Dr. Kittie Verdolini Abbott on why your instructions may be blocking learning — and the four-word method she uses instead.

What if the most useful thing you did in a lesson was stop talking? Dr. Kittie Verdolini Abbott, whose doctoral work was in perceptual motor learning, walks you through the research: declarative versus procedural memory, why an external focus of attention beats biomechanical instruction, and what her students' studies found when singers attended to room sound versus facial vibration. You'll hear the laws of practice — frequent versus infrequent feedback, concurrent versus terminal feedback, part versus whole, variable practice — and one study's unnerving count of how often teachers interrupt a singing student. Then watch her poem, scan-gel-show-tell-negative practice, applied live to a musical theater singer.