Deliberate practice is a promising approach to improve knowledge and skill, but I’ve been exploring its limits, prompted by a challenge from Lorna Shires, who suggested that it’s useful for skills which can be drilled and copied (like rebounds in basketball or classroom management techniques), but not for more sophisticated aspects of sports (or teaching) like game play, analysis and decision making. This post considers how deliberate practice can promote effective ‘game play’ in the classroom, by helping teachers make better decisions.
I’ll frame this by suggesting a rough division between three questions teacher educators face:
- What principles and practices matter most in teaching? Teacher educators need to select and sequence the strategies and techniques they will promote: they might encourage teachers to introduce ideas using models and clear explanations, for example.
- How can teachers master these principles and practices? Having decided what matters in the classroom, teacher educators must teach teachers to use these strategies and techniques: using deliberate practice is crucial; teachers can script, prepare, practise and refine models, for example.
- When should teachers apply these principles and practices? Teacher educators must help teachers tailor their actions to specific situations: knowing what to do (use models) and how to do it (how to create an effective model) is of little use unless teachers can choose when to do it (an excellent model at the wrong moment may overwhelm students).
Teacher education only helps teachers if it addresses all three questions. Deliberate practice isn’t a complete solution, but it can refine teachers’ analysis and understanding of situations, their decision making, and their game play, in four ways.
1) Practice creates space to think
Practice builds fluency, fluency frees us to stop thinking about what we’re doing now, and instead assess the situation and decide what to do. With practice, actions become routine: we find habits easier, thinking and worrying less about them (Wood, Quinn and Kashy, 2002). We can combine individual fluent actions creatively and spontaneously (Binder, 1996): football player Johann Cruyff described how practice helps in the moment when responses have to be “quicker, where instead of having two meters to control the ball, you have half a meter (Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi, p.37).” Just as students who know their times tables can tackle more complicated sums, teachers who have practised posing challenging questions, monitoring student reactions and maintaining student focus, can combine them and think about where to guide the discussion, not just whether students are listening. Deliberate practice makes space for judgement: it lets us think about where we’re going, not just what we’re doing.
2) We can practise decisions
We make classroom decisions fast, before an exacting audience: practice can help. Experts assess situations and make decisions based on their knowledge and experience (Berliner, 1988; Livingston and Borko, 1989). Teacher educators cannot simply leave teachers to accumulate experience through trial and error: teachers can practise, not just how to do things (how to respond to a misconception), but deciding when to do things (which misconceptions should we respond to immediately, for example). Examining case studies which ask what should be done next is a “natural way to produce the flexibility of thought that is needed” by teachers (Berliner, 2001, p.476). Case studies can also help teachers grapple with fundamental debates (about the merits of testing, for example) through specific dilemmas (Ball and Forzani, 2009). Teacher educators can write cases: ‘John states that he can’t see the point of maths during a test: what do you do?’ or they can show classroom video, pausing to discuss what viewers have noticed, what options the teacher has, and their relative merits: a student makes an error; did viewers notice? What would they do next? Anything can be practised: this includes analysing classroom situations and deciding how to respond.
3) We can review judgements
Classroom judgements are irrevocable: deliberate practice allows us to stop the clock and refine them. It is hard to learn from past decisions: teachers are among those professionals whose decisions cannot be second-guessed (Lipsky, 1980); the classroom is so complicated that a colleague will struggle to improve on a decision they didn’t witness. We can review past successes and failures, but we can also use deliberate practice to go beyond discussion and test alternatives. A teacher educator can pause practice to offer feedback, test teachers’ understanding, or elicit suggestions; they can, for example, suggest to the teacher practising that “This would be a good time to start to ask students what they notice about all of the numbers (Lampert et al., 2013, p.232).” One review suggested that “Deliberate practice in the company of others” helps teachers develop “an organized system for knowing when, why, and how aspects of their competency are relevant to any particular situation, (Ibid., p.228)”; another highlighted the importance of helping teachers make their “dilemmas and uncertainties” public (Kazemi et al., 2016, p.24). We cannot rewind once we have challenged an off-task student, but deliberate practice allows us to pause, test alternatives and gain feedback. Practice takes us beyond discussion and hones our understanding of the consequences and merits of our actions.
4) Practise integrates deciding and acting
I began by noting that knowing what to do and how to do it was of little use unless we know when to act; the reverse is also true: good decisions are useless unless teachers can act on them. TNTP (a teacher training organisation in the USA) described how, before adopting deliberate practice, they asked teachers to:
Think about how they would handle the various classroom management challenges they were likely to face and create a blueprint for how they would address them. The result, not surprisingly, was a lot of teachers who had thoughtful, thorough classroom management blueprints—and chaotic classrooms (2014, p.10).”
Deliberate practice is the only way we can integrate decisions and action – unless we want to make our mistakes in the classroom. As a mentor, we might see a teacher focus on one disruptive student and suggest that they, ‘Keep scanning the room while talking to an individual’. But we can’t guarantee the teacher will act accordingly, or that it will solve the problem. Deliberate practice allows us to recreate classroom situations, so teachers can learn to identify good decisions and to act upon them.
Conclusion
These four methods all offer what the classroom denies us: space and time to review our actions, think about them, and test alternatives. Deliberate practice creates mental space while we’re acting: it allows us to practise decisions, review past judgements and practise making better ones work. Deliberate practice allows teacher educators to approximate teaching, so that teachers can “learn to do adaptive teaching while developing their knowledge, skill, and identities (Lampert et al., 2013, p.238).” A review of simulation in nursing education argued that:
“The potential risks to patients associated with learning ‘at the bedside’ are becoming increasingly unacceptable, and the search for education and training methods that do not expose the patient to preventable errors from inexperienced practitioners continues (Lewis, Strachan and McKenzie Smith, 2012, p.82).”
This review noted two intriguing findings: first, a training programme which incorporated deliberate practice and theory found no effect for the theory (but an effect for practice); second, comparing two teams which had received the same training, eight hours simulated practice improved their performance; an eight hour shift in hospital caused no improvement (Ibid.). Deliberate practice is not the only way to improve judgement, but it has a crucial role, not just in mastering skills, but in applying them when they are needed in the classroom.
If you found this interesting, you may like:
- A discussion of the central role of deliberate practice in teacher education
- A discussion of the problems with deliberate practice
- A description of how teacher education can promote teacher insight
References
Berliner, D. (2001). Learning about and learning from expert teachers. International Journal of Educational Research 35, pp.463–482.
Kazemi, E., Ghousseini, H., Cunard, A., Turrou, A. (2016) Getting Inside Rehearsals: Insights From Teacher Educators to Support Work on Complex Practice. Journal of Teacher Education 67(1), pp.18–31.
Lampert, M., Franke, M., Kazemi, E., Ghousseini, H., Turrou, A. Beasley, H., Cunard, A., Crowe, K. (2013) Keeping It Complex: Using Rehearsals to Support Novice Teacher Learning of Ambitious Teaching Journal of Teacher Education 64(3), pp.226–243.
Livingston, C., Borko, H. (1989) Expert-Novice Differences in Teaching: A Cognitive Analysis and Implications for Teacher Education. Journal of Teacher Education 37. 36-42.
TNTP (2014) Fast Start: Training better teachers faster, with focus, practice and feedback.
This is really interesting!
In Sweden, the education to become a teacher at any level can be entirely void of the things you mention here. Sure there might be a few case studies here and there, but they’re too few, and the educators don’t necessarily challenge the students enough. Even during teaching placement (approx 4 months total), there really isn’t time set aside to really dig into these questions.
I’d love to have had a more systematic approach to learning strategies for classroom management and the likes.