Deliberate Practice

Effortful activities designed to optimize improvement. Extended deliberate practice is a key component for attaining expert performance and is thought to be more important than the role of innate ability in development towards expertise.

When you engage in deliberate practice, improving your performance over time is your goal and motivation. Practicing teaching/leadership can be joyful, interesting, and can contribute to student learning, but deliberate practice is not inherently enjoyable on it’s own.

If you want to gain skills rapidly or approach expert-level status at something, you must understand the importance of deliberate practice and learn how to incorporate it into your daily work.

The Four Essential Components of Deliberate Practice

According to K. Anders Ericsson, one of the foremost scholars on expert performance, there are the four essential components of deliberate practice.

  1. You must be motivated to attend to the task and exert effort to improve your performance.
  2. The design of the task should take into account your pre-existing knowledge so that the task can be correctly understood after a brief period of instruction.
  3. You should receive immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results of your performance.
  4. You should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.

It’s important to note that without adequate feedback about your performance during practice, efficient learning is impossible and improvement is minimal. Simple practice isn’t enough to rapidly gain skills. Mere repetition of an activity won’t lead to improved performance.

What Deliberate Practice Means for You

  1. Natural ability is no excuse: If you’re 5’5″, maybe you shouldn’t set your sites on becoming an NBA center. Some physical limits are obvious. Most other “limits” are cop-outs or relics of old misunderstandings about talent.
  2. How you practice matters most. To benefit from practice and reach your potential, you have to constantly challenge yourself. This doesn’t mean repeatedly doing what you already know how to do. This means understanding your weaknesses and inventing specific tasks in your practice to address those deficiencies.
  3. How long you persevere determines your limits: Becoming an expert takes time (Ericcson estimates 7-10 years of deliberate practice). You cannot reach your mental and physical limits in just a few weeks or months. To grow to the top of your game, you’ll have to persevere for years. Your practice has to be deliberate and intense, but it also has to be carefully scheduled and limited in ways to avoid burnout and long-term fatigue (both mental and physical).
  4. Motivation becomes the real constraint on expertise. Practice isn’t always fun. It’s an investment into improving your knowledge and skills. In order to practice with intention for long enough to become an expert or gain useful skills, you have to find the motivation to make the investment. Where will you find that motivation?

Your practice must be: intentional, aimed at improving performance, designed for your current skill level, combined with immediate feedback and repetitious.

Sources:

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3).

Bar, C. (2012) Deliberate practice: What it is and why you need it. Expert Enough. Retrieved July 12, 2016 from: http://expertenough.com/1423/deliberate-practice.