Practice Perfect

42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better

Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, Katie Yezzi

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781119422334, 9781118216583
• eBook ISBN: 9781118231258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Rules for developing talent with disciplined, deliberate, intelligent practice

We live in a competition loving culture. We love the performance, the big win, the ticking seconds of the clock as the game comes down to the wire. We watch games and cheer, sometimes to the point of obsession, but if we really wanted to see greatness—wanted to cheer for it, see it happen, understand what made it happen—we'd spend our time watching, obsessing on, and maybe even cheering the practices instead. This book puts practice on the front burner of all who seek to instill talent and achievement in others as well as in themselves. This is a journey to understand that practice, not games, makes champions.

In this book, the authors engage the dream of better, both in fields and endeavors where participants know they should practice and also in those where many do not yet recognize the transformative power of practice. And it's not just whether you practice. How you practice may be a true competitive advantage. Deliberately engineered and designed practice can revolutionize our most important endeavors. The clear set of rules presented in Practice Perfect will make us better in virtually every performance of life. The "how-to" rules of practice cover such topics as rethinking practice, modeling excellent practice, using feedback, creating a culture of practice, making new skills stick, and hiring for practice.

• Discover new ways to think about practice. Learn how to design successful practice. Apply practice across a wide range of realms, both personal and professional
• The authors include specific activities to jump-start practice
• Doug Lemov is the best-selling author of Teach Like a Champion

A hands-on resource to practice, the rules within will help to create positive outliers and world-changing reservoirs of talent.

CULTURE OF PRACTICE

Practice doesn’t happen in a vacuum. How well practice is supported within any group or organization—be it a basketball team, a school, or a multinational corporation—can determine whether people embrace it and eagerly take on new challenges or whether they resent practice and fail to engage in it. Great practice, then, is not merely a triumph of design and engineering, but a triumph of culture. By “culture” we mean the expectations for interactions between people in the organization, as well as their core beliefs: the ideas individuals take for granted and think of as “normal” within a particular organization or system. How people think about and talk about practice in the car ride home and the days after; their ideas for their own development and improvement; and how they react to and support their peers when they are watching them practice: all are critical to the life of a talent-driven organization.

Dr. Yoon Kang, director of the Margaret and Ian Smith Clinical Skills Center at the Weill Cornell Medical College, has established a culture rooted in the practice of intentional, repetitive, and iterative activities that help turn medical students into accomplished doctors. This should come as no surprise. Medical schools are designed to be places where students learn the practice of medicine. But not all medical schools are created equal when it comes to creating a culture of practice. In many schools there is a culture of sink or swim. Historically, at Cornell as in most medical schools, doctors were trained to conduct intakes and physical exams in the classroom setting. Students were then sent into a hospital to conduct patient interviews, learning on the job.

With a more recent emphasis on patient safety (in 2004 the licensure to become a doctor made it a requirement for students to interact with an actor-patient), all medical schools started integrating simulated practice and role plays into their programs. “Standardized patient encounters,” first used in 1963 at the University of Southern California by Dr. Howard Barrows, became the norm in medical schools across the country. Students perform exams on actor-patients who are specifically trained to follow the details of the case, making the experience as realistic as possible. This prepares students to establish rapport with patients, effectively perform examinations and other clinical skills—all necessary career benchmarks. Standardized patient encounters provide students, as early as their first year at Weill Cornell, the opportunity to perform core job tasks and get immediate feedback, a vital practice experience that could not be created with real patients this early in a doctor’s career.

While all medical schools revved up their programs as a result of the changes in the licensing exam, Dr. Kang had long been dedicated to finding ways for students to better learn through practice. In particular, she thought it was critical for doctors to practice establishing rapport with patients to ensure better diagnosis and more effective treatment. At Cornell students applied this skill in the setting of the performance, diagnosing an actor-patient, responding with empathy and sensitivity, and using active listening to respond to the medical details of the case. Several studies have shown that when there is strong rapport patients are more likely to follow a doctor’s advice.1 If medical students practice only discrete clinical skills and leave med school without the ability to establish rapport, they will be less effective overall in treating their patients.

Cornell uses a lens of practice and feedback for all aspects of the program, even the design and construction of their training facility (Rule 12). Not only do they replicate the performance environment for practice; they use physical space to create a culture of practice and constant improvement. For example, a central observation area is outfitted so that faculty can observe students practicing with the actor-patients; there are one-way mirrors and the technology to support wireless headsets so that instructors can change the audio channels to observe several rooms simultaneously. Rooms are also outfitted with AV equipment and microphones so that every interaction is recorded. This creates a longitudinal database so that students and professors can track their progress and ensure that practice has a positive outcome on student performance in medical school and beyond. As we saw with the football coaches in the Introduction, coaches have long analyzed game tape, but taping practice is actually more important. Part of building a culture of practice is videotaping practice; it sends the message that improvement through practice matters.

How does your space build a culture of practice and send the message that practice is one of the most important things you do? In his article for Harvard Magazine, “The Twilight of the Lecture,” Craig Lambert describes how Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur realized that his students were not actually learning or retaining information from his lectures. He reflects: “The students did well on textbook-style problems . . . they floundered on simple word problems, which demanded a real understanding of the concepts behind the formulas.”2 When he shifted his approach to focus more on active student learning and less on lecture by asking his students to discuss and explain problems to each other, students were better able to understand and retain information two months after taking his course. However, simply incorporating more active learning into all classrooms is no easy fix, and this is where the skills center at Cornell comes in. Lambert and Mazur point out that in most classrooms there is an “architectural resistance,” as “most classrooms—more like 99.9 percent—on campus are auditoriums. They are built with just one purpose: focusing the attention of many on the professor.”

At Cornell, where the entire space is set up for practice, observation, and feedback, a culture of practice flourishes. For the first round of feedback on practice, after a simulation, the patient takes off his actor hat and, using a detailed checklist, gives the medical student three pieces of feedback from the patient’s perspective to evaluate the exchange (for example, the student did or didn’t greet me by name; did or didn’t listen to my heart or lungs). Actor-patients are trained to use constructive language, to tell the student how it felt to talk to the doctor, and to address the nonverbal messages the doctor was sending during the encounter. Dr. Kang says that some of the more advanced actor-patients have actually modeled the feedback for students (fulfilling the rules we described in the chapter on modeling). Following the feedback from actor-patients, students debrief with faculty, during which the emphasis is on the clinical aspects of the diagnosis. Finally, students review the video of their performance and conduct a self-assessment on their performance (Rule 22).

As we saw in Rule 23, practicing together and exchanging feedback builds isolated individuals into a collaborative team. In contrast to the cutthroat med school cultures of yore, imagine a culture based on collaborative practice and the exchange of feedback in the spirit of becoming the best doctor you can be. At Weill Cornell, aspects of everyday culture are engineered to promote effective practice and feedback. How do you create a similar environment on your team or in your organization? The rules that follow will help you on that path.

RULE 31 NORMALIZE ERROR

When you punish your people for making a mistake or falling short of a goal, you create an environment of extreme caution, even fearfulness. In sports it’s similar to playing “not to lose”—a formula that often brings on defeat.

– JOHN WOODEN

We know a woman who is a breathtaking skier. She tells an interesting story about her breakthrough moment—and it was just that, a moment—when she started down the road of becoming an expert. It happened on the day she decided to fall. She was getting on the lift at the base of a steep, sunlit ski bowl. She had just come down a twisted, mogul-ridden trail in top form, earning the admiration of a teenager who’d been trailing behind her. At the bottom, amidst words like “stoked” and “killer,” the teenager asked, “Do you ever fall?” Getting on the lift, she realized that (1) the answer was no, and that (2) if the teenager had been a nephew or a cousin whom she felt invested in developing as a skier, she wouldn’t have wanted to admit that to him. Instead she would have pointed out that if you never fall, you aren’t pushing yourself and you aren’t improving as fast as you could be. Midway up the mountain she realized that she hardly ever fell, perhaps once every eight or ten days on skis, and even then it was usually at tangled moments when she wasn’t actually skiing that hard. She realized that if she wasn’t falling she probably wasn’t pushing herself to learn as hard as she could be. She had gotten lazy because she was so good.

When she got to the top of the mountain and skied off the chairlift, she knew what she needed to do. She set out to ski hard enough to fall, but she was intentional about how. She knew that there was one thing that she had been working on: pointing her shoulders face down the mountain, no matter how steep. She then set out to execute this skill even if that meant falling. She fell three times that first day. “I could feel myself trying to do exactly the things I was afraid of. I knew if I stuck with it I would conquer my fears.” She began skiing without fearing falling. Within a few weeks she was a different skier entirely.

In that single moment, she was able to embrace two important truths: first, failure is normal and not the indicator of a lack of skill; second, skiing right at the edge of mastery would make her better. She had to trust that exposing her weaknesses—risking ridicule and embarrassment—rather than trying to cover them up would be the driver of excellence. Compare our friend to a skier who just tries to ski the hardest runs as fast as he can. If he pushes himself to fall without encoding success, then he will fail miserably, likely leaning back too much on his skis and risking injury.

How do you build an organizational culture of fearless skiers willing to take thoughtful risks in order to improve—especially when the goal is to encode success? An organization has to help its people realize that failure rate and level of skill are independent variables; it has to help them feel comfortable exposing their weaknesses to their peers so they can help them improve; it has to make them feel trust and faith and even joy, not only to practice but to do so with others. The first step on that journey is to normalize error.

What does research tell us about error? Moonwalking with Einstein author Joshua Foer (Rule 23) found out. When Foer set out on a yearlong journey to improve his memory, he called on the “world’s leading expert on expertise,”3 Anders Ericsson, and “struck a deal.” Foer gave Ericsson all of the records on his training for the United States Memory Championship. In exchange, Ericsson and his graduate students would share the data back with Foer in order to find ways to continue to improve his performance. This deal was extremely useful when Foer hit a plateau in his memory performance. Several months into his work of intense practice, his memory ceased getting better. Ericsson encouraged Foer to learn from other experts who, while engaging in “very directed, highly-focused” routines of deliberate practice, reach a performance plateau—which Foer calls the “OK Plateau.” The key is to then practice failing.

To illustrate the OK Plateau, Foer discusses learning how to type. When first learning, we initially improve and improve until we ultimately reach a peak of accuracy and speed. Even though many of us spend countless hours typing in our professional and personal lives, however, we don’t continue to improve. Researchers discovered that when subjects were challenged to their limits by trying to type 10–20 percent faster and were allowed to make mistakes, their speed improved. They made mistakes, fixed them, then encountered success. If Foer wanted to overcome his own performance plateau, he had to practice failing.

Applying this lesson to organizations is often easier said than done. Most organizations have a difficult relationship with error, and with good reason. Sometimes the results of error can be devastating, causing everything from a lost client, to debilitating press coverage, to massive product recalls. Even when the results would be minimal, it is common for many people in the workplace to be scared of making mistakes and even more terrified of anyone finding out. The challenge for organizations is to find appropriate ways to normalize error in the context of learning and practicing.

Here is what normalizing error looks like: first, challenge people and allow them to make mistakes, as we saw with the skier and the typist; second, respond to errors in a way that supports growth and improvement. You do this not by minimizing or ignoring mistakes, but by supporting people in fixing errors before they become too ingrained (Rule 8). This is a delicate balance, and for each organization and learning challenge it will look a bit different. To see how this balance can be achieved, let’s consider the classroom, a place where learning is front and center.

Something we have learned from watching great teachers is that they are very good at creating a classroom culture where error is accepted as a normal part of learning; but these teachers don’t allow errors to go uncorrected. Great teachers do not downplay the importance of an error, as in “That’s OK, sweetheart, that was a hard problem. It’s OK you got it wrong,” and do not allow mistakes to go unaddressed. When a third-grader reads a passage aloud with a few errors, her teacher will ask her to reread the sentence or phrase that was troubling: “Try reading that sentence again.” If the mistake persists, the teacher may prompt her with a decoding rule like “That sound is a short i.” Champion teachers will be relentless in ensuring that errors don’t go unaddressed and become more inscribed. They correct warmly and firmly. They prefer the rigor that self-corrections provide (as by having a student reread a challenging passage and fix her own mistake) but are direct when necessary (“That word is pronounced ‘diagram’”).

As in any culture, workplace, classroom, or other group, it is the accumulation of exchanges about mistakes that will determine how everyone approaches error. When a student is encouraged both to fail and to try again, it has a profound effect on all students—how they view their work individually and how they support each other in their learning efforts. The classroom becomes a safe place to fail and a place where error is always corrected but not condemned; a place where success matters.

In this effort, it’s important that teachers, coaches, and managers “get past nice.” Often our initial impulse when addressing error is to come at it apologetically: “That’s OK, Sarah. That was a really hard one; you did your best.” Or, “I’m sorry to call you out on this.” This approach has a number of negative effects. It communicates lower expectations, that errors (and feedback!) are something you should apologize for, and finally that error is something to be avoided. When y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Dedication
• Preface: Why Practice? Why Now?
• Introduction: The Power of Practice
• Rethinking Practice
• How to Practice
• Using Modeling
• Feedback
• Culture of Practice
• Post-Practice
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Teaching Techniques from Teach Like a Champion
• Appendix B: Sample Practice Activities
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Summary of Rules
• Index