Closing the loop
Deliberate practice
I’ve made a conscious effort to avoid detailing specific elements from the Science of Learning in my work. My interest is strictly pragmatic: to help you see how better teaching is easier and more effective to apply than you think.
I’m not suggesting you’re doing anything wrong, only that something critical has been missing from our knowledge of learning that’s affected our teaching. I too discovered this about ten years ago when I had a puzzling slow burn retroactive epiphany. There is no better way to describe it. It wasn’t a moment, but a series of them piling up over time. Most of those moments are physics focused. One involved staring at a long whiteboard I had just finished covering with four interrelated mechanics problems. Other influences came from books like Thinking: Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman; you’ll find the themes of System 1 and System 2 throughout Enduring Physics.
In Competence before Comprehension, the competence in question is a student’s skill to comfortably manipulate an equation connecting the terms and variables of some physics concept; along with your skill to coach their mastery of it.
In a traditional lesson, a teacher would introduce a concept by deriving an equation from first principles, including some history, accompanied by a real-world example for relevance, and finishing with some customary numerical examples. There’s also an exciting demonstration or two to capture their attention and motivate them. To finish, some challenging examples are used to demonstrate a problem-solving technique.
To some degree, with variations, I bet you do that. And for most of my career, I did too; however, I was unconvinced it was the value-added activity I had thought. My students were learning new material, but with the same skill level every time. Then I changed my teaching so my students could become more skillful, not just more content prolific.
That’s the background behind the structure of my worksheets: solving small problems successfully, because success is a great motivator to continue learning. When learning is a positive experience, students turn habits into skills – it works for teachers too. Creating the worksheet moved my teaching away from simply assigning a list of physics problems, onto how the wording of the problems themselves could help students learn to solve problems. That observation forced me to consider the composition, sense, and wording of the problems, and how all that will improve learning, and teaching.
Therefore, to close the loop on the first step of this journey, I need to detail one element adjacent and supportive to the Science of Learning: Deliberate Practice.
Deliberate practice is roughly defined as structured teaching focused on improving skills through purposeful, effortful, and highly concentrated activities. It’s really the whole point of a coach watching you hit a ball dozens of times, then draws your attention with “You’re dropping your elbow as you swing. Try these muscle exercises to see if that helps”.
If you haven’t watched or read any posts yet I suggest you should, otherwise here’s a link:
Each worksheet allows for:
Introducing the words, units, and base terms of a concept without ambiguity.
An opportunity for repetition to master algebraic skills.
A familiar format for solving problems.
High validity with immediate and verifiable answers.
I trust the value of my strategy is evident: you can direct deliberate practice via speedy, constructive, and individualised feedback as you observe each student’s errors, possibly in isolation, on a concept by concept, or skill by skill approach. Spotting a weakness, then providing constructive feedback is at the core of who we are, and what we do – and why our presence is critical.
I’ll return to these themes (the flow and wording of problems, and deliberate practice) later when I write about designing tests for better learning…and teaching.
Teaching should be a value-added endeavour for us too; one that plays out in better teaching practices, because better teaching creates better teachers.
Better teaching is more important than better teachers.
Cheers,
John
PS: Where does all the physics history, real-world examples, and deriving equations go? After the lesson in something I call the conversation of teaching. More on that another time.