Whether you're an athlete or a performer, the concept of practice seems to be a straightforward process with little room for variation. Basketball players convene to run drills as a team, and they are expected to work on their jump shots at home; orchestra members rehearse a piece of music as a group, and every instrumentalist must become familiar with the material beforehand. But some educators, including Hempfield School District's secondary orchestra director, Nile Wilson, believe it's not about how often you practice - it's the way you practice.

As a requirement for the program Wilson is in at Auburn University to receive her doctorate of philosophy and instrumental music education, she completed a qualitative study to examine how string musicians in high school learned a new piece of music. A few of Wilson's goals were to determine how students of varying achievement levels grasped the new material, how they measured their progress and what strategies they used to practice. Wilson worked with orchestra directors from three high schools and one youth orchestra to select 14 participants between ninth and 12th grades, and she interviewed each student about their process of learning a solo piece from the first time they read it to the actual performance. Wilson then divided the participants into three groups by achievement level: typical, proficient and elite performers.

"The biggest surprise was seeing how many students spent most of their time looking at the tiny details of the music, waiting until the last second to put everything back together," Wilson said. "I'm guilty of it too, but it makes it hard to see the big picture."

Wilson discovered the elite performers think of their music as a whole piece early in the practice process, and she said it changed the way she rehearses with her own students. "I started to incorporate bigger sections early on and having different expectations in the beginning or middle stages of preparation," Wilson added.

Wilson first became interested in exploring the rehearsal process during the coronavirus pandemic, due to her orchestra's inability to practice together while in-person gatherings were suspended. Wilson recalled her own experience as a student, which often involved the frustration of not knowing how to work through the assigned material. "Teachers told me I needed to practice for a certain amount of time, but not how to practice effectively," Wilson said. "Many students don't practice regularly because they're overwhelmed. These are new ways of practice, and I think it's important for teachers to be very deliberate in teaching students how to rehearse."

Wilson will present her research at the National Association for Music Education's (NAfME) Biennial Music Research and Teacher Education Conference in Atlanta, Ga., this September.