"Practise the piece" is not an assignment. It is a topic. Students who ignore practice homework are often not being lazy — they genuinely do not know what the task was, or when it would be finished.
Three ways an assignment fails
- It is ambiguous. "Work on the second page" does not say whether to play it slowly, hands separately, or with a metronome.
- It has no finish line. Without a condition for "done", practice ends when the student loses interest, which is the wrong signal.
- The material is not to hand. If the backing track is in an email and the sheet is in a bag, the friction is often enough to stop practice altogether.
Assign passages, not pieces
A piece is too large a unit. Bars 17 to 24 at 70 bpm is a task a student can start and finish. It also makes the following lesson concrete: you both know what was supposed to happen, so you can talk about what actually happened.
When the material is rendered rather than printed — see opening Guitar Pro files online — you can point at the passage and set the tempo directly, instead of describing it in words.
State the condition for done
"Three times without stopping at 70 bpm" is checkable by the student without you present. That matters, because the entire week of practice happens without you present. A student who can self-assess can make decisions between lessons; a student who cannot is waiting for you.
Attach the material to the task
Every extra step between deciding to practise and starting to practise costs you some students. If the sheet, the backing track and the instruction are in the same place, that friction is close to zero. This is the main practical argument for keeping teaching materials in one place rather than distributed across email, messaging apps and cloud storage.
Make progress visible
Practice on a difficult passage produces very little audible improvement day to day, which is discouraging precisely when persistence matters most. Tracked practice minutes and streaks are designed to show effort accumulating while the musical result is still catching up.
Adjust when the data disagrees with you
If a student consistently practises the pieces and skips the technical work, that is information about the assignment, not only about the student. Assignments that are never done are worth changing rather than repeating more firmly.