I’m re-listening to “Peak” by Anders Ericsson (spelling may be off on that name) which is why I’m late to my Monday blogging. As with the article/book I’m reading on acquiring deep smarts from experts, this is part of my dive into how to get the most out of my apprenticeship/mentoring this year. School proper starts up next week.
If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend the book, if you are interested in mastery or even optimal learning, in any field. Ericsson has done a lot of groundbreaking research and this is his gift to the general public, a more comprehensible and quicker way to access the findings that he’s come across than cracking open an academic volume or paper. It’s very engaging reading too, I’d say.
I realize that I have, since I was very young, had a great fascination with masters, mastery. I always wanted to have some kind of mastery myself, but I didn’t know what I should devote that kind of time and energy too, and I didn’t know how to focus and discipline and motivate myself to do it. So this is a book I craved before I knew it existed.
I suppose when I decided to become a teacher, that was my answer to the question. Unfortunately, unlike sports or music, teaching is not something you can easily get a coach for. The gold standard for mastery is something Anders calls “deliberate practice.” Which involves a well established field of mastery, following a skilled coach who knows the steps necessary to achieve mastery. This exists for sports and music and dance and such, but not for most other fields. I wonder why. Perhaps it is more difficult to come up with objective measures of skill, like with sports, but they seem to have done so with music. Perhaps there isn’t enough competition and interest, for thousands of people to have tried their hands at being the very best. Teaching is not an Olympic sport. There are no world tours.
Perhaps deciding on the criteria to measure is more fraught with politics and opinion. Sports is clear: follow the rules, win or loose, score or miss. Music is less clear, but still much clearer: hit the notes at the right time or not. Though there is also an artistic element to it. Is it played with feeling, does it move you?
Various people have tried to come up with measures of success for teaching, and some seem pretty clear as well: how do the students perform on tests, on academics? Though some of the most important measures have been ignored, perhaps because they take more work to follow and measure: are the children happy? Do they go on to lead fulfilling lives? Are they successful, professionally, personally, ethically, spiritually?
Another element of fields where mastery is achieved is the practice required to get there involves immediate or very quick feedback. We need to know how we’re doing. If you only get that years later, when you see the children as adults, it’s too far away to be useful for your practice. Instead of improving day by day, it would be decade by decade.
Yet, there are master teachers. Teachers that get better results than others, teachers who’s classes are peaceful and focused. Teachers that students remember, that change the course of lives. Maybe not everybody’s life, but many.
I’m running out of time, so I’ll go to the point that is echoing loudest in my head from my reading (listening, technically, though I’m planning on going back through the book in physical form so I can notate it for later use, allowing me to get back to the most pragmatic or important morsels.)
Deliberate practice, or it’s next best cousin, purposeful practice, requires a few key elements, and one of them is going a bit outside your comfort zone, when you practice. This is one of the keys to why some people practice for years and never improve. This is key. In any field, physical, mental, spiritual, if you want improvement, you must continually go a bit outside your comfort zone, pushing yourself. That is the only way to stimulate adaptation and change, which is what is required to get better at something. If you keep jogging every day, the same amount, the same intensity, you will stay at the same level. Perhaps there will be an initial change, but then it will level off. If you stay in your comfort zone, you will stay where you are. You can’t improve past the initial quick gains, if that’s all your doing.
There are other important elements: you need feedback, on how your doing, regularly and quickly after doing it. Preferably immediately. You need specific goals. Large skills like playing tennis, are broken down into a bunch of micro skills: how to hold the racket, how to serve, how to anticipate and counter, how to put top spin on. And each of these needs to be looked at individually and worked on, when a weak point is identified.
If you want to be a master at something, you can. You really can. But it’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be fast. And you need to make sure you’re practicing in a way that is actually effective.
Given that, what would you like to master? A fun question.
OK, my time is up.
Isaac Out
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