Practice Perfect - KeynesYouDigIt/Knowledge GitHub Wiki

Notes

  • Keep your best activities, name them, and repeat them often

Rethinking Practice

Encode Success

  • Practice makes permanent
  • Don't make failure likely in an attempt to increase rigor- they need to gradual succeed and make incremental corrections
  • Supervise closely enough to catch bad habits- Design activities so that it's reasonable to catch and remediate error
  • Failure builds character, but not skills

Practice the 20%

  • Practice the parts with the highest impact
  • Use data to uncover what the 20% is
  • The value of practice increases after mastery
    • The 20% impact skills are the ones you want the most automaticity with- be great at the most important thing

Let the Mind Follow the Body

  • Practice a skill to automaticity
  • Make a habit of a skill through practice- you don't have to be aware of your knowledge to use it
  • Moving from conscious to unconscious allows you to use your active cognition on new things

Unlock Creativity... with Repetition

  • Automate more things to enable creativity
  • You need to drill skills and memorize facts in order to engage in higher-order thinking
  • Once they've practiced enough to understand what they're doing, have them reflect

Replace Your Purpose (with an Objective)

  • A purpose is something you want to work on, but an objective is measurable
  • Champion teachers spend most of their time on the objective
  • Give it a number and a target

Practice "Bright Spots"

  • Spend more time practicing strengths than mitigating weaknesses
  • Find ways to use strong skills in new settings
  • Use student strengths as a model for other students

Differentiate Drill from Scrimmage

  • Drills deliberately distort the setting to focus on a specific skill
  • Drills increase the density of repetition and help encode success
  • A scrimmage is designed to replicate the complexity and uncertainty of the full game
  • Both are important, but drills are better at building skill and scrimmages are better for evaluation

Correct Instead of Critique

  • Critique doesn't build habit, only going back and doing it again corrrectly does
  • Neurons have no sense of time- doing it wrong once and right once doesn't actually fix it, you need to correct multiple times
  • Try to correct in private- if you do it in public, make it clear that this is a common error and have everyone repeat it

How To Practice

Analyze The Game

  • Identify top performers and analyze top performance
  • Break down skills, understand the role they play, prioritize, and rank them
  • Describe those skills for others who want to replicate them

Isolate The Skill

  • Break down learning into bite-size chunks
  • Don't practice writing books while holding the pencil the wrong way
  • Look for people compensating for lacking a fundamental skill

Name It

  • Name your key skills to give your team a common language
  • Monitor usage of the names to ensure consistent and correct usage

Integrate the Skills

  • Game-like scenarios: Isolate some realistic section of the game
  • Matching: Choosing the correct (least invasive) tool given several options
  • Game environment: Practice in the same environment the game is played in

Make a Plan

  • What do you need to practice? Use data
  • Plan each minute
  • Rehearse and revise the plan- spend more time planning the practice than you do actually practicing
  • Record and reflect on practice

Make Each Minute Matter

  • Use strong signals ("clap once if you can hear me") to bring people together, not narrative
  • Use timers for breaks
  • Have "back of the pocket" activities
  • Have different ways to combine people quickly (attendance numbers)
  • Name your drills
  • Use self-interrupts to cut people off

Using Modeling

Model and Describe

  • Describe for the learner in no uncertain terms what the skill involves, what it looks like, and how to do it
  • Modeling helps them replicate, description helps them understand

Call Your Shots

  • When modeling, be explicit about what you're doing
  • Tell people what to watch for

Make Models Believable

  • It takes away excuses for not learning
  • Keep the context as close as possible to how learners perform
  • In-person is more believable than video

Try Supermodeling

  • Staff / professional development meetings are an opportunity to model the techniques you want to see
  • Model any other skills you want the learner to develop

Insist They "Walk This Way"

  • The learner should replicate it exactly
  • Don't let them put their own spin on it

Model Skinny Parts

  • Don't model too many steps at once before letting them practice
  • Stay on the part until they can do it with the prompt only

Model the Path

  • When modeling, make sure learners know the work that led to the end result
  • Model the major steps and imperfections that lead to greatness

Get Ready for Your Close-up

  • Use video as a model
  • Enables rewatches, slow-downs, etc.

Feedback

Practice Using Feedback (Not Just Getting It)

  • People get very practiced at ignoring or deflecting feedback
  • You need to become coachable
  • Force yourself out of autopilot
  • Try for a few minutes, get 1 postive / 1 delta feedback, go back and try again
  • Lots of quick at-bats applying feedback
  • You need a tight loop to see whether the feedback works

Apply First, Then Reflect

  • Don't analyze the feedback first- try applying it
  • People often use earnest conversation and reflection as a way to avoid practice
    • "Whose turn is it?" can interrupt this
  • The practice cycle is:
    1. Practice
    2. Feedback
    3. Do over with the feedback
    4. Repeat
    5. Reflect
  • What people usually do is:
    1. Practice
    2. Feedback
    3. Reflect and discuss
    4. Possibly do over

Shorten the Feedback Loop

  • Short, imperfect, frequent feedback is more effective than in-depth feedback later on
  • Have them practice in their head first

Use the Power of Positive

  • Focusing on improving your strengths
  • Positive coaching tools:
    1. Statement of identification - What did they do right?
    2. Statement of application - Apply their skill in a new way
    3. Statement of replication - Help them do it again

Limit Yourself

  • Don't give all of the feedback you could possibly give - 1 or 2 things only
  • If they're getting feedback from multiple sources, use a tracker to make sure that the feedback isn't overwhelming

Make It an Everyday Thing

  • Feedback shouldn't just be linked to mistakes, make it normal
  • Use sentence starters:
    • "One thing I thought was really effective was..."
    • "What if you tried..."

Describe the Solution (Not the Problem)

  • Tell people what you want them to do and why, not what you want them to stop doing
  • Develop abbreviated ways of saying them so you can do them quickly

Lock It In

  • People don't always apply feedback correctly
  • Tools:
    1. Summarize Feedback - Have them summarize and repeat back to you. "Let's both check our understanding here"
    2. Prioritize Feedback - Have them identify and commitment to the two most important things
    3. Next Action - Have them identify the next thing they're going to do

Culture of Practice

  • Culture is the things that people take for granted in an organization
  • Is your classroom set up for practice or observation?

Normalize Error

  • If you don't fall, you aren't trying hard enough. Do the things you're afraid of.
  • Failure rate and level of skill are independent of each other
  • Work on fixing errors before they become too ingrained
  • "Get past nice" and don't apologize for correcting someone

Break Down the Barriers to Practice

  • People will look for ways to avoid practice because it's scary to feel dumb, so they'll put up barriers to doing the work- "I don't believe in...", "This isn't realistic...", "We're working on something else..."
  • Being on topic and being on task are not the same thing
  • Name the barriers call them out
  • Break down tough students by practicing with them one one one until their demeanor changes

Make It Fun to Practice

  • Make games and competitions out of the boring parts
  • Make sure to maintain the objective
  • The team should cheer for people in practice, not just at the game

Everybody Does It

  • Don't let leaders observe other people take risks
  • If you're nervous about not doing a perfect model, tell them you're going to model a B+ version and use it as an opportunity to model the feedback process
  • Show people that you're willing to take risks too
  • Shift the language from "Any volunteers?" to "Who's going to try first?" or "Who wants in?"

Leverage Peer-to-Peer Accountability

  • Make people accountable to each other, not to a big, anonymous organization
  • A "school teacher" is preferable to a "classroom teacher"
  • "Together, we are all the teachers of the students of this school"

Hire for Practice

  • Have teachers teach a sample lesson, and gauge how they respond to, and incorporate feedback
  • Have them teach again to the instructors, incorporating their feedback
  • Assume you're hiring people for at least 5 years
  • Are they receptive to feedback from a subordinate?
  • Hire for the things that don't improve through practice

Praise the Work

  • Praise actions, not traits- traits aren't in a student's control
  • Thank people for behavior that meets expectations- praise people for behavior that exceeds it
  • It needs to be public and genuine

Post-Practice: Making New Skills Stick

Drive-by trainings don't work.

Look for the Right Things

  • If you want to get something done, measure it. Easiest way to measure is to observe.
  • Tell the instructor what you'll be observing for ahead of time
  • Can be done with video
  • Ask students to set their own goals

Coach During the Game (Don't Teach)

  • You can't learn and perform at the same time- you remind people of what they've already learned during the game
  • Remind people with signals and short reminders
  • You can do real-time coaching in the classroom- in-ear devices?

Keep Talking

  • Name the skills and call them out as shorthand
  • Reduce the transaction cost for an idea (and build culture)

Walk the Line (Between Support and Demand)

  • Be transparent about your role as an evaluator
  • You need to balance being supportive with demanding excellence, and consequences for not meeting the standard
  • Echo the mission of the organization
  • It's not advice- it's required to improve performance

Measure Success

  • Measure 2 things:
    • The effectiveness of your practice
    • Whether you are practicing the right things
  • Instead of looking at a lesson purely subjectively, look at it as a series of data points
  • Use multiple methods to gather the data- self-report, observation, performance metrics)

Monday Morning

These are the techniques that are the easiest to remember and implement immediately:

  • Practice the 20 - What are the highest impact skills?
  • Isolate the skill - How can you isolate a skill to be practiced?
  • Name it - Name your most important skills
  • Call your shots - Tell the team what you're working on