Day 25: Learning Technique 12: Deliberate Practice

Today we discuss our learning technique #12, deliberate practice, which refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance. You will learn what this technique is, the science behind it, why you should use it, and finally how you can apply it to accelerate your learning.

Resources for this lesson:

• Transcripts
• Worksheet
• List of Scientific References

Summary

What is Deliberate Practice?

Deliberate practice refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic.

• While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.
• Deliberate practice requires feedback to refine the practice. It's encouraged to make errors during the process to improve learning.

Research [2] by Anders Ericsson on deliberate practice has also shown that there are four elements that you need to actively engage in deliberate practice:

1. A specific goal
2. Intense focus
3. Immediate feedback
4. Frequent discomfort by being at the edge of your abilities, which is also known as desirable difficulty.

Why it matters: Deliberate practice is the bread and butter of becoming a master of any skill because it requires practicing intentionally, which results in rapid progress.

What does the science say?

Desirable difficulty [1], the principle that makes deliberate practice effective, is effortful, difficult learning that pushes the learner slightly beyond their current capabilities.

• Learning this way is deeper and more durable because the difficulty involved increases your retention.
• This learning often requires intense levels of concentration and perseverance, like struggling with a really hard problem that you think you have no hope in solving.

Practicing skills in the desirable difficulty range builds new neural connections, while still practicing with the older connections made in past material according to research [3].

Why should you use it?

The people who master the art of deliberate practice are committed to being lifelong learners—always exploring and experimenting and refining.

Deliberate practice is not a magic pill, but if you can manage to use it, then the promise of deliberate practice is quite alluring: to get the most out of what you've got.

How do you use it?

To use deliberate practice you need four elements

1. Specific Goal: What exactly are you practicing and why are you practicing this skill so that it adds up into the overall skill you are learning
2. Intense Focus: Remember you want to set yourself up in an environment that has no distraction and allows you to focus in on what you're practicing.
3. Immediate Feedback
4. Frequent discomfort by being at the edge of our abilities (also known desirable difficulty)

When determining your goal:

• Discover the rate determining step which is the part of your learning process that is forming a bottleneck that controls the speed at which you can become more proficient at the skill.
• This is the part of the skill that we're going to want to practice because it's our hardest part and keeping everything else from being learned.

Use the direct then drill approach in alternating stages within a deliberate practice cycle.

• Practice the skill that you're learning directly in the environment you would use the skill, in the exact way you would use the skill.
• Receive feedback which is typically an example of the correct or vastly better version of what you're trying to do.
• Isolate steps that are either rate determining steps in your performance or sub skills that you find difficult to improve because there are too many variables that require focus.
• Develop drills to practice those components separately until you get better at them (see below).
• Once you improve specific steps of a skill, go back to the direct practice and integrate what you've learned from those components by practicing the entire skill together.

Strategies to create drills for yourself:

• Time slicing: Isolate a slice in time in a longer sequence of actions.
• Cognitive Components: Practice only one component of a concept.
• Copycat: Copy parts of a skill from others that you are not focusing on, then only practice one part of the skill by doing that from your own original creation.
• Magnifying Glass Method: If you must practice the entire process of a skill, spend more time one piece of a skill that you are struggling with.
• Prerequisite chaining: trying to perform a skill that you don't have all the prerequisites for.

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Activity

Choose one the learning techniques you have struggled with the most. Practice this skill numerous times until you master it.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.