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What deliberate practice involves
This is a bit of a review and discussion of Anders Erikson's book Peak, Secrets from the new science of expertise. In the arena of applied neuroscience, Erikson is a scientist who is up there, and was influential on a great many writers, such as James Clear and Malcolm Gladwell.
tldr; Erikson says that expertise is built not just through experience but through deliberate, structured practice, effortful, focused, feedback-rich, and guided by knowledge of what mastery actually looks like. He says that the experts role is to provide both a training architecture and a mirror for what practitioners cannot yet see in themselves. In terms of relational practice, repetition matters far more than is generally assumed, and that the expert requirement is something we need a solution for.
While the book focuses mostly on individual learning and expertise, such as violinists and athletes, and so one or two of his conclusions don't quite translate, and yet there is still much to be learned from the book. To be honest, this is really the only applied neuroscience book that is in any way related to what relational practice is trying to do. Believe me, i looked.
Notably, Erikson was also the source of the research on the so called 10,000 hour rule. The phrase 'deliberate practice' is also his, dating to the 90s. I am guessing that this phrase will sound heartily familiar to those of us in the relational practice community.
Overview
The book is organised in a way that makes a simple summary of it's contents not really easy, but i will try.
My overview would be that the book is a counter argument to Robert Kegan's book about deliberately developmental organisations. Kegan promotes practicing while we work, and outlines how to make that possible. Erikson is quite the opposite, saying over and over in 100 different ways that just repeating a task does nothing in and of itself to improve. Of course both authors shared a view about the importance of real time feedback, so there is a common thread. Kegan would probably argue that if it isnt working, your feedback just isn't good enough yet. But then Erikson would reply: how to learn to give feedback, if not by practice. Anyhow...
Erikson studied dozens of disciplines. When it came to those which had achieved advanced expertise, neither knowledge or natural talent proved to be a significant factor. The common denominator was simply practice. A LOT of practice. So this is the first important takeaway, learning, unlearning and relearning requires a great deal of practice. So if you were hoping a few dozen AR sessions would do much, sorry but Erikson is quite convincing on the matter, that is not how the brain works.
Once you have reached a satisfactory skill level and automated your performance - your driving, your tennis playing, your baking of pies - you have stopped improving. People often misunderstand this because they assume that the continued driving or tennis playing or pie baking is a form of practice and that if they keep doing it they are bound to get better at it. Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of "acceptable" performance and automaticity, the additional years of "practice" don't lead to improvement. If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who's been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who's been doing it for only five.
Deliberate practice
Erikson says there are three kinds of practice.
1. Naive practice, you try hard, but it's just repeating stuff and hoping for the best
2. Purposeful practice, has specific goals, is focused on your edges and incorporates some kind of feedback
3. Deliberate practice is purposeful practice, but in the presence of an expert teacher and a best practice training regimen.
In physical fitness, an exercise has to push the muscles so that homeostasis can no longer be maintained, in order to recruit new muscle fibres, and which then builds exactly as much muscle as is needed to reestablish that homeostasis. He says that the human body has a preference for stability. Our bodies were engineered during times of little change, and as a result the brain is geared to not change a lot. So we need to figure out ways to help it change.
Comfortable activity that stays within the existing homeostatic range generates no such adaptive signal and produces no lasting change. The practical implication is that improvement requires staying just outside the comfort zone - enough disruption to trigger the adaptive response, but not so much as to cause injury - and continuously raising that threshold as each new level of capacity becomes the new comfort zone.
His study of classical violinists found that they all had more then 7000 hours of deliberate practice. "Deliberate practice is... purposeful practice that knows where it is going, and how to get there."
In addition to repetition it has this slightly fuzzy list of traits:
- Its about skills, rather than knowledge.
- The student is constantly trying things that are just beyond their current abilities.
- It demands maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable.
- Needs well-defined, specific goals, and a reason to practice
- Practice is deliberate, it requires a student's full attention and conscious actions.
- It involves a clear feedback path either from the teacher, or the object of attention
- The student must be able to detect and modify patterns
- Layers new skills on top of sound fundamental skills
- An external source provides practice activities designed to help the student improve. Best practice training techniques, are designed and overseen by a teacher or coach.
Attending courses, lectures, and seminars offers little or no feedback, little to no chance to try something new, to make mistakes, then correct the mistakes. It offers no pathway to gradually develop a new skill.
Deliberate practice boils down to: purposeful practice plus knowing what expertise looks like, then coming up with training methods to achieve that expertise.
The hallmark of purposeful or deliberate practice is that you try to do something you cannot do - that takes you out of your comfort zone - and that you practice it over and over again, focusing on exactly how you are doing it, where you are falling short, and how you can get better. Real life - our jobs, our schooling, our hobbies - seldom gives us the opportunity for this sort of focused repetition, so in order to improve, we must manufacture our own opportunities.
He opens but doesn't really resolve group learning...
Some of the most challenging skills to practice, for instance, are those that involve interacting with other people. It's easy enough to sit in your room spinning a Rubik's Cube faster and faster or to go to a driving range and practice hitting with your woods, but what if your skill requires a partner or an audience? Devising an effective way to practice such a skill can require some creativity.
So yes, we are on our own in that particular department.
Motivation
Toward the end of the book he talks about how important motivation is and there are lots of tips for sustaining the practice. He says that motivation is different to will power. It involves removing reasons to quit, and strengthening reasons to continue. Motivation comes in many forms, a desire to be better, a natural calling, practical results, pride, success, belief, approval, and respect. When we have practiced for a while and can see the results, the increasingly present skill itself can become part of the motivation. He does make another rare social reference here:
One of the best ways to create and sustain social motivation is to surround yourself with people who will encourage and support and challenge you in your endeavors. Not only did the Berlin violin students spend most of their time with other music students, but they also tended to date music students or at least others who would appreciate their passion for music and understand their need to prioritize their practice.
The most important factor here, though, is the social environment itself... If you have a group of friends who are in the same positions - the other members of your orchestra or your baseball team or your chess club - you have a built-in support system. These people understand the effort you're putting into your practice, they can share training tips with you, and they can appreciate your victories and commiserate with you over your difficulties. They count on you, and you can count on them.
He relates many interesting tales about Ben Franklins insatiable desire to learn. At 21 years old Franklin started a weekly socratic inquiry group, where the members took turns starting a conversation about matters of morality, politics and science.
The topics, which were generally phrased as questions, were to be discussed by the group "in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute or desire of victory." In order to keep the discussions open and collaborative, the rules strictly forbade anyone from contradicting another member or expressing an opinion too strongly. And once every three months each member of the Junto had to compose an essay - on any topic whatsoever - and read it to the rest of the group, which would then discuss it.
Erikson's point was that the members can use the practice group's camaraderie and shared goals as extra motivation in reaching their own personal developmental targets. He warned to first ensure that members all have the same reason. If some are there for the social life, and some to learn, that will work against the learning goal.
Deliberate practice involves both pushing yourself outside your comfort zone and maintaining your focus. Both are mentally draining. As tips for maintaining focus, he talks about breaking the work into manageable steps, the value of getting enough sleep, including naps, having a defined practice schedule, practicing in the morning when the mind is fresh, and limiting practice to one hour sessions.
This latter point i find interesting. Why one hour? Well, we can refer back to our neuroscience grounding. The one hour boundary is likely where several plasticity factors converge. The acetocholine and norepinephrine needed for learning are finite and during intense focus depletes quickly. When they deplete you can no longer benefit from all the attention your PFC is applying. The PFC's intense focus also burns through available glucose in roughly the same timeframe, which explains why we might reach for food when our attention is maxed out. Lastly working memory only has so much space. After it's capacity is exceeded things get dropped, and only sleep or rest can carry out the required consolidation.
This tells us that relational practice got the session length about right, along with quite a few other things.
In C7 he talks about remembering that it is journey, with defined stages: starting out, getting serious and finally making the mental commitment.
In C9 he documents studies on flipped classrooms, and the very positive outcomes, that come from reframing learning as experiential verses the traditional rote or book learning. It is not about what you know, but what you can do. The knowledge arrives after the skill does.
Takeaways from the book
1. Repetition matters, a metric ton of repetition
2. Being deliberate is about focused attention, being motivated and goal oriented
3. Knowledge is a product of capacity acquired via practice, not the other way around.
4. You need the presence of an expert, or something that fills the role of the expert
I find his narrative highly aligned with the established neuroplasticity preconditions, regulation, spaced repetition, attention, salience, emotion and motivation/support. However what are we to make of his expert teacher requirement? In a couple of places in the book he offers some substitutes for available experts, but none of which i found terribly compelling. Except for those few excepts at the end of the book about the value of social motivation, his entire model is a self-regulatory affair.
Nonetheless i think the answer is there in the book. The purpose of the expert teacher is two fold:
1. To provide training methods and practice exercises
2. To show us the things we can not see ourselves
We could argue that the relational practice architecture that we inherited provides both of these, by virtue that the practice is itself relational. The thing we are practicing, the relational capacity and skillset we want to acquire, is practiced relationally. So the needed mirror is embedded. Ok so like Kegan would say, the quality of the feedback matters, and thats for sure something that is a work in progress.
For the source of the targeted training exercises, the solution that relational practice is attempting to find is a theory that the practice structures themselves substitute for the presence of the expert. The practices, handed down, with the rotating host as their honorary keeper. That blog has my full argument there.
Lastly i will also say this. When the project was founded, i held nervous system regulation in paramount or elevated regard. While that hasn't changed, i would now frame this a bit differently. Safety and regulation as described by Polyvagal Theory are now for me just one of several important factors that allow us to restore and enhance relation capacity. PVT is one, the first perhaps, but it's just 1 of 5 key factors. Erikson's book helped clarify that for me. The bigger picture might be something like: nervous system informed, plus neuroplasticity informed, supports a comprehensive practice architecture that is suitable for restoring and advancing the state of the art of relating. When i get done digesting this, a clearer articulation may follow. Thats all for now. Signing off.
I will leave you with Erikson's timely reminder:
It is quite possible that this new understanding couldn't have come at a better time. Thanks to technology our world is changing at an ever - increasing pace. Two hundred years ago a person could learn a craft or trade and be fairly certain that that education would suffice for a lifetime. People born in my generation grew up thinking the same way: get an education, geta job, and you'll be set until you retire. That has changed in my lifetime. Many jobs that existed forty years ago have disappeared or else have changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable. And people coming into the work force today should expect to change careers two or three times during their working lives. As for the children being born today, no one knows, but I think it's safe to say that the changes won't be slowing down.
How do we as a society prepare for that? In the future most people will have no choice but to continuously learn new skills.
Note that views expressed in blogs do not necessarity reflect the views of the Project. They are the blog authors version of truth.
