How to Teach, How to Practise

Most teaching and practice problems are design problems, not technique problems

"I am slow to progress", "my child will not practise", "I have taught for years with no growth" — for all three, the answer usually does not lie in technique. This page reorganises them as design problems.

What you are trying to do here

First work out which kind of problem you have:

Where to read: by problem

One: practice structure — practising with no progress

• What practice research tells us — the evidence: what to practise, how long, how
• Practice and the brain — the real costs and benefits of long-term practice
• How long should I practise each day? — frequency beats duration
• Deliberate practice — goals, feedback, and stepping outside comfort
• Slow practice — slow practice trains accuracy, not slowness

What this group shares: they are all about structure, not about trying harder.

Two: motivation — why nobody wants to practise

• The notation-versus-playing debate — two positions on one thing
• Three methods: Dalcroze, Orff, Kodály — three different senses of "child-centred"
• Suzuki method: like learning a mother tongue — the core of the mother-tongue method is "a little every day"
• Judging a good teacher (and a good student) — the criteria work in both directions
• Adult music education — the constraints are entirely different

Three: pedagogy — how to teach others

• Group lessons versus one-to-one: who each suits — decided by goal, not by level
• Exam systems: what each is actually testing — exams test something else entirely
• How ear training is taught: from "hearing it" to "writing it" — ear training can be taught
• What school music classes teach: not only singing — the classroom and the exam are two things

An action you can take immediately

Open practice research, write down the practice structure it recommends, then compare it with what you actually do.

The value of that piece is not "it tells you what to practise" but "it lets you see which link you are missing". Most people who practise for years without progress do not lack effort; they lack feedback.

A counter-intuitive reminder

"Practising an instrument" and "learning music" are not the same thing. Several pieces here draw exactly that line:

• Memorisation versus reading
• Sight-reading
• Perfect pitch: talent, training and its limits — good perfect pitch is not good musicianship

If a student has played for ten years and still does not understand a passage, the problem is probably not in technical training.

What is not built yet

Four honest notes:

1. There is no teacher resource library — ten pedagogy articles exist, but no scores, textbooks or assignments you can use directly 2. There is no complete self-practice programme — the principles are explained, the schedule is not 3. The exams piece describes the systems but gives no advice — you learn what exams test, but not whether you should take one 4. Judging a good teacher is written from the "finding a teacher" side — what is missing is how to be evaluated as a teacher

Point four is the most practical gap on this route: the hardest part of a teaching relationship is two-way feedback, and only one direction is covered here.

Next

• The site-level view: what each of the thirteen sites is for
• Choosing an instrument: instruments hub
• Understanding music: listening hub
• Back to the home page

Sources

• 本页为导航页，内容为据实整理；教学法条目以 culture C5 的 10 篇为准（2026-10-03 实测）

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.