management
Again and again and again
Learning is easy, it’s the practice that’s the hard part Richard Naish L
earning how to do something is just the start. Learning how to do it well requires a lot of practice. Yet we tend to avoid practice since it conjures up
images of endless, dull, repetitive exercises. Could we be doing it wrong?
Making a joke about something is one way to avoid
doing it. Like this one: A tourist jumps into a cab in New York and asks the driver how to get to Carnegie Hall; the driver replies: ‘Practise, practise, practise.’ Yet some jokes make a telling point about
practice. Take this one: A spectator watches a golfer shoot a hole in one and says: ‘Can you do that again?’ So the golfer tees off again, the ball flies into the air and drops into the next hole. ‘Wow,’ exclaims the spectator, ‘that was lucky.’ The golfer replies: ‘I find the more I practise, the luckier I get.’ To become a true master or expert, psychologist K
Anders Ericsson said that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice were needed over 10 years. This runs contrary to the general view that mastery can be achieved only if through some innate gift for the skill or subject. However, the level of motivation and dedication needed for three hours of practice every day for 10 years appears to be beyond most of us mere mortals. As indeed Ericsson acknowledged: “The commitment to deliberate practice distinguishes the expert performer from the vast majority of children and adults, who seem to have remarkable difficulty meeting the much lower demands on practice in schools, adult education, and in physical exercise programmes.” OK, it’s a fair cop, but is there a shortcut? Usually the 10,000 number dwarfs the other key part of his research – that it must be deliberate practice. Many of us practise in a sub-optimal way, or worst of all do ‘mindless practice’ – just doing something over and over again without thinking. Like repeatedly going through that presentation you have to give; if you’re not careful, maybe even going faster every time until you can say it off-pat. The trouble is, you may also have some less good parts to your presentation. Without any feedback, you can end up
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A tourist jumps into a cab in New York and asks the driver how to get to Carnegie Hall; the driver replies: ‘Practise, practise, practise’
practising to include those less good bits too. This kind of practice can also make you less confident; it reinforces your belief that you can never give a presentation without notes and without rehearsing it thoroughly first. It is also very dull for you. Deliberate practice is more mindful, systematic and structured than other types of practice. You need to monitor your performance, continually reviewing how well you are doing. If something goes wrong, don’t get mad but analyse what went wrong, why it happened and how you can do it differently. I was taught juggling by a learning guru and when we dropped a ball he got us to follow this speech pattern: “How interesting, the ball fell. Why that happened is because... so when I do X, Y happens. OK, I’ll try this now.”
This reflective and analytical form of practice is
what Roger Shank called indexing. He said: “A learner is interested in acquiring sufficient cases such that he can learn to detect nuances. He wants to be in a position to compare and contrast various experiences. To do this, he needs to have had those experiences, and he needs to have properly labelled those experiences. This labelling process is what we refer to as indexing.” Some may also call it “tagging”. The learner must also be open to different
strategies of learning. If one strategy is not working, you need to switch to a different one. If that new strategy is a bit better but not as good as you hoped, refine it and see if that makes a difference. Take exam revision. Without any guidance, some students may revise by summarising their class notes into a neater version or by going through the relevant textbook, highlighting key paragraphs with coloured highlighters. Most exam technique experts would say that this is a visually pleasing but useless form of practice. They would suggest that a more deliberate practice method would be to get hold of a large
number of past exam papers, do one question under exam conditions in the relevant time allowed, then mark your answer using a model answer, referring back to your class notes or textbook for anything you don’t understand. Then do it again… and again. The literature on learning is generally agreed that there are four steps to becoming skilled at something in the shortest amount of time: l You need to be motivated to learn it. l Any teaching you have must take account of what you know already.
l You need to get feedback on how well you are doing at it.
l You need to practise it. E-learning content does reasonably well at the first three steps but it does not always fully address the ‘need to practise’ step. We assume learners will practise the content offline. However, we can help with offline practice guidance by providing memory- joggers and encouraging the learner to use a learning journal to record their practice and the learning strategies that work for them.
Richard Naish is a learning consultant
@richardnaish
For Ericsson’s 10,000 hours over 10 years rule – and much more – see The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance in Clemens Psychological Review, Vol 100 (3), Jul 1993, 363-406. You can read it at
http://tinyurl.com/EricssonRule You’ll find Roger C Schank’s observations in What
We Learn When We Learn by Doing (1995), Technical Report No. 60, Northwestern University, Institute for Learning Sciences. You can read it at http://tinyurl. com/ShankIndexing
e.learning age october 2013
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