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Elton Joel RW2 2'25
With apologies to them both. A rock piano solo without lyrics.
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Elegy RW2 2'25
Many, many parts to weave and balance - needs ensemble skills, even though it's for solo piano.
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The Art of the Interview back to magazine homepage
Introduction | Testing Creativity | Verbal Instructions | Swapping chairs
The Practice Snapshot | Concert in 10 minutes | Turnaround Time
Testing willingness to practice
You can fill your studio with resources, become a serial attender of pedagogy conferences and approach every teaching day with Leonardo-da-Vinci creativity levels, but if there are problems on the practicing front, the lessons will quickly die. The reality of this profession is that your job satisfaction—in fact the ability to do your job at all—is dictated largely by how students work at home.
Given that, it's worth finding out about how this prospective student is likely to approach the six days between lessons—the trick is being able to sift through the verbal promises of "sure, thirty minutes of focused practice every day, no problem" and find out what the pattern has really been so far, together with how receptive they'll be to working smarter and harder in the future.
Show me your week
I've always been much more interested in how students practice than how much, (see The Practice Revolution) but with transfer students in particular, lessons start with you being at the mercy of established patterns. If the student has been doing all their practice in a single panic session on the morning of their lessons, you have to know that. 
Not because you shouldn't accept them as students—I would have missed out on some of my best ever students if I had weeded out travel companions on that basis—but because it affects your agenda for the initial lessons.
So we sit down with a schedule, and construct a picture of their week. But here's the thing. I don't even mention practice—I just tell them that I'm interested in what keeps my students busy, and was wondering how their week pans out. The plan is to spend ten minutes filling in everything—when they get up, when they leave for school, when they do their homework, sports, dinner, computer game playing time..."practicing" is always carefully omitted from my list of examples. The question is whether it's also omitted from what they write down.
This whole exercise is best done with a parent at least present—just to make sure that there is independent corroboration of the picture you're being presented with.
Whether practice is missing from the picture or not, the next step is always the same. You're going to ask them to show you how they could fit a lot more in.
Giving them a practice shock
The key here is to make the demands almost unreasonable—not because you're really planning on insisting on that level of commitment, but because you want to see how they react when the request is made. Even if there's no way you'd normally ask for this amount of work, there will be times when you might need to...I would know more about the person on whom I might need to place such a burden.
So I tell them. "Ok, this looks like a busy schedule! Here's the thing though—let's imagine I needed you to find an extra four hours each week of practice, and needed you to agree to that before lessons started. How could you make that practice happen?" I'm not actually all that interested in the details, but I am very interested in their willingness to consider each suggestion. 
They could get up earlier? Commit to linking practice to the size of their allowance? Practice twice on a Sunday? Practice during three of their seven free periods at school? Adopt an every-day-even-on-my-birthday policy?
My experience is that the leopards here declare—and then rarely change—their spots. Students who pull a face at the idea of getting up thirty minutes earlier are the very students who are likely to resist that idea if you ever needed it. Other students though will actually make suggestions of their own and approach the whole exercise with a spirit of "let's do this".
With practicing being such a major issue in any studio, the second student is getting a major tick from me—even if they currently were reporting less practice than the first student.