How I learned to teach without relying on home practice
- Daniele Piroddi
- Jul 20
- 4 min read
Updated: Aug 10
It is probably one of the greatest challenges every instrumental teacher faces.
How do you help students make meaningful progress if they hardly practise at home?
For years, I found myself asking the same question. We often assume that students should practise because they love music. We imagine that, after a full day at school, homework, sports, and other activities, they will naturally pick up the guitar and play. But what if they do not?
The usual solution is to encourage parents to become more involved and remind their children to practise. Yet this raises another important question: are children playing music because they genuinely enjoy it, or because they are being told to do it? This cycle repeats itself year after year, and in many ways it seems to be becoming even more difficult.
Primary school children are busier than ever. Alongside school, many attend sports clubs, dance classes, chess lessons, swimming, or countless other activities that contribute to their personal development. Music lessons must somehow find their place within an already crowded schedule. Learning an instrument inevitably requires some independent practice, but we also need to accept that we no longer live in the same world as we did twenty or thirty years ago. Expectations need to evolve.
The goal is hardly to become professional musicians. The goal is to give them a meaningful, enjoyable musical experience that may later develop into something much greater, or simply become a lifelong appreciation of music. Modern forms of passive entertainment certainly do not make this easier.
But the situation is far from hopeless.
It requires thought, patience, and a willingness to rethink our teaching methods. Most importantly, it requires accepting that perhaps the solution is not to expect children to change, but to change the way we teach.
The First Step
The first major improvement came when I wrote my own Guitar Fundamentals 1 book.
I needed a method that gave me complete flexibility during lessons. I wanted to adapt instantly to each student’s needs rather than feeling constrained by a rigid sequence of exercises. This led me to develop ideas such as the Three-Path System, allowing different students to progress in different ways while using the same material.
It was a significant improvement.
But it was still not enough.
The First Online Resources
Most students improved through the practice they did at home, but often it was neither consistent nor sufficient.
I wanted to bridge that gap.
I recorded videos for the songs in the book and made them available through janasmusic. Students could listen, watch, and play along. It certainly helped.
But not enough.
Finding the video, pressing play, and following it still required initiative, help from the parents and an available device. Many students simply never got that far.
Adding Interactive Learning
Next, I introduced note-reading quizzes.
Simple, interactive games with gradual progression. And then I also added more educational games covering different aspects of music reading and guitar playing.
Did it solve the problem?
Not even close.
Although some students enjoyed them, the overall amount of home practice changed very little.
At this point I realised something important. Perhaps I was trying too hard to improve what happened outside the lesson, instead of making the lesson itself powerful enough.
Changing the Lesson
Primary school guitar lessons are often only twenty minutes long. That gives us very little time. Rather than relying on students to fill the gaps during the week, I decided to redesign those twenty minutes completely.
During the last school term I introduced several major changes:
1. I integrated the games directly into the lesson instead of treating them as optional homework.
2. I developed a Composer Tool that allowed students to write their own music and invent their own pieces.
3. I introduced structured warm-ups, note-reading activities, and musical games that became part of every lesson from the very beginning.
Everything became routine. Students knew exactly how every lesson would begin. The repetition strengthened their memory, improved their confidence, and gradually accelerated their learning.
What Happened?
The results surprised me.
1. Making the games easier to access helped a little, but the biggest breakthrough came from the Composer Tool. Children absolutely loved creating their own music. They invented titles, experimented with melodies, and wanted to play the pieces they had written. They were no longer simply reproducing someone else’s music. They were becoming creative musicians.
2. The structured warm-up routine also produced remarkable results. Because every lesson followed a familiar pattern, students developed confidence and security. They remembered notes more quickly, retained them for much longer, and built solid foundations through repetition without becoming bored.
Then something unexpected happened. Many students started practising at home more regularly. Not because I had asked them. Not because their parents reminded them. Simply because they wanted to. Ironically, by this point, home practice was no longer essential for their progress. The lessons themselves had become effective enough that every student continued improving even without extensive practice during the week.
That completely changed the atmosphere. Students no longer arrived worried about disappointing the teacher because they had not practised enough. Instead, they came looking forward to playing the guitar. That is a huge difference. Their motivation shifted from trying to please the teacher to enjoying music for its own sake.
And that, in my opinion, is the real goal of music education.
A Continuing Journey
Has this solved every problem? Of course not.
Teaching is a continuous process of observation, reflection, and improvement. Every term I change something. Every year I discover a better idea.
What I have learned, however, is that relying solely on home practice is not the answer for many young beginners. By making lessons engaging, structured, creative, and genuinely enjoyable, we can achieve far more than we often imagine.
And when children eventually decide to practise at home, they do it for the right reason. Not because they have to.
Because they want to.
Great mindset shift to support them.
Great article!