When I was a child I did gymnastics, and one of the most fundamental aspects of gymnastics is practice. We practiced skills and routines, we stretched and we worked out for hours, far longer than the average sports team practices. Where your average soccer team practiced an hour or an hour and a half a couple times a week, gymnasts practice three hours at a stretch at least three times a week. And that’s at my American gym which was no doubt less intense than some.
One of the biggest lessons I learned from my coach was his frequent saying, which became almost a mantra that he would expect us to repeat: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” For us this meant, at least, that we should make sure to point our toes in every exercise. If we didn’t practice all our exercises and routines with the fundamentals of form and technique, we wouldn’t progress, and we’d certainly get docked for improper form at the next meet.
These early lessons stuck with me and I think that’s part of why I was so attracted to a book I picked up this last summer, entitled Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better. Written by Doug Lemov, the author of Teach Like a Champion and leader of Uncommon Schools, along with two of his colleagues, Erica Woolway and Katie Yezzi, the book challenges us as educators to improve the quality of our practice of education. Actually, the book addresses the use of practice to improve effectiveness in any sphere of business, industry or life. But the authors’ own experience in the field of education shines through many of their examples and challenged my thinking most of all.
In his previous work Doug Lemov had isolated a set of techniques or strategies that effective teachers employed to deal with various challenging situations in the classroom. In workshops where his organization endeavored to teach these techniques, they noticed what they call the “get it/do it gap” where teachers come to understand a technique’s effectiveness, but are unable to reproduce it themselves:
We would analyze and discuss, and then, once our audience understood the technique in all of its nuance and variation, we went on to the next technique. Evaluations were outstanding. Participants told us they had learned useful and valuable methods to apply. But then we noticed something alarming. If we surveyed the same participants three months later, they were not quite as upbeat. They still knew what they wanted their classes to be like, but they were unable to reliably do what it took to get there. When they tried to fix one thing, something else went wrong. It was difficult to concentrate on a technique with so much else going on. Just knowing what they should be doing was not enough to make them successful. (6)
This caused a realization for them that training master teachers would involve more than just passing on information about the right way to teach. It had to involve practice. And just like master tennis players or gymnasts are made not through just any type of practice, in the same way master teachers will be made through perfect practice: high quality practice of exactly the right skills in just the right way.
In the world of education this thought is revolutionary because so much of our professional development for teachers is in direct contradiction to it. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi cite a policy brief by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education to the effective that between $20 and $30 billion are spent per year on professional development and the upshot is that
Teachers typically spend a few hours listening and, at best, leave with some practical tips or some useful materials. There is seldom any follow-up to the experience and subsequent in-services may address entirely different sets of topics…. On the whole, most researchers agree that local professional development programs typically have weak effects on practice because they lack focus, intensity, follow-up, and continuity. (As quoted in Practice Perfect 8)
There’s probably no stronger indictment of the lack of any unified philosophy of education or methodology than this. Because there is no clear definition of the proper practice of education, there can be no quality practice. Teachers cannot be developed, coached and held to a high standard, where there is no accepted standard to develop them against.
Instead, teachers are given a dizzying array of new and often contradictory ideas without the quality practice necessary to master any particular method or technique. Professional development becomes simply a continuous exposure to new methods without effective implementation or accountability. It’s no wonder that the educational establishment is in a state of crisis. In such an educational milieu, perhaps we need a renaissance or re-birth of a traditional simplicity, embodied in the classical saying multum nōn multa (“much not many things” or as we might say, “less is more”). The dizzying array of educational methods is part of the problem because, when pulled in so many directions, teachers can have trouble attaining mastery at anything.
This call for simplicity reminds me of the legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, who “led his teams to ten national championships in 12 years, won 88 consecutive games, and achieved the highest winning percentage (.813) of any coach in NCAA basketball history” (Practice Perfect 1). What is so surprising about Wooden’s method is his relentless focus on high quality practice: “old-fashioned practice, efficiently run, well-planned, and intentionally executed” (2). Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi describe it this way:
John Wooden doted on practice to a degree that was legendary. He began—surely to much eye rolling—by practicing things that every other coach would have considered unworthy, if they’d have considered them at all: how to put on socks and sneakers, for example. He timed his practices to the minute, husbanding every second to ensure its precise and careful allocation. He kept a record of every practice on note cards, which he filed away for future reference: what worked; what didn’t; how to do it better next time. Unlike many coaches, he focused not on scrimmaging—playing in a way that replicated the game—but on drilling, that is playing in ways that intentionally distorted the game to emphasize and isolate specific concepts and skills…. He repeated drills until his players achieved mastery and then automaticity, even if it meant not drilling on more sophisticated topics. (2)
Wooden’s example challenges my leadership as an administrator. How should I incorporate quality practice into my endeavors to lead teachers to mastery? What are the fundamental skills and strategies that teachers need to practice to perfection? What would it look like to design professional development opportunities for teachers that included high quality practice as a main feature?
These are questions that I’m still struggling with in response to this book. I’ve embraced modelling of our school’s philosophy and core practices in how I and our other administrators lead teacher training sessions. And this has had a profound impact on our culture and practice. However, one of the main challenges that this book leaves me with is what a practice regimen for teachers should look like. Basketball players practice for hours on a regular basis, and then they play games every once in a while. The average teacher teaches several hours a day, every day. It’s hard to see how a practice session once in a blue moon on a particular skill that’s used occasionally in the classroom in some unique situation is going to transfer with a high degree of value.
But that doesn’t mean I question the importance of the ideas posed by this book. It’s just that part of what teachers need to develop is the wisdom and discernment for how to interact with the human beings they are teaching in all their complexity. It’s worth asking how the value of practice trades off with the development of practical wisdom or the cultivation of a growth mindset, which are more likely attained through extensive reading and discussion of important ideas than isolated practice exercises.
In part, it makes me wonder whether taking on the challenge of practicing education involves simplifying a set of core classroom practices (like applying the trivium arts or deep reading for instance) for teachers to follow and then inspiring and empowering teachers to turn their daily teaching regimen into intentional or deliberate practice. It seems a shame to limit teachers’ practice opportunities to institute days outside of the classroom, if by simplifying a set of practices to follow in the classroom, teachers could amass their 10,000 hours of practice on those core essentials, while actually teaching real students. Feedback from an experienced administrator or fellow teacher is an important part of this process, no doubt. But my hunch is that the average teacher could get better at getting better much more quickly, if she simply reframed her experiences in the classroom as opportunities to practice, learn and improve. Teaching to get through the day is wholly different from teaching to improve one’s teaching.
What do you think? How have you seen practice work effectively both for students and teachers? Do you have any ideas for effective professional development involving practice?
