What I’m Reading

Updated August 2026

My recent reading has revolved around one central question: how does learning move from being organised by a teacher to being increasingly organised by the learner?

Rather than treating self-discipline as a single psychological trait, I have been bringing together several connected areas of research. Each helps explain a different part of what happens when a young musician learns to practise purposefully without the teacher being present.

Reconsidering discipline

Work by MacAllister, Frierson and Deacon has helped me separate educational discipline from punishment, obedience and behaviour management.

Discipline can provide structure, expectations and direction, but it also involves power. The important question is not simply whether a teacher provides structure, but whose purposes that structure serves and whether the learner gradually participates in shaping it.

This has led me to think of discipline as the organisation of learning conditions rather than the control of a learner.

Understanding what self-discipline contains

I have also been reading research on self-control, self-regulated learning, metacognition, motivation, autonomy, persistence and habits.

These concepts overlap, but they are not interchangeable:

• self-control helps explain how learners manage impulses and distractions;
• self-regulation concerns planning, monitoring and adjusting learning;
• metacognition involves understanding one’s own thinking and learning;
• motivation provides energy and direction;
• autonomy concerns ownership and self-endorsed action;
• persistence helps sustain effort through difficulty;
• habits and routines make repeated action easier to maintain.

Self-discipline is becoming the connecting concept in my study. It describes how these different capacities are coordinated and increasingly owned by the learner over time.

Why the ages of 11-13 matter

Developmental research has made me more cautious about interpreting inconsistent practice as a lack of discipline.

Early adolescence is a period of changing motivation, identity, relationships and sensitivity to evaluation. Young people can already plan, reflect and regulate their behaviour, but their ability to do so remains uneven across situations.

A student may organise practice successfully when the music feels personally meaningful but struggle when the purpose of an activity is unclear. This means self-discipline cannot be understood separately from confidence, identity, relationships and educational context.

The one-to-one teaching relationship

Research by Gaunt, Creech, Kupers and others shows that one-to-one instrumental teaching can provide highly responsive modelling, feedback and guidance. However, its concentration of expertise can also create dependency if the teacher continually identifies every problem, selects every strategy and evaluates every result.

This literature is helping me distinguish strong guidance from permanent teacher control. The aim is not for teachers to withdraw, but for their support to change as learners become more capable of making decisions for themselves.

Popular music and independent practice

Popular music education introduces further possibilities through meaningful repertoire choice, learning by ear, experimentation and participation in musical decisions.

Green, McPhail and more recent research on self-regulated instrumental learning suggest that these practices can encourage initiative and ownership. However, choice alone is not enough. Learners also need strategies for planning, monitoring and sustaining their practice.

The challenge is therefore to combine freedom with usable structure.

Where this reading has brought me

I currently understand self-discipline as the learner’s developing capacity to organise and sustain purposeful learning over time by regulating attention, effort and motivation and by using increasingly self-endorsed strategies and routines, particularly beyond immediate supervision.

Teaching self-discipline may therefore involve movement between three forms of learning:

teacher-organised → jointly organised → increasingly learner-organised

This movement is not linear, and independence does not mean learning without support. The teacher may provide more or less structure depending on the learner, the task and the moment.

My next step is to investigate how teachers and learners understand and negotiate this movement in everyday one-to-one popular music instrument lessons.