Why You’ve Stopped Progressing: Understanding Pedagogy and Learning
- Alexander L. Shaneyfelt
- May 3
- 6 min read
Most musicians don’t struggle because they lack discipline—they struggle because they try to fix everything at once.
For beginners, there is very little to be aware of. They do not think about voicing, phrasing, balance, articulation, etc. They are not weighing interpretive decisions or managing competing layers of control.
The goal is quite simple: play the correct notes, at roughly the correct time, with some degree of coordination.
But that changes.
With experience, more elements come into focus. The musician begins to hear imbalance. They recognize when a melody is buried, when rhythm is unstable, and when phrasing feels directionless. Everything that was once invisible becomes glaringly obvious.
At that point, the musician is no longer lacking information. They are surrounded by it. Every aspect of playing—accuracy, voicing, phrasing, dynamics, memory, tone—is present at once, each one identifiable, each one demanding—competing—for attention.
And this is where the real problem begins.
Because the challenge is no longer identifying what is wrong.
It is deciding what matters most.
When Everything Matters Nothing Improves
I’ve recently been contemplating what exactly distinguishes a good pedagogue from a good performer. After-all, pedagogy is its own distinct discipline in the piano and music world; in fact, there is such a long-standing tradition for it that most universities offer dedicated piano pedagogy programs—in contrast to piano performance.
It’s important to understand the distinction, because good teaching implies good learning. If we understand what exactly makes for good pedagogy we can better orient ourselves as independent learners in pursuit of our own goals.
If you can teach others, you can also teach yourself.
There’s a common misconception that pedagogy translates to the ability to clearly explain or articulate an idea or concept. While that is an aspect of pedagogy, in reality its greatest distinction is something else entirely.
Good pedagogy is the ability to observe over a dozen problems worth correcting or concepts worth developing, and picking the two most impactful ones to work on.
Students re sometimes pushed and encouraged to measure qualities of music (including but not limited to note accuracy, rhythm, phrasing, dynamics, pacing, memory…) all in approximately equal value.
And that’s a flawed mindset.
Not in outcome, but in development.
Because in reality it is difficult to meaningfully develop any skill, or refine any imperfection when you are cognitively managing all of them simultaneously.
This produces cognitive overload, slowing progress, and fracturing attention.
Attention is divided across too many variables. No single skill is given enough focus to stabilize. Each issue is partially addressed, then abandoned for another.
The work becomes constant, but the improvement is shallow.
For a long time I prided myself working in this way. It feels complete. It feels disciplined. It feels like nothing is being ignored.
But the result is the opposite of progress.
When everything is prioritized, everything is weakened.
And so we are forced to do something that feels counterintuitive or even lazy: allowing imperfection.
Pushing speed might mean diminishing note accuracy.
Rhythmic looseness might be temporarily tolerated while developing voicing.
Interpretation and phrasing might be temporarily de-emphasized when initially developing memory.
This doesn’t mean ignoring other elements of the music, it means temporarily stabilizing and isolating the most unstable element(s) before reintegration.
It may seem intuitive—or even obvious—when spoken out loud, especially in the context of teaching to others. If you have a beginner student you don’t want to overload them with phrasing if they’re struggling with rhythm and note accuracy. But what’s interesting: as we become advanced or even professional musicians, we tend not to apply that same logic to ourselves.
This is not laziness, or a lowering of standards. It is, in fact, the only way to realistically reach them.
The Performer’s Perspective—and Its Limits
In the world of pedagogy there are incredible performers that command the stage with true musical mastery—but might not necessarily be the best teachers.
How is this possible?
At a high level of performance, all of these elements—rhythm, phrasing, voicing, control—are no longer experienced as separate. They function together as a single, cohesive act.
This creates a misleading model for learning. Because from that perspective, it seems natural to expect all aspects to be addressed together. The standard becomes holistic: play everything cleanly, all at once.
And when this perspective is applied to teaching, something breaks.
Because as a student, if you try to respond to all of it at once, nothing actually develops. You leave the lesson with a list, not a direction. And when you sit down to practice, you end up cycling between problems without ever staying with one long enough for it to stabilize or meaningfully develop.
The fundamental misunderstanding is this: because the finished product is unified, the process must also be unified.
A list of correct observations is not a method for improvement.
This is not to say that high-level musicians are not good teachers, in fact, their awareness of the smallest details is uniquely invaluable; but if they do not follow a system of sequential prioritization in their pedagogy, then the responsibility must fall on the student to determine what is of most value for their development.
And it is for this reason that even a developing student should possess a fundamental understanding of what makes for good pedagogy.
Pedagogy in Composition
It was my composition teacher, Simon Lasky, whose teaching approach prompted me to contemplate all of this
When working on a piece, the goal was not to refine everything continuously. The piece would be brought to a rough, presentable state—a first draft that functioned, even if imperfect.
Afterwards, each week would be dedicated towards making a focused revision or correction. One week might focus on pacing. Another on engraving. Another on texture or clarity.
Now that didn’t mean ignoring other elements, but they weren’t the priority. The goal for each week was to correct the single thing holding the piece back the most in that moment, and I would usually touch up some other details along the way so long as they weren’t too disruptive.
And this process had a strict limit. Three or four revisions at most. After that, the piece was done.
This reveals another important aspect of good pedagogy: recognizing when an individual work or project is no longer providing maximum results towards long term development.
Without that structure, it becomes easy to adjust everything constantly—alter a harmony, tweak a rhythm, revisit earlier material. The piece changes, but it does not meaningfully improve.
With structure, each revision produces a clear result. Each pass extracts something specific. And once that extraction is made, the process moves forward.
Whatever refinements for the piece that can be made at that point should be considered and implemented to the next piece.
Development happens across works, not within one endlessly refined one.
The Question That Guides Everything and the Accuracy Trap
That experience with my professor really encouraged me to rethink how I approach my own musical development independently.
The question is no longer:
What is wrong?
It becomes:
“What is holding me back the most from delivering a convincing performance today?”
Often that is overall accuracy—especially in the early stages.
But there’s a very important reality also worth acknowledging: an audience generally doesn’t care if you hit a couple of wrong notes.
More often than not, the things that break down a performance are memory, and flat musicality.
Of course that doesn’t mean neglecting accuracy in its entirety—just that musicians routinely spend disproportionate time refining accuracy over other important musical elements.
Accuracy becomes the focus not because it matters most in that moment, but because it is the most accessible problem.
It is visible. It is measurable. It is direct.
So it becomes the default priority.
Beyond Music
I think this idea gets most interesting when applied outside of music, especially considering the hyperactive world that we live in today. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by everything we need to get done in the next hour, day, or week. Furthermore, we are strongly encouraged to come up with cognitively heavy and robust systems and routines to accommodate for that.
The unfortunate reality for most is that we struggle in keeping to those routines. After all, life is complicated. Things happen. Plans get interrupted. Systems break down.
The same way musicians stop progressing by trying to fix every musical problem at once, people often stop progressing in life because they try to optimize every responsibility, routine, goal, and system simultaneously.
I remember going through the process of trying to systematize my entire practice routine to account for every skill worth maintaining and developing. I found my time split so thinly that despite dedicating several hours a day, it felt as though I was making no progress. And this was because I dedicated equivalent time towards maintaining my strengths and developing my weaknesses. I equally trained that which was most important and that which was least important.
At a certain point, the problem is no longer that you don’t know what’s wrong.
You know exactly what’s wrong.
Every. Little. Detail.
And that’s precisely why you stop improving.
Because progress does not come from answering every problem at once.
It comes from choosing the one that matters most.
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