Why students don't practice

A few years ago I had a student who almost never practised. Or so I thought. He showed up to every lesson, he was engaged while he was there, and he clearly enjoyed making music. But at home he rarely did the thing we’d agreed on. Every week I’d try to motivate him again — new goals, different exercises, a fresh angle — and none of it moved the needle.

At some point I asked him a different question. Not why he hadn’t practised, but whether he actually still enjoyed it. He looked at me, surprised, and answered almost instantly: yes, he still loved making music, especially in the lesson. That answer stuck with me. Maybe I’d been working on the wrong problem the whole time.

A lot of teachers treat practice as the readout for motivation. A student isn’t practising, so the conclusion writes itself: not enough discipline, not enough grit, not enough interest. In practice it’s usually messier than that. Practising isn’t a cause — it’s a behaviour. And behind a behaviour there’s almost always a reason.

Sometimes a student feels unsure of what they can do. Sometimes the task is too big or too vague. Sometimes the sense of progress just isn’t there, so the effort no longer feels worth the payoff. And sometimes a student has simply lost track of why they started in the first place.

There’s one more thing. A lot of people assume motivation comes before action. We wait until we feel like practising and expect the practice to follow on its own. In music teaching I usually see the opposite. A student tries something, notices it works, gets a small win — and that is what hands them the motivation to keep going.

It’s also why some students stay so strikingly consistent. They’re not always the most talented ones. Often they’re the students who keep experiencing that their effort actually pays off. They hear the difference, they feel themselves developing, they watch themselves getting closer to the goal.

So these days, when a task goes undone several weeks in a row, I ask myself a different question first. Not why the student isn’t doing it, but why they would. That shifts the attention off the student and onto the task itself. Is it clear? Is it doable? Does it line up with what this student actually wants to learn?

A lot of practice tasks are bigger than we realise. A teacher says: practise this song, or work on your timing. From a musician’s point of view that’s perfectly logical — but to a student a task like that can be surprisingly abstract. The bigger and vaguer the task, the smaller the odds anyone actually starts. Small, concrete steps tend to work better.

Over the years that’s changed how I read practice behaviour. When a student doesn’t practise, I see it less as a discipline problem and more as information. The behaviour is telling a story. Sometimes the story is that something’s too hard. Sometimes that the task wasn’t clear enough. Sometimes that life is just too full at the moment.

So next time a student turns up having barely practised, it can be worth not asking straight away why it didn’t happen. A question like how did this task go at home? or where did you get stuck? tends to open a far more useful conversation. Not because the practising suddenly takes care of itself, but because you get closer to the real problem. And the real problem is hardly ever a lack of discipline.