Deliberate practice

Indeed, this suggestion leaves very little room for conceptualization and self-construction of pedagogic knowledge (Kumaravadivelu, 2001: 541).

A dynamically organized network of implicit, practice-specific knowledge for teaching is acquired by participating in a wide variety of teaching-similar activities which require participants to focus on a variety of knowledge specific to particular teaching situations and to compare, contrast and link knowledge (such as knowledge about teaching activities, student cues, curriculum, feedback, input, etc.) in multiple ways. Humans appear to excel at abstracting from specific examples and such processes result in professional competence and knowledge which is easier to transfer from one context to another. This is a bottom-up process and the result is not all encompassing abstractions like academic theories, but rather idiosyncratic, dynamically organized “theories for practice” (Burns, 1996).

deliberate practice. Once amateurs have achieved an acceptable level of performance, their primary goal becomes inherent enjoyment of the activity, and most of their time is spent on playful interaction” (Ericsson & Charness, 1994: 738). For example, while I can drive a car, I am not willing to invest the time and effort to practice various aspects of driving to become a world class car driver. “Experts…tackle problems that increase their expertise, whereas nonexperts tend to tackle problems for which they do not have to extend themselves” (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993: 78). Experts engage in deliberate practice because they want to continue to improve, while others are satisfied with being merely adequate. “For experts, the mental resources freed up by the use of routines will be ‘reinvested’ in the pursuit of new goals and problem-solving at a higher level, which they did not have the capacity to deal with earlier. Nonexperts, however, will simply have a diminished number of problems to solve as they develop routines to handle them”

(Tsui, 2003: 19).

Learners develop deliberate practice by first noticing aspects of performance which could be better (although they may be adequate already) and then designing practice activities which allow them to work on those aspects of the activity. “[T]he critical distinction between experts and experienced nonexperts is not that the former do things well and the latter do things badly, but rather that experts problematize what seem to be routine practices and address them, whereas experienced nonexperts simply carry out practiced routines. ‘Reinvestment’ and ‘progressive problem-solving’…are two aspects of the same process” (Tsui, 2003: 19). This is also true for teachers. For example, beginning teachers work on maintaining classroom discipline during their beginning years of teaching (Kagan, 1993a; Tsui, 2003). Once they have developed and mastered schemas and routines for class control, teachers have a significant amount of time and energy free which they used to invest in learning how to keep their classes under control.

At this point some teachers may choose to invest this in non-teaching activities (e.g., thinking about non-school responsibilities, saving energy for after school, etc.).

However, those who want to be good (or excellent), and not merely adequate teachers, can invest this time in figuring out, for instance, whether the students are not just quiet, but are also learning. They can work on their schemata for recognizing when students are engaged in learning or not and hone their skills in routines which can foster student engagement.

Self-regulating activities such as deliberate practice do not necessarily have to be explicitly controlled, but can also be habitual and automatic. For example, Tsui (2003) reports on the nonconscious nature of one teacher’s deliberate practice in developing a classroom routine.

The vocabulary consolidation routine is something that Marina has developed subconsciously over the years…This routine emerged through what Martina described as a ‘gradual process.’ She realized the importance of recycling and consolidation in learning after her unsuccessful experiences in the first two or three years of teaching when she found that the students did not remember what was taught in class, did very poorly on tests, and had very limited vocabulary, and constantly made the same grammatical mistakes, even though they enjoyed the lessons thoroughly and were interested in learning (Tsui, 2003: 202-3)

Deliberate practice has been shown to be important for the development and maintenance of expertise in fields such as sports (Baker, Côté,& Abernethy, 2003; Cleary &

Zimmerman, 2001; Soberlak & Côté, 2003; Starkes, Deakins, Allard, Hodges, &

Haynes, 1996), music (Jørgensen, 2002; Krampe & Ericsson, 1996; Nielsen, 2001) medicine (Hatala, Brooks, & Norman, 2003; Issenberg, McGaghie, Gordon, Symes, Petrusa, Hart, & Harden, 2002; Wayne, Butter, Siddall, Fudala, Lindquist, Feinglass, Wade, McGaghie, 2005; Wayne, Butter, Siddall, Fudala, Wade, Feinglass, & McGaghie, 2006) and software design (Sonnentag, 1998). Even insurance agents engage in deliberate practice. Sonnentag (2000) studied 100 insurance agents and found that the most successful agents arranged the activities required for their job in ways that let them work on things that needed improvement. For example, they may choose to call on people who are known for creating problems in order to practice working with difficult customers. It has been found that expert organizational consultants also engage in more activities that stretch their competence than merely competent consultants (Van de Wiel, Szegedi, & Weggeman, 2004). Deliberate practice has even shown to help university students learn informal reasoning (van Gelder, Bissett, & Gumming, 2004). Studying can be a form of deliberate practice, but only if it is done right. For example, Plant and her colleagues found that the general number of hours spent studying did not correlate with the grades of university students. However, grades did correlate with having a plan for studying and studying in a quiet environment (Plant, Ericsson, Hill, & Asberg, 2005).

Berliner (2001) claims that deliberate practice is rare in teaching in most western contexts. He does point out, however, that in other cultures teachers engage in deliberate practice by observing a variety of teachers, talking about different ways of approaching teaching, collectively working on lesson plans, etc. (Lewis & Tsuchida, 1998). Dunn and Shriner (1999) used questionnaires (n=142), activity logs and interviews (n=8) to study what kinds of deliberate practice activities elementary teachers engaged in. They found that almost all of these were activities that they performed anyway, such as preparing materials, mental planning, and evaluating written work. Tsui (2003), however, studied four EFL teachers in Hong Kong and found that three of them engaged in some forms of deliberate practice, while one used it to a great extent.

Deliberate practice, however, does not just happen whenever you engage in an activity.

“[T]he deliberate practice hypothesis is not the banal claim that reasoning skills improve with practice. Rather, it asserts that high-level skills result from practice of a very special sort. Activities that might be called practice but do not amount to deliberate practice, such as simply engaging in reasoning and argumentation, are predicted not to help people go beyond ordinary competence” (van Gelder, Bissett, & Gumming, 2004: 149).

Furthermore, in many activities simply engaging in the practice does not normally provide learners with the feedback they would need to focus their learning. “Deliberate practice differs from other domain-related activities because it provides optimal opportunities for learning and skill acquisition. If the regular activities in a domain did not offer accurate and preferably immediate feedback or opportunities for corrected repetitions, improvements in performance with further experience would not be expected” (Ericsson & Charness, 1994: 739). Another problem is that opportunities to work on specific aspects of practice are not always present.

During play even individuals who desire to improve their performance do not encounter the same or similar situations on a frequent and predictable basis. For example, a tennis player wanting to improve a weakness such as a backhand volley, might encounter a relevant situation only once per game. In contrast, a tennis coach would give that individual many hundreds of opportunities to improve and refine that type of shot during a training session (Ericsson & Charness, 1994: 738).

Finally, if learners are engaged in real practice, they many not be able to afford the luxury of experimenting with new ways of doing things. “The costs of mistakes or failures to meet deadlines [may be]…generally great, which discourages learning and acquisition of new and possibly better methods during the time of work. For example, highly experienced users of computer software applications are found to use a small set of commands, thus avoiding the learning of a larger set of more efficient commands”

(Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, 1993: 367).

Some evidence supports the hypothesis that deliberate practice needs to be separate from normal participation in the activity. For example, studies of chess players from a variety of countries have shown that expertise in chess correlates well with time spent on deliberate practice activities such as studying games played by Grand Masters, but expertise does not correlate with the amount of time spent playing chess games (Charness, Tuffiash, Krampe, Reingold, & Yasyukova, 2005). Furthermore, Cleary and Zimmerman (2001) studied 43 basketball players. They found that the boys who were much better than the others (e.g., experts for their age group) selected specific goals and worked on specific techniques during practice, whereas other boys tended to just play around.

However, other studies point to the possibility of engaging in deliberate practice while carrying out the activity. As mentioned above, expert insurance agents and organizational consultants construct their practice in a way to work on their knowledge and skills (Sonnentag, 2000; van de Wiel, Szegedi, & Weggeman, 2004). Marina, the teacher in Tsui’s (2003) study also incorporated deliberate practice into her teaching practice. Davis & Krajcik (2005) claim that teachers can learn from using curriculum materials if these are designed to promote teacher learning: “educative curriculum materials serve as cognitive tools to help teachers add new ideas to their repertoires”

(Davis & Krajcik, 2005: 7). Schneider and Krajcik (2002) followed three middle school science teachers using such curriculum materials to teach a unit on physics. They found that because the materials asked teachers to engage in deliberate practice activities such as eliciting student explanations for phenomena and accounting for them in explanations, the use of the materials did help teachers change their knowledge and facility in science teaching. Collopy’s (2003) findings were slightly different. She studied two elementary teachers teaching a unit on math using new curricular materials. Callopy found that the teaching style of the teacher determined whether the materials were used for deliberate practice or not. One of the teachers wanted to understand why and how to use the new materials while the other teacher used the materials as directed without working on understanding the ideas behind the materials. The first teacher used the material to deepen her knowledge of and facility in math teaching, but the second teacher was not.

In fact, Ericsson does suggest that, in some circumstances, what experts do in practice can be both (a) aimed at performing the task well and (b) used to increase knowledge and skill. “Many of the mechanisms of superior expert performance serve the dual purpose of mediating experts’ current performance and of allowing continued improvement of this performance in response to informative feedback during practice activities.” (Ericsson &

Lehman, 1996: 273)

Deliberate practice should not be confused with the training model of teacher education (Larsen-Freeman, 1983; Widdowson, 1990). In teacher training, as opposed to teacher education, teachers learn procedures to use during L2 instruction. Teachers were supposed to use these procedures in the way they were taught and not much attention

was put on having teachers understanding the reasons behind the procedures (Freeman, 2002; Widdowson, 1990). While deliberate practice does stress skill development, procedural knowledge is not the only thing learned in deliberate practice. Schema and theory development can also be part of deliberate practice, as long as these are generated from the experience of practice, not from abstract discussion. For example, Tsui (2003) reported on a teacher who spent several years trying new activities and new activity arrangements until she figured out what she wanted in terms of vocabulary instruction.

Furthermore, the purpose behind deliberate practice is not the automatic and mindless use of techniques. Deliberate practice can be used to increase skill and knowledge, so that learners gain the facility to do more than they have been taught. “The experienced chess player learns many patterns. But for the expert these do not become patterns that restrict thinking and result in stereotyped, predictable play. Instead, they are used as building blocks for increasingly sophisticated analyses and strategies of play” (Bereiter

& Scardamalia, 1993: 110-11). In addition, if creativity and innovation are part of the activity being learned (as in teaching), it should be part of deliberate practice. “[O]ne of the requirements of adaptation is to participate in the pursuit of ideal goals of the group, and this necessitates continued progressive problem-solving. Adapting to a scientific subculture, for instance, requires more than mastering a body of scientific knowledge and skills. One is expected to make some advance on an unsolved problem between this year’s convention and the next” (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993: 104-5).

In summary, to move from basic competence to expertise, teachers need to engage in deliberate practice. This is not specific to teaching; the need for deliberate practice seems to be a general requirement for the acquisition of expertise in any practice. The research presented in this section indicates that while some kinds of knowledge can be gained with deliberate practice during the actual activity (e.g., teaching), other kinds of knowledge need deliberate practice outside of the activity for expertise to be acquired.

The implicit, practice-specific and dynamically organized knowledge acquired from quality deliberate practice is the basis for sophisticated and creative teaching.