The adage, ‘Practice makes perfect’ is only rarely true, because perfection – whatever we mean when we use this word – is very hard to attain, and maintain. We can say, however, that practice pays off. It is essential for improvement and success in so many things in life – it’s impossible to exaggerate its role in the development of performance.
Not just any practice, of course. I’ve been playing football since I was a careering four year-old, but I probably haven’t improved in my ability to play football in the last forty years, because I’m just playing, I’m not practising deliberately in order to improve. Beyond a basic level, deliberate practice is what’s needed for continued improvement.
Deliberate practice is not haphazard or recreational, it’s highly structured and typically involves: setting specific goals or targets for improvement; attempting challenging tasks that are just beyond our current performance levels; and getting and using feedback – usually from a teacher or coach – to improve towards achieving the targets we have set. According to Hattie and Yates (‘Visible learning and the science of how we learn’, 2014), ‘deliberate practice is the essential prerequisite for skill development’.
Deliberate practice emphasises how we practise far more than how much we practise.
Anders Ericsson preferred the term ‘purposeful practice’ to deliberate practice, because he felt it was more achievable for all individuals and across all domains – with purposeful practice, for example, you don’t have to have an expert teacher/coach giving you feedback; the feedback could be based on your own assessment – but the key elements are the same: well-defined, specific goals; focus – concentrated attention; feedback for improvement; and going outside our comfort zone, by tackling challenging material.
A key goal of practice should be to achieve ‘automaticity’ – being able to do a thing ‘on autopilot’. According to Daniel Willingham, we achieve automaticity by practising beyond the point of mastery: ‘studying material that one already knows is called overlearning. Because memory is prone to forgetting, one cannot learn material to a criterion and then expect the memory to stay at that level very long’ (Ask the cognitive scientist: practice makes perfect – but only if you practice beyond the point of perfection’, 2004).
The big advantage of overlearning is that it frees up space in our working memory (the place where we think): if I know my times tables to the point where they are right there, on the tip of my mind, I can focus far more easily on higher-level maths problems – automaticity significantly reduces cognitive load, and this is a good thing because we know that the limitations of cognitive load are a key barrier to successful learning.
What does all of this mean for the classroom? We need to ensure that students get lots of opportunities to practise their learning, and achieve automaticity in the core skills and knowledge they will need again and again. We can do this by:
1. Clarifying the learning intentions: the students need to be crystal-clear about what they are meant to be learning 2) Providing students with multiple opportunities for both guided and independent practice 3) Checking their progress and ensuring they get specific task-related feedback they can use to improve and 4) Providing regular future opportunities for retrieval practice of the material/topic.
Practice may not make perfect, but it can certainly make permanent. Amongst the techniques for making learning stick, it reigns supreme. PPO!
