As laid out in part 1, one of the core components of my school’s curriculum is teaching kids how to learn. One of the pillars of this is teaching kids how to use deliberate practice.
In this post I will lay out my plan for developing a deliberate practice curriculum. I’ll come back and add notes and links as I work through this. Here’s what’s on tap:
Background on what deliberate practice entails
The challenge of developing a deliberate practice curriculum
My plan of attack
Background on Deliberate Practice
Anders Ericsson is the godfather of the study of elite performance across a number of fields. His book, Peak, covers his findings. He found that regardless of the field - music, ballet, or any type of sport - that the training of elite performers follows a similar set of principles, which he described as “deliberate practice”.
Here are the five components of deliberate practice:
1. The field you are practicing within (say music or art) is developed enough that effective training techniques are established. There are teachers or coaches who know how to develop expert performance.
2. The training is broken up into specific goals that target one aspect of performance. The coach designs these smaller goals and how they tier up to larger goal. Later training builds on these skills - this step-by-step improvement leads to expert performance.
3. Deliberate practice pushes you outside your comfort zone. It demands extreme effort and is not enjoyable. It requires your full attention and is not simply following a coach’s instructions. It is “deliberate” in the sense that you are aware of the goal you’re trying to reach and adjust your practice to achieve it.
4. There is a feedback loop so that you modify your efforts - early on this comes from the coach, later on, the student can self-monitor.
5. Deliberate practice is about building the “mental representations” that experts have. These are the ways that experts can process a lot of information very quickly. London taxi drivers are experts at navigating the city - they do this through mental maps of the city - that is their “‘mental representation”. A professional baseball player has built up mental representations so that he can quickly decipher what type of pitch is being thrown - the position of the hand and arm, the spin of the ball, etc.. Developing these mental representations are the key to expert performance.
The Challenge of Developing Deliberate Practice
Here’s the problem - many of the areas where we’d like to radically improve our skills don’t fit component #1 above. Deliberate practice can only be easily engaged when the field has the following:
Expert performance is easy to identify. Competitive sports are the most simple - there is a score or time that identifies who is best. Other fields, such as music or ballet, have clear indicators of expertise.
The field is old enough to have examined these expert performers, figured out how they did it, and then developed and refined the training techniques.
There are coaches or teachers available who understand these training techniques and the principles of deliberate practice.
Ericsson sums it up well:
As defined, deliberate practice is a very specialized form of practice. You need a teacher or coach who assigns practice techniques designed to help you improve on very specific skills. That teacher or coach must draw from a highly developed body of knowledge about the best way to teach these skills. And the field itself must have a highly developed set of skills that are available to be taught. There are relatively few fields—musical performance, chess, ballet, gymnastics, and the rest of the usual suspects—in which all of these things are true and it is possible to engage in deliberate practice in the strictest sense.
For most fields, you fall back to what Ericsson calls “purposeful practice”. You still bust your ass, but you don’t have the blueprint to follow from expert performers who have gone before you. You’re on your own and likely to waste a lot of time doing the wrong things in the wrong order.
Here’s Ericsson’s advice:
This is the basic blueprint for getting better in any pursuit: get as close to deliberate practice as you can. If you’re in a field where deliberate practice is an option, you should take that option. If not, apply the principles of deliberate practice as much as possible. In practice this often boils down to purposeful practice with a few extra steps: first, identify the expert performers, then figure out what they do that makes them so good, then come up with training techniques that allow you to do it, too.
Back to my school. I want kids to pursue what interests them - whether it’s a field that has deliberate practice or not. I also want to teach them how to develop a deliberate practice approach when one is not easily found. How can I do that? Read on.
Developing a Deliberate practice curriculum
As I progress through this plan I will link to updates on each step.
The Goal:
Have students experience the gains from deliberate practice in a field that interests them.
Have students learn how to develop a deliberate practice approach when one is not readily available.
Challenges:
You’ve never done deliberate practice yourself! How can you coach others to do it? Are you sure it works for kids?
If the field does have a deliberate practice regimen, how will you find and pay for the coaches?
If the field does NOT have a deliberate practice regimen, how will you help students develop a plan and then get the coaching feedback they need?
Plan of attack:
Do deliberate practice yourself in a field that has an established deliberate practice regimen.
Identify a skill and find a coach who fits the deliberate practice mindset. See post on how I did this.
Engage in deliberate practice long enough (6 months?) to master the approach. Follow my deliberate practice experiment log.
Take that experience and create deliberate practice plans for fields that do not have a deliberate practice regimen.
Review how others have approached this problem. I know that Cal Newport and Scott Young have material on this in their Top Performer course. Who else has tackled this?
Build a deliberate practice plan for yourself in a field that does not have an established practice.
Build out an approach to develop practice plans for a kid.
Take it to the kids!
Have one or more kids try out deliberate practice, first in a field with a well-developed deliberate practice regimen.
Then in a field without a deliberate practice regimen.
Iterate and improve.
background on My School project
This post is part of a series on developing a new type of school. Click to see the other posts on this school project. If this is new to you, I’d suggest starting with the vision for the school. If you’d like to get notified of new posts, sign up below.