Deliberate Practice

Every day, I practice driving. To and from work equals almost an hour. Sometimes I even put in massive bouts of practice and drive a solid four hours. So why aren’t I a world rally driving champion?

The answer is that my practice has not done anything at all to improve my performance at driving. This is nothing to do with the time spent: as noted, I’ve spent a lot of time doing it. However, my practice has not been deliberate practice. In any complex activity, whether it is physically or mentally demanding, improvement can only come from deliberate practice. Sheer time is not enough; in fact, this is often the point people miss when talking about the world-famous '10, 000 hours of practice to become an expert’ trope. This isn’t wrong, but we need to expand on what the practice part means, and how we are attempting to enshrine the ideals of deliberate practice in our lesson planning and delivery.

Deliberate practice should lead to tangible improvements in the skill being practiced. Its key features include:

·         Feedback on performance

·         A distinct lack of automaticity

·         Practice is spaced, or interrupted on purpose

·         It is not too easy or too hard

·         Total focus on the practice

In the Nova Science Faculty, we’ve been working hard on making changes to how students practice scientific skills, and knowledge recall, in our lessons. We want to put a great distance between our practice and how ‘we’ve always done it.’ For instance, when teaching the GCSE chemistry skill of calculating relative formula mass, my approach used to be: teach the big idea, model one or two examples, students practice by completing about 30 of these calculations. Probably, most students got them all correct. We’ve rejected this approach as allowing automaticity. Once you’ve correctly done 2 or 3 of these calculations, the process becomes automatic, so students stop improving. So, the lesson outline has become more like this:

Starter: students complete a low-stakes quiz on prior learning, some of which will be relevant to the lesson’s material, some of which will involve recall of material learned many moons ago.

Main: the teaching of new knowledge and modelling of new skills takes place.

Practice session: Students are quizzed on the knowledge taught this lesson (cement the background); they solve a problem like that which was modelled; they solve a problem for topic of last lesson; solve a problem tackled in lesson last biology/chemistry/physics topic (as appropriate); complete a “show that” problem for this lesson’s topic; complete a combined, applied problem.

Plenary: students are given an assessment task on last lesson.

This approach to plenaries often causes a sharp intake of breath. Thankfully, gone are the days when we were expected to show learning every 20 minutes; replaced by the very sensible recognition that deep learning takes time, takes recap and recall, and any gains shown in 20 minutes are unlikely to still be there 2 years later without any further attention. So, let’s break the discrete nature of lessons and help students recognise that studying something for a lesson does not a permanent memory make. We teachers often make this assumption: how often do we find ourselves saying or thinking: ‘but we only did this last week!’ We fail to promote long-term retention of knowledge and skills unless we accept and work with the lessons of cognitive science and psychology – it takes multiple repetitions to allow us to remember the majority of a body of knowledge, and those repetitions should be spaced out.

The simplest way to space out learning and practice is to interleave it, which means we come back to previously taught material for practice on it at intervals. We can even set up our curriculum like this – an idea which is given concrete form in the blog post on curriculum design. The practice is interleaved in the model above, by expecting students to complete tasks based on learning from a while ago, rather than automatically reproducing what they’ve just heard in your lovely explanation. I could teach any of you how to calculate relative formula mass in five minutes, and you could get 30 questions right – but this isn’t the same as recalling and applying this skill in your GCSE exam! You need interruptions, literally a chance to forget, to make memories stronger. This is why a series of questions of similar style is not very helpful, and why practice of that lesson’s skill should be mixed up with practice of previously taught material.

The difficulty aspect is one we’ll come back to in another post: How hard should my work be? Furthermore, we’ve made some significant changes to our feedback policy, in an effort to increase the impact of our feedback while moving away from compliance marking and feedback. More on this aspect in a future blog