The magic of Deliberate/Purposeful practice

 Another! (I am slowly but surely catching up to my blog backlog. How about that. Nice.)

This post is about something I am very passionate about: deliberate practice, as applied to helping professions. Normally, deliberate practice is about the science of mastery, and is applied to fields like professional music or sports (both physical and mental, such as chess.) But the founder of the idea Anders Ericsson, asserts that it is relevant to any kind of mastery that anyone develops, thought it gets a bit more fuzzy (and thus is called "purposeful practice") when it is in less clearly defined and developed fields, where 'success' isn't as exactly measured, and there aren't coaches and systems of training that have been refined over years. In general though, it seems to apply pretty universally, though, interesting and important note, even taking account of deliberate practice, there are still a lot of other factors that seem to influence mastery. 

To my understanding, deliberate practice or its relative purposeful practice (I'm just going to abbreviate that to DP for short, so I don't have to keep typing it out), maybe accounts for 30% of the variance in skill levels of people (that's a gross oversimplification.) That may seem small, but the key to remember, is no other single variable they've been able to identify accounts for close to that much of the variability. It's just a general mush of "other stuff" which is not at all helpful, in gaining mastery. 

In any case, the punchline is this: most of the things we do, to try and make people better at their jobs: doctors, teachers, therapists, is useless. It doesn't actually make them better. But DP does. My first big aha about this, was going through my education masters, being boggled by the lack of scientifically rigorous and proven preparation, for us teachers. We could be making teachers so much better, if we followed what the science said about training for skill mastery. I was sad, because there was literally nothing available to me, to do that, even though I wanted to. It seemed like a gross oversight, and I wanted to do something about it, though I was woefully unqualified to head such an operation. Nowadays, DP has gotten a little more popular and talked about in the literature, though it getting operationalized practically speaking still seems to be in its infancy.

However, the field of psychotherapy, perhaps because it is more closely linked with academia, has a little bit more research minded people behind it, and thus there is actually a small but strong movement of people who are trying to operationalize the science of DP as applied to psychotherapy. This is super exciting to me, especially since the research also clearly shows that just about everything else has close to zero effect on improving therapist outcomes. There seems to be quick growth at and around the begining, where there is a lot of learning, and then stagnation for the rest of their career. This is not isolated to counselors, it's true of many professions where they don't get immediate feedback on the results of their work, like primary care providers, and usually, teachers.

So I am super excited to learn about, and start implementing, DP into my own practice, and maybe someday, help support something that gives that opportunity to teachers as well.