My mother-in-law feeds my addiction to books. For over a decade she has worked at a used bookstore, and often shows up at family events with a stack of books for me to add to my personal library. She now also supplies my friends and my school. Jason was recently the beneficiary of her generosity, inheriting a slew of Hebrew resources–much to his enjoyment as he begins teaching an Intro to Hebrew class. At Christmas, my mother-in-law got me a brand-new copy of Josh Waitzkin’s book The Art of Learning. Since then I have been devouring the book, and there are tons of valuable insights that bring together many of the topics we’ve delved into on Educational Renaissance over the past two years.
Broadly speaking, I like how Waitzkin frames the book from the vantage point of the learner. As educators, we can become immersed in the headspace of the teacher as we work on our craft. This in itself is a good thing, since there’s much to practice and hone as teachers. But Waitzkin’s book provides a helpful reminder that the work of the student learning is our primary goal. He gives ample insight into his own learning, first as a chess player (he was the subject of the book and subsequent movie Searching for Bobby Fischer), then as a martial artist, becoming a world champion in Tai Chi. While Waitzkin is a top performer in multiple (and disparate) fields, the book focuses more on the process of learning, only incidentally referring to his accomplishments. As we’ll see below, process is way more important that results.
Jason has written extensively on the concept of flow.
(See The Flow of Thought series: Part 1: Training the Attention for Happiness’ Sake; Part 2: The Joy of Memory; Part 3: Narration as Flow; Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games; Part 5: The Play of Words; Part 6: Becoming Amateur Historians; Part 7: Rediscovering Science as the Love of Wisdom.)
This is a major concept that weaves through Waitzkin’s book. While some readers might not take on board some of his examples from Eastern mysticism, much of what he writes about illustrates and exemplifies how important flow is to top performance as a learner. (For what it’s worth, and perhaps this can be a future article, for almost every point at which Waitzkin draws upon Eastern ideas, I was able to think of a biblical passage that effectively communicated the same concept. For instance, Waitzkin beautifully describes the child-like nature of learning [p. 80], which reminded me of Matthew 18:3 “unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”)
This book is a great read, and I encourage you to read it thoroughly for yourself. Here I will unpack four principles that are central to Waitzkin’s understanding of the art of learning. If you’ve been following Educational Renaissance for some time, you will hear many resonances with articles we’ve written elsewhere. The four principles are growth mindset, deliberate practice, discipline AND love, and routines.
The Art of Learning Principle 1: Fixed vs. Growth Mindset
Carol Dweck is best known for her book Mindset. So it was interesting to see Waitzkin draw upon her work to describe a key aspect of his own learning (Art of Learning, pp. 30-33). Dweck argues that individuals can be placed on a spectrum of views pertaining to their own intelligence. Those adopting a fixed (or entity) mindset view their intelligence as an innate quality. For instance, the student who thinks, “Well, I’m not good at math,” has adopted the fixed mindset. The liability is that the individual perceives herself as something that will be perpetuated into the future, which short-circuits growth. Contrast this with the growth (or incremental) mindset in which the individual takes on the view of self as in a state of development. It’s important to note that these mindsets aren’t adopted consciously, and an individual needs to be observed to determine where they fall on this fixed vs. growth spectrum. The reflective learner, though, once their mindset has been identified, can modulate towards the growth mindset.
Waitzkin draws out an important point from Dweck’s work, which is the learner’s response to failure. He writes:
Children who associate success with hard work tend to have a “mastery-oriented response” to challenging situations, while children who see themselves as just plain “smart” or “dumb,” or “good” or “bad” at something, have a “learned helplessness orientation.”
Art of Learning, p. 30
What Waitzkin is talking about is how fixed-mindset students want to avoid failure because it is received as a definition of their innate ability, whereas the growth-mindset student invests in failure because it reveals an area for growth–a place where the student is not at the level they want to be at yet. The “mastery-oriented response” means that the student sees initial failure as a challenge to work hard toward mastery.
At a later point, Waitzkin develops the idea of “investment in loss” that expands upon the growth mindset (pp. 107-113). It can be difficult to take on a growth mindset in part because it hurts when our pride gets bruised due to failure. We want to resist the learning process, finding it easier to adopt a fixed mindset and assume that’s just the way it is. He writes,
“In order to grow, he needs to give up his current mind-set. He needs to lose to win.” (p. 107)
Giving yourself to the learning process means that the learner must actually embrace loss and failure. Failure leads to humility as our pride is chipped away. Failure also leads to growth, step by step. Adopting the growth mindset means accepting the long journey to maximizing one’s ability in any given field. Yet more often than not, we are operating at suboptimal levels. That’s just the nature of life. As Waitzkin states,
“It is essential to have a liberating incremental approach that allows for times when you are not in a peak performance state.” (p. 113)
In other words, the growth mindset can simultaneously recognize that one is not working at the top level and still invest in the opportunity for growth.
A corollary to the fixed vs. growth mindset is the result vs. process approach. Waitzkin, who is a top performer in multiple fields, believes that results are harder to come by when you are results oriented. Instead, we should focus on setting up a “process-first approach” (pp. 44-47). I’ve heard other performance experts talk about setting systems rather than setting goals for long-term success. What I appreciate about Waitzkin is that he balances both result and process approaches. He writes,
“While a fixation on results is certainly unhealthy, short-term goals can be useful developmental tools if they are balanced within a nurturing long-term philosophy.” (p. 44)
So as teachers, we can set small benchmarks to track progress, but these benchmarks should not detract from the sense that we are establishing a process or system.
The Art of Learning Principle 2: Deliberate Practice
Anders Ericsson is a pioneer in high performance research and is perhaps the first to express the idea that the key to expert performance rests not in innate qualities but in extended periods of deliberate practice. He writes in an article published in Psychological Review,
“We argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.” (1993, Vol. 100. No. 3, pg. 400)
Deliberate practice has obvious connections to the growth mindset, so it’s not surprising to find Waitzkin incorporating concepts of deliberate practice.
Learning effectively takes time. As Waitzkin describes sessions of deep absorption in the world of chess, he provides us with an image of the kind of learning students need to take on board in order to become really effective in any domain.
“Sometimes the study would take six hours in one sitting, sometimes thirty hours over a week. I felt like I was living, breathing, sleeping in that maze, and then, as if from nowhere, all the complications dissolved and I understood.” (Art of Learning, pg. 74)
The satisfaction and joy of understanding is a profound experience, but it only comes after time spent in deep work. Waitzkin expresses the concept of deliberate practice as “numbers to leave numbers.” When we are confronted with highly technical information, it needs to be assimilated in such a way that it becomes integrated into our intuition. A concert pianist doesn’t think about scales and arpeggios while performing on stage. This would detract from her expression. What we can assume when watching a virtuosic performance is that hours upon hours have been spent internalizing scale patterns so that the finger patters are simply part of her being. There is no thought of scales or of fingerings, simply of music. She has studied scales to leave scales, which is what Waitzkin is expressing here.
As teachers it can be difficult to help students catch the bug of deliberate practice, especially when our goal is not necessarily expert performance in one domain, but merely steady progress in multiple simultaneous domains. Our students are predisposed to be highly motivated in some subjects and less than motivated in others. The joy of understanding feels too remote and hours of deep absorption is the last thing they want to be assigned. Good coaching is one aspect (and we will delve into this below shortly). Another concept that will guide us is reduced complexity.
Waitzkin uses the concept of “smaller circles” to get at this essential idea:
“Over time expansiveness decreases while potency increases. I call this method ‘Making Smaller Circles.’” (p. 120)
Perhaps we can be forgiven of thinking of Mr. Miyagi training Daniel LaRusso with his “wax on, wax off” techniques. Mr. Miyagi was using “smaller circles” by breaking down karate moves to its component parts that were learnable through garden-variety exercises. The vast expanse of knowledge in mathematics, history, literature and science require deliberate practice in order to gain competence, let alone expertise. Such a task is way too overwhelming for a teacher, let alone so many students with different dispositions. Yet, breaking down the complexity into small steps provides a way to train students in deliberate practice. Additionally, some of the complexity occurs because we try to move quickly through content. Some skills, though, are built best when practiced slowly.
“We have to be able to do something slowly before we can have any hope of doing it correctly with speed.” (pg. 120)
As an example, for our students who will be taking AP tests in May, I have them practice a few problems slowly and deliberately early in the training process. This builds certain skills they will need with regard to understanding the nature of multiple choice questions, how to eliminate incorrect answer, how to avoid trick questions, etc. Later they can operate at a more rapid speed because we’ve taken the time to thoroughly comb over a few example questions multiple times. (For what it’s worth, I have mixed feelings about the whole AP enterprise. Forgive me for viewing the College Board as the Galactic Empire.)
A seemingly contradictory concept is “chunking” or “the ability to assimilate large amounts of information into a cluster that is bound together by certain information into a cluster that is bound together by certain patterns or principles particular to a given discipline” (pg. 138). Yes, we want to break massive complexes of information and skills down to small steps absorbed slowly, but we can also recognize that the mind works like a supernetwork to systematize all it knows into meaningful relationships. By letting new information bump up against other closely related information, the brain can absorb it more easily than if it is completely disconnected from everything else.
As educators, we can help our students capitalize on their natural interest in specific domains by connecting other areas of knowledge to those domains. Modern education fractures domains of knowledge into separate arenas. It is no surprise then that students become fractured beings, thinking of themselves as math people or art people. Therefore, we need to provide students a means of putting their being back together again, a unifying theory of reality and existence occurs when we understand all learning as interrelated.
The Art of Learning Principle 3: Discipline AND Love
Waitzkin describes many of his different chess teachers. Some challenged him to become more disciplined while others wanted him to express his natural game. There’s a balance between discipline and love that needs to be considered carefully. In describing his first teacher, Bruce, Waitzkin writes,
“He had to teach me to be more disciplined without dampening my love for chess or suppressing my natural voice. Many teachers have no feel for this balance and try to force their students into cookie-cutter molds.” (p. 9)
This is one of the great tensions all teachers face. We have a tendency to slip to one extreme or the other according to our personalities and propensities (especially when we ourselves are stressed). We need order and we need warmth in the learning environment.
I think the imagery Waitzkin provides by way of his mother beautifully describes the way we as teachers can build an alliance with students. He explains two ways of taming a wild horse. One way is to break it:
“The horse goes through pain, rage, frustration, exhaustion, to near death… then it finally yields.” (p. 86)
This dominance approach can be highly effective, but our response is that something damaging happened to that horse. It lost something of its nature by being broken. An approach defined by extreme discipline lacks love of the beautiful creature being trained.
Waitzkin’s mother, on the other hand, is a “horse whisperer.” The trainer creates an alliance with the horse by petting it, grooming it, stroking it.
“So you guide the horse toward doing what you want to do because he wants to do it.” (p. 87)
Notice that the horse whisperer hasn’t give up all discipline, but the discipline comes through love. Training students takes the same kind of indirect approach of leadership rather than manipulation. If students are going to operate at their best, the can be broken, submitting to the rigors of the system, or they can be groomed to desire for themselves their personal best. When we are growth minded and process oriented as teachers, we can help our students gain for themselves a growth mindset and process approach.
The Art of Learning Principle 4: Routines
The last concept I want to draw out from Waitzkin’s book is the concept of routines. Effective learning occurs when we have established healthy patterns. Imagine what a school day would look like if every student ate right, got to bed on time and ordered their books nicely each day. Waitzkin describes his involvement with the Human Performance Institute in Orlando. We associate the Institute with high caliber performers like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, so it is striking that they brought in a chess player to study high performance beyond athletics. One of the key concepts gleaned from his experience is the importance of routines.
High performers often incorporate routines as a means to maximize their effectiveness. We often hear of inspiring stories of top athletes who get to practice before their teammates to put in that many more reps that later pay off on the field. These athletes created a routine; the routine of getting to practice early. Effective routines enable top performers to get into the right frame of mind, especially when they have to operate under pressure. As a Chicagoan growing up in the Jordan era, I recalled that Michael Jordan would regularly ask for the ball in clutch situations. He wanted the ball when the game was on the line. He had a winning frame of mind that was cultivated through routines.
Students can create routines that help them to function at their best as learners. Waitzkin advises working backward from the desired state to identify a “trigger” that initiates a four- or five-step routine (p. 188). For example, a student experiences anxiety whenever a test is handed out. She wants to calm herself so that her anxiety doesn’t adversely impact her test. Working backwards from her desired state (calm), she decides that she will take a deep breath, after stretching her arms, after sharpening her pencil, after getting a drink of water. The trigger for this four-step routine is the transition to test time. By laying out this routine, she is taking control of her emotional state with the goal of being in the right frame of mind to do her best on the test.
What Waitzkin is describing here is very similar to what Charlotte Mason teaches about habit training. We gain a vision of some inspiring idea that we would like to attain (for example, focused attention). We delineate a few key steps to the habit. And then we practice that until it is internalized. This is obviously an overly simplified description of Mason’s philosophy, but as teachers one of our primary tools is habit training. We can lovingly enable our students to acquire the discipline to live masterful lives through our support.
Speaking of habit training, a couple weeks ago I finished writing my eBook on habit training! It should be coming out in the next few weeks. So stay tuned. There you will find a much fuller treatment of habit training from a Charlotte Mason perspective.
In the comments let us know how you are applying these concepts (growth mindset, deliberate practice, discipline AND love, and routines) in your work as an educator!