is competing or taking an exam for the first time, he should perform repertoire that is very seasoned and comfortable in order to put his best foot forward and feel successful.
Students don’t know how long it takes
Until they have been performing for many years, most piano students underestimate how long it takes to be truly ready for a performance. And even if they have been performing for a long time, as their repertoire increases in difficulty, they often do not know how that will affect the timeline or how they will feel under pressure.
As experienced teachers, we do know how long it takes, and we know which pieces are more difficult to reliably play under pressure. Therefore, it’s our job as studio leaders to give our students plenty of time to prepare, helping them choose performance repertoire far enough in advance and guiding them through the preparation process.
Want to take a deeper dive into how to best prepare our piano students for upcoming performances? Check out my course called Preparing Confident Performers. Click on the photo to learn more:
