When I read Matthew Syed’s book, ‘Bounce’, some years ago, I remember being uplifted by its core message that it is practice that gets you there. The book’s subtitle is ‘The myth of talent and the power of practice’ and a lot has been written on this subject, including Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘The Talent Myth’ which was published first as a chapter in the New Yorker magazine in 2002 and then followed up with his best-selling book, ‘Outliers’ in 2008. Seminal research on the importance of practice in achieving expertise carried out by both Bloom in the 1980s, and K Anders Ericsson in the 1990s found that what distinguished the highest performers from their high-performing peers was that they had just practised more. A lot more.
The fundamental idea that practice is key to improvement in anything is of course neither new nor controversial, but I think the subject is muddied by the notion some people have that so-called ‘innate talent’ is key to the development of expertise. I don’t think that notion is helpful for teachers, school leaders or our students.
Is talent innate?
Many scientists and researchers subscribe to the view that there is a genetic component in both IQ and talent, and some even put a percentage on this genetic inheritance – around 20%. Some other people, who aren’t scientists, feel that much of what is seen as talent in young people in particular is nicely explained by their genes: ‘Of course she’s a great musician! She got it from her dad who was a concert pianist!’ etc… My own admittedly unscientific but hopefully common sense view on this is two-fold: 1) From the moment a child is born they start interacting with the environment, so given the impossibility of testing their genetic inheritance at birth how can we know that the subsequent emergence of talent is NOT the direct result of their interaction with the environment? 2) Let’s say for a moment that it is true, that talent or a predisposition for it can be passed on in the genes – it still doesn’t matter because as teachers and school leaders we have no control over students’ genetic inheritance. We should spend our energies on those things over which we do have some control, which includes promoting the importance of practice for getting better at anything, and making sure that students do lots of it.
Is all practice equally good?
We know that if we practise at something we can reasonably hope to get better at it over time. On the other hand, whilst I type every day and have done so for many years, my typing is still two-fingered and amusingly slow – I am clearly not improving. Am I not practising? For Ericsson and his research colleagues, the reason for my failure to improve is that I am not practising my typing deliberately. In their model, deliberate practice has the following four characteristics: 1) The will to improve; there needs to be the motivation to get better 2) Progress is made through small steps that can be worked through (in school these are often called success criteria) 3) The availability of feedback on performance that helps us understand what specifically we need to do to improve and 4) Practice has to be regular, and sustained over time.
So, all practice is not equally good. Once we have reached a basic level of competence – my own basic ability to type, for example – we will not improve much more unless we practise deliberately. Nowhere is this truism more evident, perhaps, than in elite sport, music and the performance arts, where performers will hone their skills through deliberate practice with coaches pushing them and giving them focused feedback.
Innate talent vs practice
If innate talent does exist, and I am instinctively sceptical about it, deliberate practice trumps it every time. That is certainly the right view for teachers and school leaders to adopt because, as I have already said, it emphasises the thing over which we have a good measure of control – teachers can maximise their students’ learning by ensuring that they practise stuff. A lot. Over time.
The best practice:
1. Is distributed over time (this is often called spaced learning). Four or five short practice sessions over time are far better than one long session. This is the essence of retrieval practice – we have to keep going back over key learning so that it sticks. Retrieval practice is the single most important activity for promoting learning.
2. Is interleaved. Mixing up the study of topics provides a greater challenge when learning, and that greater challenge makes the learning more durable. It is easier and it feels much more comfortable to always study just one thing at a time, but doing that is far less beneficial for us in the long run.
3. Takes the form of testing. Tests and quizzes are far better than other forms of retrieval practice, because they force the brain to work in a way that, say, re-reading and reviewing notes do not.
4. Involves feedback on performance. With tests and quizzes, it is very important to have the answers available to fill the knowledge gaps that are uncovered.
Practice does not usually make perfect, but done right, it usually pays off. It is the beating heart of learning.
