Delibrate Practice. Lesson 12

 

In prior lessons we learned some of the key principles of memorization:

·       Lesson 1: encoding, consolidation, retrieval, reconsolidation

·       Lesson 2: getting motivated

·       Lesson 3: paying attention

·       Lesson 8: making associations

Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash

We will learn how to implement these principles in this lesson on Deliberate Practice. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues came up with the idea of deliberate practice during the 1990s, based on their study of musicians. The researchers saw that deliberate practice requires considerable time investment, but it is more than just repeating what you are trying to master. It is not “drill and kill.” It is practice in which you:

·       Have a clear long-term objective in mind.

·       Plan what you need to do in detail.

·       Monitor how you executed the plan, with attention to specific details.

·       Noticing what to avoid and what to repeat in the future.

·       Apply corrective feedback to adjust the plan if needed and remind yourself what you need to do different next time.

·       Affirm and reward yourself for progress.

·       Get coaching from an outside source, like a teacher.

·       Keep raising the standards for acceptable performance. 

When I transitioned from a D student in the 4^th grade to an A student in the 7^th grade, I think the change was made possible through deliberate practice. Though I did not understand much about deliberate practice, I did intuitively use some elements of it. Penmanship class was likely the turning point, because deliberate practice is baked into the learning. When I looked a drawing of a cursive “a” and tried to duplicate it, the results were tangible and immediate. I had to think about where my drawing missed the mark and what I needed to do to make it look better. I had to keep repeating the process until what I produced looked like the instructional example. Aside from the utility of learning cursive, this may be the most beneficial example of teaching penmanship in school. Few schools do that these days.

 

Until you have mastered the learning goal, deliberate practice is a cyclic process that is repeated again and again. Most everyone has had this kind of learning experience at some point, usually when they are trying to perfect some kind of physical action. If you were in school band, for example, you used deliberate practice to memorize sheet music and master your instrument. If you were in a sport, you used deliberate practice in perfecting the movement skill sets.

If you did not have these experiences, here is one you can try right now: To perfect learning how to stand on one foot in a yoga pose, you could just do it repeatedly without thinking about what you have to do to make it work. Try it. You will see that does not work well. Now try it again, focusing on a visual spot far away and think about what muscles in your foot you have to activate to keep you balanced. These deliberate tactics will train you much faster to master this task.

Deliberate practice is not limited to physical movements. It is equally applicable to mastering school work. The practice objective might likely be to perform better on exams or to develop competence you know will be required in later courses.

Study sessions need to be strategic. That is, at the time you are studying, you need to think about what you need to do to make your memorization better. You may need to pump up your motivation level. You will need focus and self-discipline to work outside your comfort zone. Perhaps you need to invent better mnemonics. You need to think about how often to repeat self-testing forced recall. You need to contrive ways to apply what you are trying to learn. You need to take practice quizzes and solve related problems. You need a way to check on the completeness of your understanding. You need to have a way to check on the correctness of your recall and establish criteria for satisfactory mastery.

Next Lesson:

Especially difficult learning tasks

Sources:

Clear, James  (n.d.) Deliberate practice and how to use it. https://jamesclear.com/deliberate-practice-theory

Keep, Ben (n.d.) Deliberate practice in the classroom. The Learning Curve. https://www.the-learning-agency-lab.com/the-learning-curve/deliberate-practice-in-the-classroom

On Becoming More Human: The Two Human Distinctions

To become more human, it seems we must first recognize what is distinctive about being human. Basic biology is about the same in all higher animals and humans. So for distinctiveness we must look to mental and behavioral functions. It seems that only two mental characteristics are distinctively human. These are commonly referred to as constructed imagined scenarios and deliberate practice.

The clarification of human scenario building became evident from the research of Thomas Suddendorf at the University of Queensland. He challenged the usual claim that humans are distinct because of their capacity for “speech, fire, agriculture, writing, tools, and large-scale cooperation.” Actually, certain animal species can perform one or more of these activities in their own way. As examples, Suddendorf reminds us that "If you set the bar low, you can conclude that parrots can speak, ants have agriculture, crows make tools, and bees cooperate on a large scale." What sets people apart from others in the animal kingdom is that humans have imagination that enables them to develop scenarios and link other scenario-building minds. Such use of creative imagination, he says, allows humans to turn animal communication ”into open-ended human language, memory into mental time travel, social cognition into theory of mind, problem solving into abstract reasoning, social traditions into cumulative culture, and empathy into morality."

Suddendorf concedes that some animals, like great apes, seem to have some scenario-building capability. But human capability explodes after about age 2, while this does not happen in great apes. Age 2 is about when humans show signs of conscious self-awareness, which may be the key determinate for scenario-building capability.

We should not overlook the creativity element of scenario-building. Creativity has certainly been central to cultural advancement. Animal cultures, if they evolve at all, mostly seem to arise from trial-and-error learning.

A second uniquely human feature is captured in the term "deliberate practice." This term was apparently first coined in 1993 by Florida State University professor, K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues, as a result of observing the development of expertise by budding musicians. Their report has been cited an astounding 10,000 times according to Google Scholar. Key principles include the importance of purposeful learning involving individualized instruction and a focus on identifying goals and methods for achieving musical mastery. The phenomenon has since been named "structured practice" to capture the essential feature of systematic growth of expertise. I take the liberty of adding to the original ideas about deliberate practice by identifying several central elements for success of deliberate practice:

·       Motivation to develop expertise,

·       A specific learning regimen,

·       Learner control,

·       Knowledge on how to improve,

·       Time on task,

·       Repetition that features explicit awareness of how well mastery develops,

·       Immediate performance feedback,

·       Analysis of corrective feedback needed,

·       Successive approximations of feedback correction and attendant positive reinforcement of improvement,

·       Repetition that incorporates corrections.

Though Erickson originally claimed that a challenging expert teacher or coach is needed, the learner need not have direct supervision of a teacher, as long as there is an external source of information on the nature of the expertise, advice on how to develop it, and an objective metric for the extent of growth in expertise. Obviously, deliberate practice is more efficient when performed under the guidance of an expert coach or teacher.

Obviously, deliberate practice is most needed for development of specific skills, as in sports, music, and competitive games like chess. My own experience with use of mnemonics suggests a role for deliberate practice in the ability to memorize. Also relevant to the effectiveness of deliberate practice are the memory principles of focused attention, conditions supporting memory consolidation, and spacing of practice session. Other aspects of learning experience can be a kind of deliberate practice that promotes learning sets and a learning-how-to-learn expertise.

So, if we want to become more human, it seems necessary to develop our capacity for creativity and scenario building and for deliberate practice. Numerous writings, including my own, suggest ways to become more creative. Deliberate practice is achieved by doing it, especially in a way that promotes remembering what the practice is teaching you. As described on my web site (WRKlemm.com), my four books on memory seem to cover the breadth of memory theory and application.

Sources:

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., and Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychol. Rev. 100, 363–406. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.87.3.215

Ericsson, K. Anders, and Harwell, Kyle W. (2019), Deliberate practice and proposed limits on the effects of practice on the acquisition of expert performance: Why the original definition matters and recommendations for future research. Front. Psychol., 25 October 2019, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02396

Klemm, W. R. (2018). Developing a strategic and systematic idea creation and management system. International Journal of Creativity and Problem Solving. 28(1), 7-26.

Klemm, W. R. (2017). Leadership and creativity, p. 263-296. In Leadership Today, edited by Joan Marques and Satinder Dhiman. New York: Springer.

Klemm, W. R. (2017). Reason and creativity require free will. Chapter 2, in Free Will: Interpretations, Implementations and Assessments  In Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science.

Klemm, W. R. (1990). Leadership: creativity and innovation, p. 426-439. Concepts for Air Force Leadership, 2nd Ed. Air University, Maxwell AFB, Ala. Available on-line at the Air War College website, http://www.au.af.mil/AU/AWC/AWCGATE/au-24/au24-401.htm. (Used as a text in several military academies for multiple years).

Suddendorf, Thomas (2013). The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals. New York, NY, United States: Basic Books).