When growing-up I spent hours and hours in parks and
playgrounds trying to hone my basketball skills. During those hours and years, my
peers and I came to believe that some kids had more talent for basketball than
did others. Better players seemed to be able to practice less, yet still excel,
earning a spot on the coveted high school basketball team for which 100s tried
out. I’m not sure whether I had talent for basketball or not, but I certainly
practiced as much as I could to develop the skills I needed to make the team.
But, in retrospect, I now wonder why I was not better; given the time I spent
practicing? Did I only have a limited amount of talent for the game, or was I
not practicing the right things in the right way? Now, a new book entitled PEAK: Secrets from the New Science of
Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool[1]
provides answers to my questions.
Over decades of study, Ericsson has found that better
performers in a domain typically are made,
rather than born. His research that
attempts to explain how expertise across an array of domains is acquired shows
that experts typically practice a great deal more than others who are less
proficient. Yet, his critical observation is that it is not just the absolute
number of practice hours in which they engage that matters, but the way those
hours are structured. He used the term deliberate
practice, to differentiate it from traditional
practice to distinguish what was special about what they did during practice.
In contrast to how I honed my basketball skills, which entailed simply
repeating over and over again what I did well, deliberate practice requires learners to acquire skills that more
advanced performers are able to execute well, and typically are on the outer
boundary of what they are able to do. In essence, they are constantly pushing their envelop by acquiring more
advanced capabilities, rather than simply repeating over and over again what
they already are able to do well. In PEAK,
Ericsson and Pool point out that the reason why so many recreational players across
sports appear to hit performance plateaus, even after years and years or
participation, is because they rarely venture beyond their comfort zones, as
they simply do the same things over and over again. They state:
The sorts of activities that most
people consider "practice" are generally not very helpful in
improving one's performance. A golfer gets in at least eighteen holes every
week and tries to hit a bucket of balls at the driving range beforehand. A
pianist plays the same exercises over and over until they are completely
automatic. A teacher has been teaching the same material in the same way for
twenty years, thinking that practice must eventually make perfect. None of
these people are likely to see much improvement despite all that
"practice."
So what is deliberate
practice? For practice to be maximally effective, Ericsson and Pool assert
that it should have the following qualities:
1.
It is a specialized--and particularly
effective--form of purposeful practice where an experienced coach designs the
training exercises and monitors a player’s progress, modifying the training as
necessary to keep the player progressing steadily. A critical point is that the
coach is able to assess the strengths/weaknesses of her player, understand the
knowledge and skills that she needs to acquire to move to the next level, and
be able to design and run practice sessions in which players practice these
things.
2.
Such sessions require a great deal of effort
on the player’s part, as they typically focus on attempting to execute skills
on the edge of their comfort zone. If the skills practiced seem easy or
executed automatically, probably not much new learning is occurring.
3.
Effective practice requires precise feedback—a
player needs to know what he is doing wrong so that he can figure out ways to
make corrections. The resulting progress comes as a series of baby steps, none
very impressive on its own, but they can add up to performing quite complex
skills in a very expeditious manner.
4.
The focus should be on the acquisition
of skills, with knowledge of the domain being a by-product of learning,
rather than it’s main focus. That is to say, no one ever learned to become a
great basketball player, a great violinist, a great surgeon, or a great coach
by reading how to do these things from a book, or by being lectured to about
them.
5.
With regard to knowledge, Ericsson’s
focus is on the creation of mental representations that develop during
practice. These are multifaceted representations of the skills to be executed,
as well as the real world situations in which they should be deployed.
Essentially, what is asserted here is that advanced skills must have internal
mental representations, which help both in their execution, and in the
assessment process, which compares what was done to what was attempted. By
having such a representation, internal feedback is meaningful, which entails comparing
what was attempted with what actually happened. Mental representations develop
over time, and make it possible to execute a skill with greater and greater precision.
6.
As one can surmise, a critical factor in
deliberate practice is having the motivation to continue doing activities that
are challenging, and often frustrating because of a lack of success (at least
at the beginning). Ericsson asserts: When a student is first learning a skill,
it is critical to limit their practice time to 15-20 minutes per day so they
are able to concentrate fully and make observable improvements. Ericsson has
found that experts practice multiple times each day for shorter sessions. This
allows them to allocate full concentration and effort to improving on those
things that they do not do very well.
Summary
A book such as
PEAK is critical for a program such as Project Coach, as one of our core
goals is to develop coaches who can help their players improve their skills at
a variety of sports. Of course, this is not our only objective. We also want
kids to have fun engaging in a variety of physical activities, while learning
to be good teammates and sports persons. Yet, the deliberate practice
approach also is a means to teaching youth what it takes to become good at
something, whether it be sports, as a student in school, or as a community
leader.
Whatever the
domain, the formula of deliberate practice entails identifying what one does
well, and what one needs to do better, and then to design activities that help one
to overcome weaknesses. This takes time, and the crafting of practices in a deliberate
manner, that are guided by a coach or teacher who can inspire an individual
to keep working at difficult tasks. Feedback is critical to motivating individuals
and helping them to understand where they are at, where they need to go, and
how to get there. While these ideas many not be very complex, being able to
operationalize them is. Developing
coaches who can help their players to improve, while making practices fun and
rewarding also entails deliberate practice. For a quick and snappy video about deliberate practice click here.
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