Guided practice shows students the correct procedures, significance and relevance of a learning task. Overviews, outlines and analogies help students to organize learning material and to retain what was learned. It is imperative that students understand the learning task before they leave their lesson. The teacher should work on the newly assigned material with the students until they can play it. Then the students are left to reinforce the newly attained skill at home.
Practice begins to pay dividends only when students have information about how well they are doing.
Practicing without feedback is of little value, especially when new skills are being learned. Feedback from teachers shapes behaviors, serving as a guide and a motivator to students. Teachers may take two different approaches. First, they may positively reinforce those aspects of the performance that were exemplary by mentioning them, while attempting to negatively reinforce other aspects by not mentioning them. But this is a particularly dangerous approach with inexperienced students, since it may lead to misunderstanding.