What People Get Wrong About Deliberate Practice

deliberate practice is one of the major most important ideas in learning and instruction yet a lot of people get this idea wrong and specifically there are three mistakes that i see people making over and over and over again so i'm making this video hopefully to address these mistakes or these misconceptions mistake number one is that there is nothing special or magical about 10 000 hours the whole point of deliberate practice is that it's about the quality of practice more so than the quantity of practice so when anders erickson and his colleagues first started to explore

what was driving expertise development the main question they had is like okay we've got a bunch of people why are some people experts and other people not experts and the explanation that they came up with was that even though both of these groups practiced a lot one of these groups that is the group that reached high levels of expertise had a different kind of practice than the other group the whole idea of deliberate practice is that it's it's about how you practice deliberate practice is different from regular practice right that's the main important point maybe

i have not so i probably haven't said this enough yet yet but but that's that's that's the main point it's about the quality not the quantity so where did the idea of ten thousand hours come from well it came as an offhand comment that ericsson wrote in a paper on violin players saying that many of them estimate they had spent about 10 000 hours practicing and then this comment was lifted by malcolm gladwell into his book and then that idea kind of became cemented in the public imagination and then everyone just started associating 10 000

hours with deliberate practice that's not a thing the number of hours that it takes to become an expert at something depends so we already said that it depends on the quality of practice that you do right but then it also depends on what it is you're learning some skills are more complex than others some skills are easier to learn than others right it also depends on what your competitors are doing so if you're talking about becoming an expert say in a competitive field like chess or sports or something like this it's harder to be better

than everyone else if everyone else is already ridiculously good by the same token it's also easier to get good in an absolute sense to be to kind of learn quickly if there are already really good training programs access to really great coaches this kind of thing okay hope that makes sense mistake number two is that everybody forgets about the first step so if you if you've read about deliberate practice before or yeah if you're familiar with the idea what i want you to do now is to pause the video pause the video and write down

these steps of deliberate practice now while you're pausing the video i'm going to read a book about how important it is to like this video so why don't we pause this video and you can click the like button if you know you happen to have a free moment okay okay you back you're with me cool so did you write down for the first step identify the expert skills if you did then you have my hearty congratulations excellent work but chances are that uh you didn't and it's easy to do a lot of people forget about

the first step why well the first step seems obvious right isn't it obvious what makes professional soccer players better than say average soccer players isn't it obvious what makes mathematicians really good at math isn't it obvious what uh makes expert doctors better than average doctors well no it's a lot of times it's not obvious until you know the the expert skills that are really distinguishing experts from say non-experts then it's very hard or it's really impossible to create a deliberate training program and to illustrate this i'm just going to dip a little bit into my

own field which is science education suppose the goal of physics education is to walk students along the road to physics expertise so we want them to think the way a physicist thinks right well if that's the goal then we can look and see what people do in actual classes and the typical physics class at the undergraduate level involves lectures and labs and in lectures the teachers will talk for a little bit about new concepts and new kinds of problems and you get to learn these you know procedural steps and you get to learn some kind

of deeper ideas and then in the labs the labs tend to reinforce the concepts that's taught that are taught in the lecture so for instance students will go in and they will follow a recipe in the lab they'll follow a series of steps to reach a conclusion that is already known so for instance you might have students estimate the acceleration due to gravity on earth students already know what the right answer is and they don't have any real decision-making power as they go through these series of steps because the lab is supposed to be this

kind of canonical walk-through of what you would do so that's what students are doing in their classes basically but if you look at what actual physicists do when they're actually doing physics experiments if we're talking experimental physics and we're not talking theoretical physics it looks completely different than what students do in the lab so for instance and i've written some of these steps down so i don't forget them actual physicists they have to establish the overall research goal right they have to decide what kind of data would be convincing to other people they have to

determine the important variables and decide how to measure those variables let's see they have to explore different research designs potentially they have to decide how to analyze their data a lot of times they're analyzing their data in multiple ways and they a lot of times they need to iterate so they perform an experiment it doesn't quite work out the way they want it to and then they go back and they have to revisit some of these steps and change things none of these things do students do in lab so this is a case where the

expert skills and the actual practice that students are getting are not matching so students are not going to develop the skills that we presumably want them to develop you have to know what the expert practice is to move in the right direction okay mistake number three people use the wrong metrics now this relates back to the first mistake that we talked about earlier that i talked about maybe you were talking at the same time so we already talked about why this 10 000 hours idea doesn't really work or doesn't really match with the idea of

deliberate practice but the idea of putting in your time goes a little bit deeper than that of course it takes a lot of time to become an expert in anything but time is the wrong thing to focus on what you want to focus on is practice feedback cycles that's really the meat of deliberate practice you have a challenging practice that's really you know pushing you and challenging you you have expert feedback feedback that's going to help you improve and then you you have these further practice opportunities and it's really this cycle that is driving learning

forward now completing those cycles takes time reorganizing your brain which is what learning is that takes time but focusing on the time is not going to get you there as much as focusing on the quality of your practice and ensuring that you are focusing on those expert skills so i have a question for you now which is was this video helpful at all so if you can tell me if this was confusing or uh just didn't make any sense because it was too darn abstract well you can you can tell me in the comments and

i won't make any more videos like this and if it was helpful you can tell me that too so that i will make more videos maybe on these kind of more abstract ideas that's it i will see you next time i appreciate your patronage