Development of optimal performance skills seems easy--just make sure the child practices a lot and starts training very young. This long-held viewpoint is patently false. One must learn to perform in the same way one learns other things--repetition in an environment that supports all phases of the learning process. Most teachers themselves have trouble performing (have performance anxiety); others do perform well but do not have relevant knowledge about how their own performance skills came to be. We know how to perform ourselves, and we know how to train others to do the same.

Basically, when one performs easily and well, it is due to having something called high Self Efficacy. Self-efficacy is concerned with how one believes one will do in a situation that contains several ambiguous and unpredictable events. In music education, performance opportunities are typically few. We increase the number of performance opportunities through group lessons, but most importantly, we teach students how to foster their own self-direction between those opportunities. Students are taught to provide their own motivation and action. This is where psychology comes in--helping students learn self-directedness through cognitive structures that mediate perception, self-evaluation, motivation and regulation of behavior. Here's a very brief outline of what we do: