Don’t Bloat the Feedback Loop

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Lots of people hear “repetitive” as a synonym for “mindless” when in fact repetition and mindlessness are completely orthogonal to each other.

“Mindful repetition” is what you want – mindful because you’re practicing just beyond your repertoire, getting feedback on every attempt so that you can improve on the next attempt. I.e., deliberate practice.

But even then, it’s easy to go overboard and bloat the repetition with supplemental tasks that, while intended to support mindfulness, end up throttling the volume of practice, creating a severe bottleneck in the learning process. The feedback loop becomes too slow.

For instance, one of the worst offenders is “think-pair-share,” which ensures that the amount of time wasted scales with the number of students in the class. If you do think-pair-share in an class full of 30 students, it’s easy to burn most of the class time dragging out a single repetition, which is next to nothing in terms of training volume.

Kind of like if you go to the gym for a workout and only do 1 pushup the whole hour, it doesn’t matter how perfect your form was on that pushup: you only did 1 pushup which is next to nothing. You’re not going to get stronger without a serious volume of reps.

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