How to do deliberate practice

http://thetalentcode.com/2011/05/31/a-gauge-for-measuring-effective-practice/

by cwb • 15 years ago

87 34 15 years ago

It's interesting that each of those practice scenarios he recommends are fairly dangerous from the point of view of the ego. I would be very apprehensive about learning the multiplication tables in a public fashion.

wccrawford3• 15 years ago

All education works best when customized for the learner. In your case (and mine!) you prefer to learn without the possibility that someone will ridicule you for making a mistake. Many people actually learn faster/better when the threat of ridicule is on the table, though.

Assigning homework actually has the same effect as the in-class quiz, since it forces each student to reach in the same way and would be another example.

rhizome• 15 years ago

Many people actually learn faster/better when the threat of ridicule is on the table, though.

Really? How many?

cwb2• 15 years ago

The teacher would need to try and make the students understand that it is all right -- scrap that, necessary -- to fail when you learn. Learning to perform surgery is not the same thing as performing it.

Out of curiosity, how do you think it would affect your motivation to practice in private if you knew you would be tested in public?

GHFigs• 15 years ago

The irony is that most students had to be taught to abhor such failure in the first place.

wccrawford3• 15 years ago

I actually disagree with the 'play perfectly' example. It emphasizes the beginning of the practice and de-emphasizes the end. If playing the whole thing 20 times is boring, imagine how boring it is to play the beginning over and over until you get the whole thing perfect 5 times?

Guitar hero has a mode that lets you practice pieces of a song. You can practice each segment to perfection, then play the whole song. This targeted practice should be a lot more effective and still obey the idea of what he's saying.

I once had a teacher that took offense at the statement "Practice makes perfect." They always changed it to be "Perfect practice makes perfect." I think it's more in line with the article's meaning, too.

As another anecdote, I've been studying Japanese lately. Never before have I been so acutely aware that the only way to improve a skill is to use it. Reading English for me is -very- easy and enjoyable. Japanese started out extremely difficult, time-consuming and painful. A few years later, and I'm much better at it... But my listening skill (for Japanese) has hardly changed at all. Why? Because I almost never use it.

cwb2• 15 years ago

He does say "passage" to refer to a small part of a composition, not the whole thing. Your thinking is spot on though -- the length of the segment needs to be considered.

dbalatero• 15 years ago

You need to adjust the segment length to reflect your current success/failure. Either that, or you need to slow down. I'm viewing this from a musician's perspective, but those are the two basic tools in my practice toolbox:

1) slow down until comfortable 2) isolate the thing that is giving you the actual trouble, and fix that before attempting the bigger challenge

The thing to avoid is practicing mistakes. These two basic principles attempt to minimize that.

Jabbles• 15 years ago

I agree.

Principal Skinner: Here's a whole box of unsealed envelopes for the PTA!

Bart: You're making me lick envelopes?

P.S.: Oh, licking envelopes can be fun! All you have to do is make a game of it.

Bart: What kind of game?

P.S.: Well, for example, you could see how many you could lick in an hour, then try to break that record.

Bart: Sounds like a pretty crappy game to me.

P.S.: Yes, well... Get started.

What works for one child/person may not for any other. Whilst we've seen game-ification take off for many activities, it doesn't mean it's the only way to learn things. If the core activity isn't enjoyable, building a game around it may only encourage someone temporarily.

jonprins• 15 years ago

Another problem with stopping and restarting with every mistake, is you learn to stop and restart when you make a mistake.

This makes it really, really awful if you're playing a recital and slip up just a tiny bit (obviously, you should practice it so you don't slip up /at all/, but let's be realistic here. Even people studying to be performance majors make mistakes in their recitals) - your first instinct would be to start the passage over, which is the /last/ thing you want to be doing.

It also makes it nearly impossible to play with a group.

icegreentea• 15 years ago

Yeah. My experience with playing (long long ago), as well as while practicing wrestling moves is that you need to do a mix of isolated, and complete practice. The mix depends on your proficiency, length involved, complexity, and some other contextual stuff. I could tell when I practiced just isolated elements too much because then my transitions would be obvious. In fact, having that mix will increase your engagement (which was his original point anyways).

But in my experience, the 4th criteria is by far the most important. Not only is it more effective, it's a hell lot more enjoyable.

nandemo2• 15 years ago

> Another problem with stopping and restarting with every mistake, is you learn to stop and restart when you make a mistake.

The key is not making mistakes in the first place! Do slow practice on short passages. If you make a mistake then decrease the tempo (or play a shorter passage) until you can play it correctly. Repeat it until you can't do it wrong. Then increase the tempo.

http://www.public.asu.edu/~schuring/Oboe/practice.html

wccrawford3• 15 years ago

That's a good point, since the author was also making the point that practice should mirror the skill as closely as possible. In a real orchestra, if you make a mistake, you do NOT hesitate. You keep playing and hope not to make another. If all your practice has depended on being perfect, you have neglected a needed skill.

jamesbkel• 15 years ago

>Guitar hero has a mode that lets you practice pieces of a song. You can practice each segment to perfection, then play the whole song. This targeted practice should be a lot more effective and still obey the idea of what he's saying.

I guess maybe we understood him differently, because I thought that was the point he was getting at.

Regardless, I agree with the idea of "targeted practice" of each section. It's been awhile since I've done any serious piano playing, but my strategy for perfecting a piece was always to nail the final 4-8 bars 5x in a row. Then I would keep adding another 4-8 bars to the beginning of that and repeat the process until I could play the whole thing through.

I found working from the end to be much more effective than from the start. My guess is that it's less tedious since the new part is at the beginning, so if you're restarting after each mistake, you end up focusing on the new material instead of racing through the old boring material to get to the new stuff.

nandemo2• 15 years ago

> Guitar hero has a mode that lets you practice pieces of a song. You can practice each segment to perfection, then play the whole song. This targeted practice should be a lot more effective and still obey the idea of what he's saying.

That's exactly what he's saying: "a violin student trying to perfect a short, tough passage in a song". Passage, not the whole piece. To practice the whole piece, you divide it in overlapping passages and master each passage. It's "boring" but it works.

sayemm• 15 years ago

Here's a good piece by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson on Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice, he's the guy who's pretty much behind all this research on deliberate practice and the making of outliers - http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.ht...

nerfhammer• 15 years ago

Here's a whole book on the subject:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591842948/ref=as_li_tf_tl?...

spottiness4• 15 years ago

I read this book and although I enjoyed it and found it interesting, I think that the author undervalues the importance of innate talent. According to the author, almost everybody can become great at anything given the right motivation, hard-work, and coaching. I find this principle wrong, based on what I've heard experienced coaches say, and my own experience through 19 years of schooling. In other words, a lot of (non-scientific) evidence suggests that great performers have above average innate abilities in what they do. These abilities are common in the population but in no way general to most people. So, those born with the "extra" in a particular field, paired with great couches, family support, and an emotional fabric that keeps them focused for a long time, will have the chance of making it to the highest.

(I have a friend that thinks otherwise and I tell him: "Remember when you were in first grade, try to remember your classmates, what percentage of them could have become Nobel Prize winners in Physics given the right nurturing conditions?". According to the author of this book, almost all of them)

zarastralia2• 15 years ago

Something I recently discovered: the secret to deliberate practice is to consciously enjoy it by entering more deeply into the experience. This approach is the opposite of enforced drill. Thus, when you are bored and enjoyment starts to flag, you stop immediately (nothing is lost by this).

Enjoyment both motivates further practice and makes what you are trying to learn more memorable. For example, if you are memorising a phrase in a foreign language, you revel in the fruity sounds you are making and in the delicate dance your lips and teeth and tongue are performing; you marvel at the pattern of connections between the meaning of the phrase and other ideas you have learnt.

It goes against the grain because one of the legacies of schooling is the assumption that learning is difficult and painful. (Paradoxically, by continuing to believe this one makes it so.)

Travis• 15 years ago

Reminds me of the koan, "Wash the dishes when you are washing the dishes."

zarastralia2• 15 years ago

In my case, 'flip the cutlery before placing it in the dishwasher.'

But yeah. The problem isn't that learning is unenjoyable, but that we don't enjoy it enough.

bostonvaulter22• 15 years ago

This sounds like a great idea! I'll try to in incorporate it into my practice. I can also draw many interesting parallels between this and mindfullness.

te_platt• 15 years ago

For me the most important part deliberate practice losing all embarrassment about making mistakes. Practice should give a chance stumble at the edge of your ability and take chances you wouldn't in a live performance.

For more detail I highly recommend "The Perfect Wrong Note" by William Westney.

ChuckFrank• 15 years ago

Part of what these suggestion contains are the basis for the emerging field of game learning. While the wiki is surprisingly weak on the matter -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_based_learning -- the idea is that structured conditions of gaming/sports success can be applied to teaching and knowledge acquisition. Some of these ideas include:

Coached practicing / Competitive performance evaluation / Transparent Scores / Winning opportunities / Final Awards.

raju• 15 years ago

I have been thinking about this for a while now, and I am not quite sure how to apply it, to say learning a new (programming) language (I have been playing with Clojure for a while now but am nowhere near productive in it).

I guess the part that confuses me is the first step - "R stands for Reaching/Repeating" - How exactly would you apply this to learning a new language, framework, algorithm?

Folks here on HN - Any words of advice?

teach• 15 years ago

When I wanted to get better at Python, I started working through the problems at Project Euler[0], because they were novel and interesting. Also, many of them needed non-trivial optimizations to produce an answer in a reasonable amount of time.

After about 20-25 problems, I found myself reaching for the Python docs way less.

[0] http://projecteuler.net/

bostonvaulter22• 15 years ago

Similar to what teach said you could apply some of it by trying to code without using the docs as much as possible. But I agree that it's hard to "practice" programming, versus "doing" programming.

So much of programming is working with large complex systems that it isn't that amenable to small drilling techniques.

How to do deliberate practice

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