When observing high achievers, such as top musicians or scientists, or even the students that perform well above average, there is a single characteristic that is common to all of them. This is that all of them put a high and sustained effort on positive loops of practice, performance feedback and further practice to master specific skills.
This kind of practice is commonly referred as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is different from repeated practice of an activity, let’s say teaching, but instead it is the intentional intensive practice of specific components of that activity directed to improve performance. Continuing with the teaching example, a case of deliberate practice to improve a specific skill could be sustained practice in developing, implementing and perfecting questioning techniques to enhance and assess student understanding during classroom teaching.
The key characteristic of deliberate practice is deconstructing advanced expertise in small chunks of learning that create a cumulative intensive journey of practice, from where performance feedback can be gathered and used to continue improvement towards the development of expertise. In areas such as music education and sports we have a more clear understanding of how a journey of deliberate practice may look like. But deliberate practice to develop advanced expertise is present on any area of knowledge, from studying expert chefs, scientists, artist, chess masters and many other professions, we have solid evidence that deliberate practice is necessary to develop advanced expertise on any field (Anderss Ericcson, K.,2006). The question now is what is the structure of a journey of deliberate practice? and how can we implement it in our teaching practices?
The interesting part is that a journey of deliberate practice shares a lot of the characteristics of a learning journey to raise and maintain self-efficacy as described here. This is not a surprise, because top achievers reach an advanced level of expertise by maintaining a learning journey that keeps them motived even when confronting really difficult challenges. How do they do it? They design a learning journey that helps them to constantly raise their self efficacy while developing expertise.
From here it follows (see post about self-efficacy theory) that a journey of deliberate practice has to have a clear structure of cumulative goals and tasks to achieve those goals. The tasks are designed to develop expertise and could be divided in two main types. First are the tasks to teach efficiency, that is the tasks that provide the basic skills and procedural knowledge necessary to be able to confront problems that require higher level thinking skills. For instance, physics students have to develop an understanding of the different laws of physics and their corresponding formulas, and they should have an understanding of how those formulas and laws can be applied to specific problems. Second there are the tasks that teach students to think as an expert (see post about the characteristics of expertise), these can be referred as the tasks to develop adaptive expertise (Schwartz D., Tsang J., Blair K., 2016). Adaptive expertise tasks can be described in terms of the characteristic discussed in a previous post about what makes an expert an expert. That is tasks that help students to think in terms of the deep structure of problems (e.g the laws of physics involved) and not in terms of the familiar procedural processes (e.g. the formulas and methods used in similar problems). Another example are tasks that help students to apply existing knowledge in a new context that may appear unrelated to their current understanding, so that students can practice retrieval of knowledge outside the context where they learnt about it. A final example of tasks to develop adaptive expertise is tasks that help students to identify the limits of their current knowledge and that force them to find the way to the required knowledge and skills to complete the task.
Practice in most educational programmes is mainly focused on tasks to teach efficiency. And the kind of practice promoted is not as structured as a journey of deliberate practice as described above. In addition to this, tasks to teach adaptive expertise are rarely explicit in the learning journey of most programmes. As a consequence most professionals develop a minimum of expertise only after few years of professional practice. From here it follows the importance of developing structured learning journeys of deliberate practice that promote adaptive expertise in our educational programmes.
References:
- Anderss Ericcson, K. (2006). The influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance. Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, Ch. 38, (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- Ambrose S., Bridges M., DiPietro M., Lovett M., Norman M. (2010). How Learning Works 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint.
- National Research Council, 2000. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/9853.
- The University of British Columbia (2020). Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative. Viewed 16 November 2021. https://cwsei.ubc.ca/
- Schwartz D., Tsang J., Blair K. (2016). The ABC’s of How We Learn 26 Scientifically Proven Approaches, How they work and When to Use Them. W.W Norton & Company, New York, London.
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