Many music teachers will begin a lesson with a version of the question, "How did your practice go this week?" It is easy to describe your recent practice in a fuzzy way. For example, “Practice went OK this week.” A statement this broad doesn’t tell us anything helpful or actionable without follow-up questions.

One of the best ways to get the most out of your lessons is to transparently and succinctly describe to your teacher how your practice went between lessons. Here are 4 examples of how to convey this.

1. I put in good practice time, and I noticed improvement.

2. I put in good practice time, but I didn’t notice improvement.

3. I didn’t put in good practice time, but I noticed improvement.

4. I didn’t put in good practice time, and I didn’t notice improvement.

Let’s provide more details to these 4 outcomes, with a general outline of how I approach that day’s lesson based on a student's self-reported assessment of their practice.

1. I put in good practice time, and I noticed improvement. -- Great, let's increase the tempo, work on a new measure, or begin our next challenge.

2. I put in good practice time, but I didn’t notice improvement. -- Let’s look at the specific practice methods you were using. Sometimes the material is hard enough that the results take time to add up, but other times, our practice methods may need to be improved.

3. I didn’t put in good practice time, but I noticed improvement. -- That feels great when you pull it off! There are some cool neuroscience explanations for why this sometimes happens. In short, our brains keep working even after we have finished practicing, so sometimes we will come back to the drum set able to play a pattern that we couldn’t play yesterday. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is rare, and usually only appears in the very short term, such as 5 days of missed practice. The mature practicer realizes that improvement without practice is not very common, and the best predictor of increased drum skills is overall practice time.

4. I didn’t put in good practice time, and I didn’t notice improvement. -- This is the golden rule of learning anything: You Get Out What You Put In. But our lesson is not wasted! Not all of drumming or music-learning is sequential, and there are always other paths we can take to have a perfectly valuable lesson.

Notice that under the guidance of a good teacher, none of these outcomes end with your teacher getting frustrated, yelling at you, or throwing drumsticks at you. As a young piano student, I remember being very nervous to give my teacher anything other than a great practice report, even if I wasn't being fully transparent, or outright withholding the truth. Now that I am in the teacher’s seat, I realize that no one has great practice weeks all the time. Accurately self-reporting your practice time and understanding of the material provides valuable information to your teacher. The most beneficial approach for students and teachers is to be completely candid in reporting your practice time, then you and your teacher can get to work based on one of the general pathways listed above.

If you want to help your teacher even more, be prepared to share the quantity of practice sessions and the cumulative practice time. A notebook, log, or practice journal is very helpful in tracking the quantity and duration of your practice sessions.