Make practice visible: how online music teachers can better follow progress

What happens between two lessons

The real work does not happen in the lesson.

One hour a week is the shared part. The other six days belong to the student. During that time, things are practiced, tried out, discarded and sometimes nothing is done at all.

As a teacher, you normally see very little of it.

You may know what task you gave. But not necessarily whether the student worked on it for ten minutes or two hours. You also do not always know where they got stuck while practicing or which passage suddenly worked well.

In the next lesson, the result stands in front of you.

That makes teaching harder than it actually needs to be.

Because two students can come to the next lesson with exactly the same task and very different paths behind them.

One practiced briefly every day and worked on a specific passage. The other tried to catch up on everything the evening before the lesson. Both might say: “I practiced.”

For your planning, that is a big difference.

Progress is more than the result of a single lesson

If you only look at the result, you are missing part of the story.

Take a difficult passage. Last week it was still unclean, this week it runs noticeably better.

That is, of course, progress.

But it would be even more interesting to know how that progress came about.

Was the passage practiced slowly? Was it broken into small sections? Did the student record it and then listen back? Was only this passage practiced, or was the whole piece played from the beginning again and again?

This information can be just as important for your next lesson as the result itself.

And that is exactly why it is worth making practice between lessons a little more visible.

This is not about monitoring students

“Tracking” quickly sounds like control.

But it does not have to be.

It is not about noticing on Monday that someone did not practice on Saturday. And certainly not about putting students under pressure with statistics.

The more interesting question is:

What can I, as a teacher, learn about the learning process that would otherwise stay hidden from me?

An example:

A student works on a specific passage for a week. They note that the transition between two bars is difficult. They might also make a short recording.

In the next lesson, you already know where the problem was and what they worked on.

You do not have to spend ten minutes finding out what happened between the last lesson and this one.

That changes the lesson.

Three things are especially helpful

1. Clear practice goals

“Practice the piece.”

That is an assignment, but not yet a very good goal.

“Play bars 17–32 evenly at tempo 80” is much more specific.

The student knows what to work on. And in the next lesson you can check together whether the goal was reached.

It does not have to be complicated. A short, concrete formulation is often enough.

2. Small insights into practice

You do not need to document every minute of practice.

Even a short entry can help:

“20 minutes today. Bars 24–28 were still difficult.”

Or:

“Practiced with the metronome. Still uncertain at 80 BPM.”

Such information is small. Over several weeks, though, it gives a much better picture of how a student works.

3. Recordings

Recordings are especially interesting in music lessons because they can do one thing that notes cannot:

You can hear the progress.

A recording from three weeks ago next to a current one can sometimes show more than a long explanation.

That also helps students and parents. Progress suddenly becomes concrete.

The motivating effect often comes as a side benefit

Another advantage: students themselves get a better sense of what they have actually achieved.

You know this from other areas too. If you only look at each individual day, development often feels slow.

If you look back after a month, though, things look different.

In music lessons this is especially relevant. Progress is rarely linear. There are days when something suddenly works, and others when you feel you are not getting anywhere at all.

When this development is documented, you can look back on it later.

“You could not do that four weeks ago.”

That is different feedback from:

“You just need to practice more.”

What this changes for your teaching

If you know what happened between lessons, you can prepare the next lesson better.

Perhaps a student practiced exactly the passage you expected. Then you can build on it.

Perhaps they ran into difficulties somewhere completely different. Then you can adjust your planning accordingly.

Or you realise that an assignment simply did not work.

That is valuable information too.

Because good teaching does not mean working through the same plan every week. It means responding to the student’s actual level of learning.

And what about the extra effort?

This is probably the most important objection.

As a music teacher, you do not want to maintain yet another system, fill in yet another table and check yet another app.

That should not be the goal either.

When digital tools are used sensibly, they should create as little extra work as possible. The assignment is recorded once after the lesson. The student works with it. Small feedback arises during practice.

And before the next lesson, you already have the most important information at hand.

That is different from having to create a complete documentation afterwards.

This becomes especially interesting for music schools

With a single teacher, much stays in personal exchange.

At a music school, documentation eventually becomes more important.

What happens when a student changes teacher?

What does the new teacher know about the previous goals? Which pieces were worked on? Where were the difficulties? How was practice done so far?

If this information only lives in someone’s head or in scattered chats, it is quickly lost.

Shared documentation can help maintain a common thread across a change of teacher.

It is not about making teaching uniform. Every teacher works differently.

It is much more about not having to gather important information from scratch every time.

As soon as personal data is involved, the articles GDPR in online music lessons and Data protection for online music schools are also worth reading.

Making practice visible does not mean measuring everything

This is perhaps the most important point.

Not everything that happens in a music lesson can be expressed in numbers.

Musicality, expression, concentration, or a sudden understanding of a passage do not fit into a dashboard.

Nor do they need to.

Digital documentation should support teaching, not replace it.

A few good pieces of information at the right time can already make a big difference: What was the goal? What was worked on? What worked? Where were the difficulties?

Often that is all it takes.

How MUSIRIS helps

This is exactly where MUSIRIS comes in.

Lesson goals and assignments can be recorded right after the lesson and shared with students. During the week, practice times, recordings and notes can be added.

Little by little, this builds a picture of what happens between lessons.

For the teacher, it mainly means one thing: the next lesson does not start from zero again.

And for the student, it becomes visible what they worked on and how their playing changes over time.

You can try MUSIRIS for free.

If you organise your music teaching online and currently spread a lot of information across notes, messengers and individual files, you can try whether a shared place for lessons and practice makes your everyday life easier.