Fairynne Blog 1

Decide: Blog

Who: Voice Student

Date of activity implementation: 3/27/24

Date of feedback: 3/27/24

Need: The student struggles with dedicating time to practice, so the activity is a checklist that outlines what to practice.

Practice - a necessary evil in the world of music. For voice, you usually warm up, sing through literature, memorize text, and try to remember what your teacher told you to work on throughout the week. Add 2-3 hours of this to a collegiate students’ workload each week, and you complete the overwhelmed collegiate musician. Each student presents a different challenge as a teacher, however, practice seems to be a universal struggle. As a teacher, I’ve tried multiple approaches to prepare students to be successful in the practice room, but I have also noticed that productive practice sessions seem to be more elusive for neurodivergent students. So, I partnered with one of my students who has severe ADHD in order to figure out a way to help them find more effective ways to practice each week.

As a student, my teacher required a weekly practice log that I would turn in each week in order for her to measure how much I had worked on during the week. Her expectation was that I would spend 6-7 hours a week in the practice room, and I would have to categorize each minute. Long story short, many of those practice logs I turned in were embellished to meet the minimum requirement because some weeks, that just wasn’t possible. I resolved to do away with practice logs if I ever became a collegiate voice teacher because, for me, it was busy work and not actually helpful. What I’ve learned is simply that it wasn’t helpful for me. For some students, a practice log could help propel them to be successful if I was reasonable in my expectations. While I think I have been successful in teaching my students how to practice and tempering my expectations with their workloads and goals, I failed to recognize those students who might need a tactile element to keep them accountable and help remind them to practice throughout the week.

I decided to focus on simplicity, usability, and versatility when I was building this activity. I went through and explained each component, and they kept remarking, “This is so great. It’s going to be so helpful.” Whether it has been fully effective or not remains to be seen, as it was handed out this past week, and I do not see this student again until later on this week. However, when I handed the handout to the student, they were really excited about it! Another thing that I kept at the forefront of my mind was that this student struggles with remembering if they’ve actually done something or if they’ve just thought about doing it. I used a checklist format, so that they could check off each element in the moment so that they wouldn’t have to try to remember later on. I also included space for them to write questions or observations during their practice time so that if they had a question or thought, they could just jot it down and we could address it the following week during our lesson. This will hopefully be helpful for me to guide our lesson time and minimize confusion. 

Honestly, it was very challenging to come up with this practice log and keep it simple. I had to boil down so many things to fit into a realistic time expectation for this student. I constantly had to reword something or delete something entirely to not clutter the page. This student has shared that they get overwhelmed very easily with too many instructions but also with too little. Finding that balance is something that is difficult for me, because I love extremely detailed instructions. I would rather have ALL of the details, and I constantly had to pare down this activity and what was included. 

Now what? Performance - the second necessary evil in music (also, coincidentally, starting with the letter “p”). The next activity will focus on incorporating meaningful movement in performance for this student who has a tic disorder. There is an expectation in performances for a level of stillness to be achieved without extraneous movements like tapping your foot or swaying. For this student, the goal is to find an activity that allows them to find ways to move during a performance that are helpful to the student and provide minimal distractions for the audience.