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:

• MOTIVATION is an important concept in all education. Exactly what is it? How does it operate? What can teachers to do maintain it? One important source of motivation relies on personal goal setting and self-evaluative processes. Operating largely on internal comparison, self-motivation relies on setting personal standards and using those standards to modulate ongoing high levels of performance. We make self-satisfaction an integral part of our program. Students learn that persistence creates an optimal match with personal standards. They then anticipate satisfaction (when they meet their own standards) and dissatisfaction when the standards are not matched. 
• Personal goals do not automatically create good self-evaluative processes. Goals need to be clear, standards immediately reachable and proximal. Stated differently, students of different ages will react differently to future goals. However, for all students, the goals and standards have two major effects:
  • Self motivation is partly learned by proximal parts of the goal, and the more attainable the goal, the higher the self-motivation. Intrinsic interest is developed mostly from the sum total of the individual's perceived competence which require mastery experiences over time.
  • Competence is not one thing; it is not just knowing what to do. It involves many sub-skills that are organized and integrated to form one outcome.It requires multiple sub-skills.

Children with high self-efficacy move beyond problems readily since they do not have to spend much time solving them. That's why our program fosters efficacy within each skill and sub-skill so the children develop true musical competence. Judgments of self-efficacy are therefore not just reflectors of past performance, but how the student draw inferences based on personal and situational factors. The evaluative standards persist through the student's life and we give every student the tools he or she needs to persevere and self-reflect in a personally positive manner.