Mathis

Epigraph
I see discipline as a spectrum: a cloud of tools. Discipline isn’t using every tool every day. It’s knowing which tool to choose, when, and why.

Why I’m Writing This

For a long time, my relationship with discipline felt like a chase. I chased time. I chased opportunities. I chased the idea of “being disciplined,” without really understanding how learning becomes sustainable. I knew what I wanted. I knew I wanted to be good. But I didn’t know how to do the work without breaking me. The more I tried to force discipline, the more I turned it into a judgement: if I didn’t do everything perfectly, I believed I was failing.

What changed my trajectory was not a sudden boost of motivation. It was a shift in how I understood learning. When you feel engaged and empowered, you don’t just want to learn. You feel ready to learn. And when that readiness becomes something you can return to consistently, you start collecting small wins that compound. Over time, that compounding builds a different identity: not someone who “tries to be disciplined,” but someone who knows how to move forward even when the feeling isn’t there. This chapter begins from that personal shift, because it became the foundation of my doctoral work. My PhD asks how self-discipline can be taught in one-to-one popular music lessons for learners aged 11–13, not as compliance, but as a capacity that supports autonomy and resilience.

Discipline as a Problem We Keep Misplacing

In teaching spaces, I kept hearing a familiar narrative: “students lack discipline nowadays.” I also heard the opposite voice from students: “it’s just music, no one really cares.” Both of these positions miss something important. When a young person says no to music at this age, it can also be a way of saying no to expression, identity, and a language that might have helped them make sense of themselves. My proposal sits inside that tension. Popular Music Education (PME) is often excellent at sparking engagement and agency, but it has not sufficiently addressed how young learners develop the self-discipline needed for sustained progress—especially in one-to-one contexts.

This is where my stance becomes explicit: I’m not interested in blaming teachers or students. Teachers are working hard in complex systems. Students are developing in complex bodies and social worlds. The problem is more structural than moral. There are misalignments. There are gaps between what we expect and what we explicitly teach. And in the middle of it all sits a question that is both simple and uncomfortable: if we want young musicians to practise independently, have we actually taught them the inner tools required to do that? My research question is direct: How can self-discipline be effectively taught in one-to-one Popular Music instrument lessons to students aged 11 to 13 in the United Kingdom?

Why Students Come First

A major part of my vision is to start with learners, not with theory. Teachers and researchers already carry language for this topic. We know the terms: motivation, determination, resilience, self-discipline, self-regulation. But students don’t live inside terminology. They live inside experience. They have feelings about practice. They have beliefs about what “counts.” They have stories about effort, frustration, identity, boredom, confidence, and the fear of being judged. If I want this research to matter, I need to understand discipline as they encounter it at their stage of life, in their language, from where they are.

Over time, a pattern has become obvious in my own teaching: it’s not enough to teach students how to learn. The turning point often comes when we explore why they learn, how strategies actually feel to them, and what they believe these tools are for. When students are invited to give their opinion—when their voice genuinely shapes the learning process—they stop being passengers and start becoming co-authors. This is not just “making them feel safe.” It is building self-awareness without forcing overthinking, and helping them notice their own learning in a way that supports agency. This connects strongly with Self-Regulated Learning theory, where learning involves cycles of forethought, performance, and self-reflection, and self-regulation is described as a “self-directive process.”

The Mistake I Made: Knowledge Accumulation

If I’m honest, one of my biggest early mistakes as a teacher was thinking that learning meant accumulating a list of things. If I could just give students the right vocabulary, the right exercises, the right sequence—then surely progress would take care of itself. But discipline doesn’t emerge because a student has been told what to do. It emerges when they begin to understand themselves in learning, and when practice stops being something they “should” do and becomes something they can navigate.

This is why I’m careful with how I introduce structure. Structure can support independence, but it can also become control. A student can follow structure while still feeling powerless. The deeper work is not to impose a system, but to offer tools that students can choose from, adapt, and eventually own. In my proposal, this is exactly the reframing I’m arguing for: discipline in PME should be reconsidered “not as external enforcement but as an internalised skillset that supports autonomy.” The goal is not obedience. It is self-direction.

What I Notice When It Works

When this approach works, the signal is not perfect practice. The signal is ownership. Students start surprising you. They print calendars and track small wins. They start a one-sentence journal just to remind themselves they are moving forward. They ask to send videos for feedback because they trust the process. They take opportunities they would once have avoided because their confidence is no longer fragile in the same way. These moments matter because they show that self-discipline is not limited to the instrument. It becomes transferable: organisation, consistency, self-belief, long-term thinking. That transfer is one of the reasons this research matters beyond music.

The literature supports the idea that one-to-one environments can be a particularly powerful site for this work, because they offer a “private and flexible space” where teachers can respond to individual goals and challenges, making guided goal-setting and reflective dialogue more visible and deliberate. This is the kind of teaching I want to map in detail: not just what teachers do, but how they decide when to step in, when to step back, and how they gradually hand responsibility over.

What I’m Studying in Teachers

I also want to respect what teachers carry. Most teachers are not researchers. They are in the lesson room. They are managing time, emotions, progress, curriculum pressures, family expectations, and student confidence—often all at once. Many of them don’t have hours to step back and theorise what they do. That is part of my motivation: to research for teachers, not to judge them.

So I’m investigating how teachers conceptualise and operationalise self-discipline in one-to-one teaching, including strategies like feedback, collaborative goal-setting, modelling, co-regulation, and personalised instruction that supports learners to self-regulate and take ownership. A key idea in my proposal is structured autonomy: a way of balancing freedom with scaffolding so independence becomes achievable rather than rhetorical.

How the Study Is Designed

Methodologically, the project is qualitative and interpretivist, designed to capture meaning, experience, and the social construction of “discipline” inside real teaching contexts. The design is sequential: I start by listening to students in focus groups, then use what emerges to shape teacher interviews, so the learners’ realities actively guide the questions asked of educators. The analysis uses thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke’s framework), because it provides a systematic way to identify patterns while staying grounded in participants’ words and perspectives.

What This Research Will Produce

This project is not only explanatory. It is practical. The proposal commits to outputs that translate findings into usable tools: an open-access guidebook with routines, feedback cycles, and reflective prompts; a privacy-conscious progress-tracking app concept; and workshops and tutorials to support teachers in implementation. The aim is to make research travel into practice without requiring teachers to become researchers in their spare time.

Closing: A Different Definition of Discipline

Today, I no longer think discipline means doing everything, all the time. I think discipline is the ability to choose wisely in service of something meaningful. Sometimes it looks like effort. Sometimes it looks like rest without guilt. It is timing, purpose, and the awareness that tools exist to help—not to control you. This is the definition I want students to encounter: discipline as something empowering, not something that crushes them.

This chapter is a beginning. The pages that follow will build the framework more carefully, trace how students interpret the “between lesson” struggle, and map what teachers do when they try to cultivate independence without replacing student agency. If you’re reading this as a teacher, a parent, or a learner, my hope is simple: that you feel seen—and that the work becomes more doable.