The Anatomy of Effective Practice
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Effective learning feels like a workout with a personal trainer.
It centers around deliberate practice, a type of active learning in which individualized training activities are specially chosen to improve specific aspects of performance through repetition and successive refinement.
Let’s break that down.
1. Deliberate practice is active, not passive.
Watching videos, attending lectures, reading books, and re-reading notes may leave you with a comfortable sense of fluency, but any information you consume won’t stay with you for the long run unless you practice actively retrieving it from memory.
During a practice session, students should spend the entirety of their time engaged in deliberate practice by solving problems (and receiving feedback) on new topics and topics most in need of review.
Active problem-solving should be interspersed with instruction so that students receive minimum effective doses of information right before they use it to actively solve problems and receive feedback.
2. Deliberate practice requires repeatedly practicing skills that are beyond one’s repertoire.
However, this tends to be more effortful and less enjoyable, which can mislead non-experts to practice within their level of comfort.
Classroom activities that are enjoyable, collaborative, and non-repetitive (such as group discussions and freeform/unstructured project-based or discovery learning) can sometimes be useful for increasing student motivation and softening the discomfort associated with deliberate practice – but they are only supplements, not substitutes, for deliberate practice.
3. For deliberate practice to produce large gains in learning, it must be supported by a consistent routine.
The power of deliberate practice comes from compounding incremental improvements over a long period of time.
It is not a “quick fix” like cramming before an exam.
There is no “quick fix” for true long-term learning.
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