Dear Friends,
Last week I mentioned the survey that many of you have filled out. So far, I have received around 1800 responses, and learned a lot from all of you! (If you'd like to take the survey, you can fill it out here.) When asked about what is most frustrating or difficult for you at the piano, hundreds of you have said some version of this:
“I practice, but I don’t seem to make progress.”
“I come back the next day and it feels like everything is gone.”
Hearing this from so many of you has led me to spend some time in these newsletters focusing on the issue of retaining what you practice. In last week’s email I wrote about overlearning as a strategy to make faster progress.
This week I want to share another technique that can help: interleaved practice.
Psychologists have found that if you take the same amount of time you’d normally spend working on something and split it up, taking breaks before reviewing the material, you will retain what you are learning more effectively. In the research world this is often called spaced or distributed practice.
At the piano, one very effective way to do this is through interleaved practice, where you rotate between pieces instead of working on one in a big block.
Imagine that you are learning a language. You have 50 vocabulary words to memorize for a quiz next week.
Does it make more sense to review the list every morning and evening for 10 minutes, totaling 140 minutes over the course of a week (10 minutes x 2 sessions x 7 days), or just work for one 140-minute session to learn the 50 words, and then take the test 7 days later?
I think you will most likely agree that it sounds like a ton of boring work to spend 2+ straight hours staring at 50 vocabulary words, and it also sounds pretty unrealistic to expect to remember those words one week later without any review.
When you first learn something, you need to review it briefly and frequently in order to retain it. Returning to the vocabulary list as an example: if I have 50 words to learn, it will be more effective if I look at it briefly several times over the course of a day. Each time I return to the list, I will have forgotten some of it and I will need to review what I’ve forgotten.
The process of learning, forgetting a little bit, and re-learning is what allows you to retain what you learn.
When people report that they don’t retain what they have been practicing at the piano, it’s often because they are doing what is called massed practice. They are practicing one piece for a while, then putting it away and moving on to another piece, and so forth.
Practicing one thing at a time, aka “massed practice,” might feel effective in the moment, but it doesn’t lead to as much retention as interleaved practice does. In interleaved practice you practice each piece for briefer periods and come back to everything several times, instead of doing one long block on one piece at a time.
Here’s the difference between massed vs interleaved practice:
Scenario A: massed practice
- Piece 1: 30 minutes
- Piece 2: 30 minutes
- Piece 3: 30 minutes
Total: 90 minutes of practice
Scenario B: interleaved practice
- Piece 1: 10 minutes
- Piece 2: 10 minutes
- Piece 3: 10 minutes
Repeat this 30-minute structure three times
Total: 90 minutes of practice
For more on interleaved practice, check out this short video where Robert Bjork, a psychology professor at UCLA, explains some studies that have found interleaved practice to be more effective than massed practice.
So, if you are one of the hundreds of people who have told me that you struggle to retain what you practice, try interleaved practice this week.
(Just a warning: if you’ve never done interleaved practice before, it can feel quite taxing and slightly chaotic. But stick with it - that’s a normal feeling that comes with this kind of learning. It's a sign that it's working!)
Let me know how it goes!
👋 Happy practicing,
Kate