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Thanks to recent, hugely popular books about the development of expertise, the term deliberate practice is coming into common usage as the kind of practice that produces expertise.
Deliberate practice requires careful reflection on what worked and what didn’t work. A budding concert pianist may practice a particularly troublesome passage listening for places where his fingers do not flow smoothly. A chess student may spend hours analyzing one move of a world-championship chess match trying to see what the grandmasters saw. This kind of practice demands time for reflection and intense concentration, so intense that it is difficult to sustain for longer than 3 hours per day.
As I have learned more about deliberate practice, I often think about its lessons for the educational system. And they are not happy ones.
In the grade-school years, deliberate practice is already hard to find. My strongest memory from fifth-grade mathematics is pages and pages of tedious three-digit-by-three-digit multiplication problems. Day after day! It is, alas, the kind of rote practice that I have done for chess: simply playing lots of games.
In a classic paper, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in Chess Expertise,” Neil Charness and colleagues studied the effect on chess rating of different types of chess practice, including total hours of serious study (i.e., deliberate practice) and total hours of tournament play (their Table 3). The effect of deliberate practice far outweighed the effect of tournament play. Not surprisingly, my chess skill today is only slightly higher than it was nearly 40 years ago when I learned to play chess.
In college, at least in science subjects, the situation is hardly better. As an undergraduate physics student, one often takes four or five science or mathematics courses per semester. Each course assigns a set of problems every week, each set taking about 6 to 8 hours. Thus, solving lots of physics problems is how one spends most weekday evenings, many sessions lasting late into the night; in my time the physics majors had keys to the physics library, where we would order pizza to fuel the weary problem-solving neurons, and I remember seeing many sunrises from the windows of the library.
Those problem-set hours total almost a whole other working week laid on top of the other academic tasks of attending lectures and reading notes. In college as in grade school, where is the time for deliberate practice?
[The notes were mostly a copy, with my own mistakes added, of what the professor wrote on the board, which was usually a copy of the textbook (with perhaps fewer mistakes added). The Gutenberg method of teaching, which takes account of the invention of the printing press, is little used.]
Is it any wonder that, just as I can play chess but have little insight into how the game works, science and engineering students graduate able to “work hard” but cannot solve problems expertly and creatively? What would an educational system look like that took seriously the principles of deliberate practice?
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By definition, deliberate practice CANNOT be imposed on children through compulsory schooling.
2 inputs:
A close friend of mine knows a famous sportsman who was at the top of his sport in the early 2000′s. He was the best example of his kind at “deliberate practice” before we knew the words. But – not at all a rounded person.
A headmistress commenting on 2 education systems, 1 heavily based on accumulating KNOWLEDGE (“wrote” learning) and 1 on accumulating SKILLS said that a combination was the key to better outcomes – albeit leaning towards skills not knowledge.
Applying these to Education: you need to give people the tools to succeed, and deliberate practice could help in both. However, in my opinion, the real ability to “think out of the box”, so important in entrepreneurship is something that we are all born with but some education systems more than others are highly effective in eliminating! And deliberate practice is not relevant here.
Do the 10,000 matter if they’re not deliberate?
Or what % of them need to be?
“What would an educational system look like that took seriously the principles of deliberate practice?”
I went to school in the 1950s and 60s and have a daughter who went through the school system in the UK and Australia mainly through the 1990s and a son who is home educated. I don’t hesitate to suggest that only self-motivated learners with the freedom to follow their own passions take seriously the principles of deliberate practice and that you won’t find it taken seriously nor will you ever find it taken seriously, other than perhaps in isolated or sporadic cases, in any schooling *system* (I’m assuming when you write that “education” fails to produce expertise you mean “schooling” – thinking that schooling and education are the same thing seems to be a very common error in our modern world).
This extends beyond students; teachers suffer the same thing. I’ve had teacher who used slides and quizzes/exams from the publisher, so that pre-made material was the bulk of the lesson plan.
What happens when those teachers get really inquisitive, really sharp students? The teachers can’t keep up with the questions. Those students get bored.
Deliberate practice I think would require a “deliberate focus,” meaning a focus that goes beyond the bottom line–the passing grade. It’s a cultural attitude: Give a rubric so students know what amount of effort would be “good enough,” that meets a quota.
But creativity should be channeled by entrepreneurial endeavors that, by nature, require the creative application of knowledge. It’s not that education doesn’t produce expertise, because education can teach us WHERE to look for what we might need, but students don’t seem to know what creative application means. They should be given problems to solve, not chapters to read; they’ll figure out which chapters to read once they determine (on their own) how to go about the solution.
@moids
Also, creative application can be observed (usually) from one’s portfolio or body of work; this creativity is what those technical and logic puzzles are for at the Facebook, Google, Microsoft, et. al interviews.
Why didn’t you bother to define “Deliberate Practice” in the article? Come on.
My wife was a high school teacher who challenged students to be creative and develop critical thought. She spent weekends and weeknights creating worksheets, excersices and projects to engage students. She gets paid the same (less if depending on years of service) as a teacher who asks students to read the textbook and test them on what they read.
Standardised testing is the death of learning
Teachers are known to deploy classroom scripts — architected around the standardized test. (A classic case of misaligned incentives, in my view.) This means that pedagogical techniques, and reinforcement methods, promote students’ ability to memorize definitions, formulas, facts, and processes. They do not, however, teach students the ability to integrate facts with thoughtful conclusions or insights.