|
Coaching how to practice.
Coaching skills create practicing skills which change learners into experts. How to create experts. While experts can sometimes come into existence purely through force of will by learners who engage in unreasonable amounts of practice over enormous amounts of time, usually experts have to be coached into existence.
How to coach skills to create experts. It is almost impossible to coach those who do not want to learn, but if learners do want to learn and are given good coaching on how to practice skills, they will be able to become experts baring physical disabilities.
Doug Lemov, Erica Wollway, and Katie Yezzi in their book "Practice Perfect" provide most of the information on this page but even they seem somewhat confused as to what practice is. They give the following definition of practice. They say: "Practice...is inscribing habits on the brain through repetition with variation." This seems a bit confusing as variations are quite different to repetitions and habit seems to denote some kind of final fixed form. Perhaps there is a better way to understand what practice is and so be clearer as to the role of coaches.
Two types of practice. This site holds that in order to coach learners how to practice coaches must first understand that practice is two things not one. Practice, both physical or mental, is actually two separate but intertwined things. It is firstly, the building of fixed habits by means of repetition, and secondly the building of flexible continually improving skills by means of repetition and iteration. These two types of practice have different objectives and are performed somewhat differently. Imprinting practice. Practice is how we build actions on actions to become fixed habits by repetition of the same action over and over again till it becomes automatic. Improving practice. Practice is also how we build actions on actions to become flexible skills by means of some repetition but mostly by means of finding weaknesses in the actions and correcting them by means of creating variant versions of those actions. Thus each action is an iteration of itself rather than a repetition.
Repetition and Iteration. Although this site has emphasized iteration as opposed to repetition this does not mean that this site is opposed to all repetition. Indeed this site is well aware that some repetition is necessary. It is obviously necessary to the formation of fixed habits and is also necessary to some extent in the formation of flexible skills as well. Instead this site is is trying to make clear that any repetition moves a learned action toward becoming a fixed habit. Fixed habits in turn are actions or skills that have become automatic and reached a dead end. Fixed habits become extremely hard to alter and and are cued to respond to environmental triggers.
This confusion, over the meaning of practice, results in sometimes practice or part of practice meaning repetition, and sometimes it meaning iteration. When people say: "Practice makes perfect." They are not only wrong but are leading learners into confusion. They could mean: "Practice as repetition makes permanent." Or they could mean: "Practice as iteration makes improvement or progress." This site proposes that there are two types of skills and the practice for each is slightly different. Factual and theoretical knowledge. In other pages of this site it has been suggested that drilling or unvaried repetition is not effective in building memory of facts and theories because this kind of memory is all about connections. Each time a bit of factual or theoretical knowledge is recalled it has an opportunity to connect to a different bit of knowledge that is embedded in the learners brain. When it does this it become more than a repetition it becomes an iteration or variation of itself. The more connections made the better it is understood and the better memorized. Repetition without making a new connections is less understood and less easily remembered. Procedural or implicit knowledge verses factual or theoretical knowledge. Procedural knowledge unlike factual or theoretical knowledge is able to become finished. It does not become finished in the sense that it reaches a perfect form but rather it reaches a form that is good enough. Especially for teams of people working together and acting as a single unit the necessity of having each team member's actions fixed is essential. If each team members does not know exactly what all the other team members are going to be doing their interaction will not work as a single unit. The team play depends on every team member repeating exactly the same action every time. For this to happen well all those actions need to be practiced till they become automatic. This however, is the exception because most physical learning is about improving not imprinting. The practice process. Doug Lemov, Erica Wollway, and Katie Yezzi in their book "Practice Perfect" seem to understand instinctively that practice is a process where learners must both imprint and improve. An example of a practice given early in their book gives us some idea of how repetition and variation work together in practice to produce improvement: "On the first try, participants were all over the map in their approaches; people tried using gestures that worked as often as they tried ones that didn't." The learners here have seen the model performances and have created variations of their own performances to try and match those of the model. At first they do not get close but by creating newer, better variants each time through their performance, they got closer and closer to the model. "Over time, successful ideas began to emerge , and as a group they began to 'get it,' to internalize a vision of what the activity well implemented should look like... Variations decreased." In the end most of the group manage to either duplicate the the model or improve upon it. At this point they begin to imprint the action by repeating it over and over. People borrowed ideas from one another and began to look like each other." Almost at the same time, however, variation did not cease completely as the learners began to look at each other's performances and create variants of their own actions that incorporated aspects of each other's performances that they liked. "But
then as we practiced, variation began to reemerge... Slowly,
individuals developed their own style... Variation reemerged.
Creativity was back - within a narrower range but with greater
effectiveness. Style. This is an interesting idea. For an artist style is what make the work unique and recognizable as the work of one unique artist. On the other hand some think that style is what each artist is doing wrong. In terms of action style would be what the actor is doing wrong if there was always the perfect way something could be done. But this is not the case. There are usually many right ways of doing things. So style is useful not a mistake. Habit skills. As discussed on the expertise page, what we call skills can also be habits. Singing, dancing, playing music, martial arts are all fields of learning where certain actions and parts of actions are a standard way of doing things that fall between good enough and approaching perfection. Experts allow these actions to sink into their unconscious, become automatic and become part of their repertoire. Still even though experts allow this to happen there are truly no actions, no way of doing things, that is ever truly perfect. They are simply good enough until someone comes along and improves them. Thus perfection does not really exist, actions deemed perfect are mere rest stops on the road of improvement. Habits only exist in so far as change in them becomes increasingly difficult with each repetition.
The imperfection of improvement. But other actions, as explained on the expert page, are never able to reach the illusion of perfection, nor are they ever held to be perfected, nor can they be. Thus they must remain in the intermediate stage of being unfinished and flexible. These actions or skills have no end point and are thus open to being continually or infinitely improved. In sports there are records like the fastest times, the longest jumps, the highest jumps etc. are not the perfect form of an action and never can be. These are actions that are never consolidated into a fixed habit and yet they can be almost fully automatic. It's just that a few of their elements or aspects remain not automated. The optimal performers of those skills or actions never reach a stage where they can perform a perfect model form of the action or skill. Why? Because they too are always improving in those skills and actions. Flexiskills. There is no word in English to distinguish these flexible skills from fixed habitual skills. However this site has created a word to stand for this concept. Lets call them flexiskills. Flexiskills are a flexible form of action that can still be changed fairly easily at any time by the creation of a new variant of that action. To create an improved version of an action or a variant, a learner must first identify how the previous version is falling short and make adjustments to that version. A Learner can do this by combining some old aspects or elements of the action, that were good or optimal, with those aspects or elements that they have created to replace the aspects or elements they found to be erroneous or of poor quality. The resulting combination is a variation of the original and replaces it. Or someone (usually a coach), who is more expert in the field, may suggest a better alternative. Of course there is not always a guide. Performers who are experts in in their field and at the top of their game have often gone past where coaches or any kind of feedback can help them improve. They still keep trying to improve though and they can do it. How? They simply try slight variations they create of many actions. They alter one small element in their performance and create a variant with the new element. Sometimes they do this by mentally picturing how it might work better, or sometimes they just try different things at random. If the action turns out better they then double down and repeat it many times till they can reliably perform it. Still the action or skill remains flexible, a flexible kind of skill, or a flexiskill. The creation of these variants is what prevents the action becoming fixed. Team plays. However, fixed habits have their uses. Fixed habits are at their most useful when a group of people have to cooperate as a singe unit. If everybody in a platoon knows knows their part in a platoon action and they can all rely on one another to play their parts perfectly then they can be unstoppable in a battle. Similarly sports teams can learn to act together in plays so smoothly that they will win game after game. Such actions become possible only if each member of the group learns his/her part by repeating the actions in practice over and over until they become automatic. These planned strategies and plays can become so automatic, fast and intricate as to bamboozle any opponent even if the opponent knew they are coming. The group acts together like a well oiled machine. One time right. Flexiskills are formed mostly by means of iteration where the learner does not try to repeat an action as before but rather creates a variant of that action in an attempt to improve on the action. However, as Doug Lemov, Erica Wollway, and Katie Yezzi point out in their book a certain amount of repetition may be necessary to get a learner close enough to being able to perform the model being presented. Getting an action or a technique right one time is unlikely to mean it is learned. An action or technique may have to be repeated many times before it can be reliably produced. A learner has to have a skill or technique sufficiently well absorbed before they can begin thinking about starting to produce variations and thus improvements on those skills. This is a delicate balance. Doug Lemov, Erica Wollway, and Katie Yezzi recommend that coaches insist that learners be able to produce the modeled action exactly and on demand before allowing further development. Bits. Even though flexiskills have to remain unfinished and flexible, parts of them can become, if not automatic, pretty close to being automatic. Coaches can help learners become aware of feelings that an action or technique is starting to become automatic. Coaches can then help prevent this from happening by creating an improved model, having it performed and insisting that the learner imitate it before it is too late. The learner then performs the variation of the action thus preventing the action solidifying in to a fixed habit. Think of it like this. Repetition causes an action to freeze into a fixed form while creating variations of an action allows it to remain flexible. Unlearning. Part of the problem with the coaching of practice is that learners often come to practice, not as novices, but as people with baggage. These learners have already learned ways of doing things, which are not only not optimal, but which may be completely self sabotaging. A learner is much more difficult to coach if he/she believes (wrongly) he/she knows (at least in part) how to perform the action or technique being modeled. This can be made even more difficult if, what the learner has learned (incorrectly), has sunk to an unconscious level where it has become automatic. In this case they have formed an anti skill more commonly called a bad habit. To get rid of a bad habit the learner not only has to practice the new skill but he/she has to first find the cue that is activating the bad habit and use that cue to activate the new skill instead of that bad habit. This is a process of physical unlearning. Unlearning is not a matter of one action overwriting another. Bad habits continue to hang around like bad smells. When faced with a need for the learner to unlearn; coaches must, not only point out what the learner is doing wrong and provide a superior alternative, but also be able to guide or help the learner to find what is cuing the bad habit and demonstrate how it can be used to cue the new skill instead. Of course things are not always so bleak. On occasion what has been learned incorrectly may not be all bad. Sometimes parts of the original action are usable and it can be adapted by becoming a starting point for creating variants of the action. In this case what has been learned incorrectly is itself a variant of the optimal action to be modeled and can be improved by iterative practice. Unlearning then becomes unnecessary. Social prejudice against practicing some types of skills. Surgery, you might think, is a skill where practitioners improve all the time. While this might indeed be true, surgery is also a skill where practitioners cannot afford to make mistakes. You would think then, that surgeons might be open to practicing their skills in a safe culture where they could make mistakes without threatening people's lives. Pilots, after all, can safely crash in flight simulators. Why can't surgeons develop a safe space away from patients where they can continue to observe new models get feedback and operate all without damage to patients or themselves. Trainee surgeons do, of course, have some places to safely practice but as soon as they are surgeons this practice seems to stop.
This is also true in many other skills and the professions they belong to. We are simply prejudiced against some skills being coached even though such coaching would make a better safer world. Think about your profession. Is it being coached and if not why not. Could you do something about it? If there is some coaching being done, then be one of the ones being coached or one of the ones coaching. Conscious control and variants. In his book "Moonwakling with Einstein" Joshua Foer suggests that: "The secret to improving at a skill is to retain conscious control over it while practicing it.... to stay out of autopilot." Learners do indeed need to remain aware of and in control of the action. When practicing a learner must remain observant of his or her own actions in order to produce internally self generated feedback which enables him/her to select which areas of the action need improvement. The learner also needs to be in mental control so that he/she can then alter the action in those selected areas on the fly. Coaches should therefor construct methods to help learners to remain self vigilant and self controlled during practice. Perhaps the question is more why would a learner stop this self observation and control. The main reason learners stop this self examination and mental control is because they no longer need them. When an action becomes automatic the need for self observation and control simply recedes. Automatic actions require no thought yet they are faster, smoother, and more accurate. Indeed trying to maintain some conscious control tends to increase the likelihood mistakes and be a possible cause of choking. In all sports and many professions people simply stop improving after a while. This is called plateauing. Sometimes this plateau is good enough and what you may want to achieve, but other times it is an unintended blockage that is preventing further improvement. Actions will not improve without variant actions. In order to improve a learner needs to return to self observation and retain that mental control so as to make alterations to the action on the fly. In other words the learner needs to produce variants of the action. Also the learner has to return to making errors. If you are not making errors you are not pushing yourself hard enough and thus not really improving very much. The thing is that improvement needs variation. Variation leads to error. Error leads to correction. Correction is improvement.
Coaching as continual skill improvement and perfecting fixed habits. Any action physical or mental can be performed better and coaches, mentors or teachers can help learners get there by coaching them. Coaching is mostly about causing change and thus improvement in skills and about bringing about continual improvement in individual flexiskills. But sometimes coaching can be about creating habit skills such as will enable teams of people to work together like a well oiled machine. Ether way coaching has to start with a model of how it should be done.
Codifying the coaching of skills. In 2012 Doug Lemov, Erica Wollway, and Katie Yezzi produced a book called "Practice Perfect". In "Practice Perfect" they set out to codify the best ideas they could find to produce the best coaches possible. Unlike most skill books which which tend to be by or about great coaches in various sports, this book came into being for the express purpose of finding ways to coach teachers into becoming better teachers. This book is not another book on self help, or even a book of specific coaching, it is a mine of useful and practical information on how to coach any skill and this site will refer to it often on this page.
Practice makes permanent. Doug Lemov, Erica Wollway, and Katie Yezzi proposed 42 rules for coaching how to practice any technique or skill. Their first rule and it is assumed to be the rule they thought the most important is "encode success". Lemov etc. explain that in the story below Uncle Lou despite his ultimate success has imprinted being wrong on himself: "Someone you know, maybe your Uncle Lou, tells a version of this story He will be thinking back to the days when he was just learning to (a) write a legal brief, (b) ride a bike, (c) dance the tarantella, or (d) shingle a roof and say, 'By God, I tried it a hundred times. Got it wrong the first ninety-nine but I picked myself up. Eventually I got it.'"
THE PROBLEM IS THAT WE MAKE THE
MISTAKE OF THINKING THAT PRACTICE Be careful what you imprint. Doug Lemov, Erica Wollway, and Katie Yezzi mean by the above, that any kind of repetition tends to encode what is repeated. This being the case what is repeated had better be success and not failure. Now this does not mean that they want learners to avoid failure or errors but rather errors or failures should not be repeated. Failures and errors should be corrected and quickly.
Effort and long hours is not enough. Elsewhere on this page, this site will emphasize the importance of effort, hard work and long hours of practice as being essential to producing expert or successful practitioners of any technique or skill. However, although this is true it is not sufficient in and of itself to produce successes. When first trying to find ways of improving learner's actions Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi discovered that coaches often missed catching and correcting learners practicing incorrect or badly performed actions. This has the unfortunate effect of the learners ending up practicing (repeating) incorrect or bad performances. This not only meant that they were not getting better they were actually making it harder for themselves to get better. Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi give an example: "However, you observe that many of the players complete the the activity with their knees locked. Some appear to pass the ball fairly well but in reality they are practicing doing it wrong, getting better at standing up straight instead of flexing their knees. Every time they run through the drill, they get more and more familiar with the feel of playing with their knees locked. As they do so they get further and further from their goal." Avoid encoding error. It is true Uncle Lou may have learned the way he expounded but just because many people learn that way does not mean it is an efficient way of learning. Why? They are not encoding how to do something right. They are encoding how to do something wrong. A learner's best efforts should be made to only repeat those actions and parts of actions that they want to become permanent and coaches should be alert to stop a practice before error imprinting can occur in actions they think should remain flexible. Encode Success. Of course some actions do need to be repeated despite the fact that learners do not want them to become permanent. In this case learners simply need to repeat them enough so that they are able to perform them accurately on demand. These can all be considered to be successful performances and repeating them not only encodes them but also encodes success. The point is that while many actions skills and techniques should not be completely encoded as a habit the abstract idea of success can be encoded and accepted as the usual way the world works. Put in enough effort, work hard enough and you will succeed. Repeat and encode. When Less is more and more is less. Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi also point out: "...less
practice of better quality could yield more preferable results than
more
practice of lesser quality... Imagine the benefits to the teaching
field, Goldstein wonders, if the same amount of practical learning
could be accomplished in a practice lab at one fifth of the cost of a
typical placement, or at the same cost with five times the learning." The just right of challenge. Any imitation of an action or technique needs to be challenging in order to make its accomplishment feel worthwhile and thus provide motivation to perform it. However, if the action or technique is too challenging the leaner will not be able to be successful at performing it.
In "Practice Perfect" Doug Lemov, Erica Wollway, and Katie Yezzi explain the importance of enabling learners to be successful in their performance as follows: "Facing pitches that are moderately above her current ability level is likely to allow your daughter to apply small corrections to what she does and see whether they work. It allows her to get more efficient with her technique. However if the pitches are too fast and result in her continually missing the ball, she's likely to start reaching desperately to make contact, disrupting the things she already does well and trying random rather than productive adaptions. Straining fruitlessly for the ball, she risks developing new bad habits. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham observes that in his book 'Why don't students like school?' that people learn fastest when the problem solving they are asked to do requires them to make small and steady leaps, when problems are challenging but not sink-or-swim-ish." Motivation and success. The point is that incremental successes provide pleasure and much in the way of intrinsic motivation. On the other hand, too much failure and errors can be highly demotivating and can cause learners to give up. Lemov etc. continue: "You want a success rate that's high enough to be reliable: most of the participants get it right most of the time. ...If the error is persistent and prevalent, ask yourself whether there needs to be so much of it. Why not redesign the process instead, eliminating complexity or variables to make the task temporarily simpler, breaking the chain of skills down to focus on just one, or slowing things down so there is time to process the complexity and then speeding it up later on?" Practice activities should be engineered to produce reliable successes. Practice should be simplified until success becomes reliable.
Mind follows body. Doug Lemov, Erica Wollway, and Katie Yezzi tell a story of a teacher Sarah who was spending too much time directing students. The coaches got her to practice one of their tricks for keeping children on task. After practicing intensively for quite a while Sarah had someone observe her teaching to see how well she used the technique. To Sarah it seemed that in the heat of teaching she forgot to use the technique. But Lemov etc. notice: "Her observer had seen something totally different, however. She had seen Sarah use 'What to do' time and again when students needed a quick correction to help them back on task. Sarah, in short, had been using the thing she had practiced without even realizing it." Muscle memory. This is muscle memory at work. Physical memory, the memory of how to perform actions can not only be performed without thought, it does not even require the awareness that it has been performed if it has become automatic. Lemov etc. say: "You don't have to be aware of your knowledge to use it." Faster than thought. Doug Lemov, Erica Wollway, and Katie Yezzi ask us to consider the seemingly impossible task of hitting a baseball: "It takes about 0.4 seconds for a serious fastball to reach the plate. 'Conscious awareness takes longer than that: about half a second,' writes Eagleman, so most batters are not aware of the ball's flight. The entire process happens before the batter becomes aware of it. Success is based on habits the batter has built but cannot consciously manage in the moment they are most needed."
"While you are executing a series of complex skills and tasks that were at one time all but incomprehensible to you your mind is free to roam and analyze and wonder. If you use practice to build up skills intentionally, you can master surprisingly complex tasks and in doing so free your active cognition to engage in other important tasks." Unconscious decision making. Some skills like batting in baseball need to be learned all the way to automaticity so they can be performed reflexively before any conscious decision can be made. In such cases there is no time to think, the learner must react automatically to environmental cues. Schemas, variants or layers. Most skills, however, and indeed this baseball example need to be a series of schemas or variant actions that turn out slightly differently depending on many different environmental cues. Doug Lemov, Erica Wollway, and Katie Yezzi call this building up layers of skills. They say: "Build up layers of of related automatic skills so that participants can do complex tasks without actively thinking about them." Routines and subroutines. These can also be thought of as routines and subroutines as in computer programming. Think of an action as being a routine. Inside that routine there can be subroutines that are called by the initial routine in response to various environmental cues. There could be many of these within any routine and at many different places in the routine. Depending on which subroutine is called and when, the outcome of the action can end up very different. This can all happen without any conscious thought by the learner.
Time is relative. Time is a relative experience. This is partly because of how fast our brains process information. If our brains are processing data fast, time seems to slow down. This in turn is partly due to how fast a charge moves along any neuron's axon which in turn is dependent on how often that pathway is used. Well used pathways are fast so time seems to slow. Seldom used pathways are slow so time seems to move fast.
A fast brain slows time. However, the speed of the brain as a whole depends on how much information is being processed by a brain at any one time. The more information we take in and process, the longer it takes us to process it. The less information we take in and process, the quicker we can process it. This results in time appearing to speed up when we are processing a lot of information and slowing down when we are processing a small amount of information. Other factors complicate this, like the readiness of the body to act, but essentially time's apparent speed depends mostly on the amount of information a learner's brain is processing. The amount of information that a brain is processing at any one time also depends on a number of factors some within our control and some not. Elsewhere on this site slowing down time was discussed in terms of the effect of pain or fear. This site suspects that both fear and pain have the ability to slow down time because they focus attention, to the exclusion of all else, on what is causing the pain or fear. Likewise other external events may also focus a brain on particular events and exclude other information as is suggested in the zits cartoon below.
Doug Lemov, Erica Wollway, and Katie Yezzi take the idea of learners performing automatically, and so using less brain processing resources, and point out that this may also be perceived by the learner as time slowing down: "Athletes and other performers often describe how, after a certain amount of experience and practice, the game 'slows down' for them. What this means is that at certain points in the game their mind has gotten access to new processing capacity because complex actions have come to require a smaller percentage of available capacity. All of a sudden they can look up see an open teammate or a new passing lane." Little thinking required and excluding information. This idea of increased brain resources being available when less information is being processed is about two things. One is that when focusing on a particular action a brain may automatically exclude information that appears not pertinent. In other words the more we focus the less information we take in or process. Two, when performing an action automatically a brain does not have to use up recourses thinking about what to do. In this way the amount of resources being used is reduced in two ways. With automaticity there may be focusing with less information coming in, but the mere fact of thinking not being required during task performance, may itself free up a lot of brain resources. That, by itself, may be enough to make time appear to slow. On top this actions that are automatic will have been performed many times and thus involve brain pathways that are very fast. This also could contribute to the appearance of time slowing down.
Boredom, focus and perceptual relativity. Now boredom and focus may seem like opposites and it may therefore seem strange that both boredom and focus both seem to slow down time. However, the thing is that focus reduces the amount sensory information that needs to be processed by a brain and boredom simply blocks boring sensory information from being processed by a brain. Boredom is basically a lack of surprise or change bought about by either repetition of sensory information or simply no change in sensory information. How we experience time depends on a number of factors but the amount of sensory information that needs to be processed is probably the most important factor influencing any organism's perception of time. It also should be pointed out that both focus and boredom free up large amounts of brain recourses, which is another way of saying they both tend to slow down time. The amount of time we experience increases as we process less and less information thus time slows down. Information is processed more and more quickly with every time we process it and we have more time left over for us to experience thus time slows down. Conversely the more information we process the more our recourses are used up and we experience less time thus time speeds up. Also the less often we experience the same information and the more often we experience the uniquely new, the slower we process it, and the less time is left over for us to experience, thus time speeds up. Four ways we might use freed up brain resources. In their book Doug Lemov, Erica Wollway, and Katie Yezzi suggest that the time and brain resources that are freed up may be used to be creative. Slowing down time could indeed provide an opportunity to be creative but it seems unlikely that the extra brain resources would actually cause creativity. Here are four ways these freed up resources could be utilized by learners. The Robot. Firstly, there is the possibility that the learner may use the extra time and resources to simply let his or her mind wander. The slowed down time may be spent thinking about something else. This is what Colin Wilson calls "the Robot" where the learner lets automatic actions take over to the point where he or she can become completely unaware of performing the action. A variation of the Robot is where the person is so busy thinking of something else (like the teacher above) that he or she becomes unaware of his or her own actions. Devising Variants. Secondly, the learner may use the extra time and resources to observe and analyze his or her own actions and in response devise or create a new variant to be performed at the next practice run through. Programed response. Thirdly, there is the example presented above about hitting the 90 mph fastball. In that particular case time may not be slowed down enough for the learner to have time to think. In that case when and how to begin the swing and any changes made after the batter begins his swing have to be in the form of automatic responses to cues presented by the incoming information. Intentional change on the fly. Fourthly, there is the possibility in a slower sport like football that the freed up time and resources may be sufficient to allow the learner to make adjustments to his or her actions in real time while performing. In this case the learner would be changing his or her actions on the fly. SUBROUTINES. Changing an action on the fly and a programmed response are not very different. In both cases an already formed schema is activated and run as a sort of subroutine within the already running action routine. The difference is, change of an action on the fly, is activated by the thoughts of a conscious mind, while a programed response, is activated by some cue occurring in the external environment and occurs automatically without conscious decision.
Nested subroutines. It may well be that an action routine may have a subroutine within it and that subroutine may have another subroutine within it and that subroutine may yet have another subroutine within it. In this way an action may may be moving along a path till a subroutine is cued and then the path will change and become the path of the subroutine. If another subroutine is cued the path will change again. In this way an action can become built up of ever diverging paths that morph into something completely different to the action it started out to be, a whole new highly complex action. Can automatic actions be creative? These nested subroutines are also applicable to actions that are entirely automatic and have subroutines that are cued by the environment automatically. An action routine would be running when suddenly a subroutine would be cued by the external environment causing a different action to start running till yet another subroutine is cued and another action subroutine starts to run. To outside observers it would look like a whole new complex action had been created yet no actual thought or conscious decision making would have taken place. It is just a matter of whether it is possible to have creativity without intention to create and thus without a creator. Then again, it could also be said, that there is some intention to such actions as each activation cue has to have been intentionally paired with a particular schema at some point in the past.
"No error should go uncorrected." John Wooden Wooden also believed correction was wasted unless done immediately. Correction is something done not told. Correction, whether it derives from the learner's own aspiration to imitate a modeled action more closely, or from feedback received from others, is the very heart of any learning. A coach can tell a participant how to do it better, but he/she will be more effective if he/she also gets the participant to do it again immediately. Correction is only truly effective when it is done by the learner, and when the learner first becomes aware of how to do it. Corrections that are attempted after feedback has left active memory are not so effective. Doug Lemov, Erica Wollway, and Katie Yezzi in their book called "Practice Perfect" explain: "...correction means going back and doing it again and doing it better - as soon as as possible. So in an ideal practice, a player might go right back into the line and practice cutting more sharply, say [or any action]. Only when she has done correctly what was at first erroneous has correction been accomplished. ...Only correction, doing it over again right, trains people to succeed." Correct in multiples. Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi explain further that performing an action correctly once is not enough to embed it in our brains as something we can do on demand: "It may be worth reflecting that the body's neural circuits have very little sense of time. If you do it right once and wrong once, it's encoded each way equally in your neural circuitry. It may matter little which one happened first. The ratio is one to one. If you are correcting then correct in multiples. If one of your tennis players hits backhand incorrectly, doing it right once will help erase the error, but doing it right three or four times right away will begin to overwhelm the wrong memory with the right one. Think about saying, after the error is corrected, 'Yes. Good. Now do it five more times.'"
ANALYZE THE GAME. Statistics. Any ability is made up of a number of individual skills and the first job of a good coach is to determine what those skills are. Statistics can help a coach determine what actions produce a desired result and what actions do not. In his book "Moneyball" Michael Lewis described how Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta changed baseball forever by using statistics to find and identify baseball skills that no one else was using to pick team members. They bought it cheap and developed it to create a winning team. The only trouble was that everybody copied this idea and some were able to do it better by paying more. In their book "Practice Perfect" Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi explain that this method can not only allow coaches to pick the best performers but also has the potential to help in selecting the better coaches and eventually transform your learners by coaching them to use the newly discovered skills. They point out that Beane and DePodesta could have used Scott Hatteberg and the others like him as models for the team to imitate and changed the game even more than they did. They say: "He [Scott Hatteberg] ...developed (1) his ability to hit almost anything, (2) his ability to know what pitches he could do something with, (3) his ability to look for those pitches, and (4) his ability to spot and avoid those pitches he knew he couldn't do anything with. It is possible that the insight that Beane would have gained in analyzing players like - the list of more discrete, subtle, and potent skills that could be practiced in isolation - would have transformed the A's into a talent hotbed." They go on to explain further they say: "The first step for any team or individual in getting practice right is to get the game right , and we do this through analysis of who and what wins the games we set out to play.
HIRE THE RIGHT PEOPLE Good coaches work well when they have a number of skills:
Hiring for making the most of feedback. However, the type of people you hire to coach learners are basically the same type of people you want as learners, the type with a willingness and a determination to improve. If you have those sorts of people they will help you make the learners more like them. What Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi discovered was that, when choosing new coaches the skills applicants already had was only somewhat important. They found it was far more important to choose people who were likely to improve. They say: "We soon realized though that it wasn't about candidates demonstrating they could teach a sample lesson in our schools. What we became most interested in was their ability to respond to feedback - how candidates take it and how they are able to incorporate it into their instruction. In the feedback session, we often ask candidates to repeat a particular part of the lesson, practicing with school leaders. What teachers do in the sample lesson is important, but it's more important to see how they do in the feedback session... Assume you are hiring people who will stay with your organization for at least five years. In that case it is more important to think where they will be in their second year, after one year of practicing and coaching, versus where they enter in year one. If you have someone practice and he is a six out of ten, but open to practice and feedback, then he could be a valuable contribution to your culture of practice. On his way to becoming a level eight, he may make other eights into nines through his relentless spirit of improvement. You may be better served to hire an employee with a lot of potential through practice than someone who is fantastic but could potentially be a drain on a culture of relentless improvement. Building an organization around practice means hiring people who are responsive to it: people who like and use feedback, who enjoy working with a team, who are comfortable talking about their mistakes, and who are egger to improve. In short, incorporating practice into your hiring changes your selection process because it changes the attributes you are looking for. Set candidates up to have an informal interaction with some someone who would be their subordinate. Are they respectful and polite or dismissive? Are they receptive to feedback from colleagues regardless of their positional authority? [an advertising exec] ...When you give her feedback on her innovation, is she excited to incorporate it? [real estate exec] ...How does he respond to a simulated situation in which a client does not like what he has prepared? Is he open to feedback? ...As part of the interview process, ask candidates to try out different approaches based on feedback, and see if they improve through practice, or if they are resistant to it. [How do you tell if they are responding well to feedback?]
MAKE A PLAN If you are going to teach or coach you need a plan of how to do it. Such a plan needs to be driven by the data you collected when analyzing the game. Plan with data driven objectives. A plan needs objectives. Objectives do a number of things. Objectives enable learners and coaches to see that improvement is taking place. They enable coaches to measure how close learners get to those objectives and what percentage of learners are improving and how much. Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi give an example from the documentary "The Heart of the Game" with Bill Resler and the Roosevelt High School basketball team: [Resler works]"...analyzing game and practice tapes and data on the precise skills...that each girl needs to work on. From this he determines the number of minutes that need to be spent on each discrete skill at practice, and which skills are most important to overall individual and team performance. Using these valuable statistics, he creates a practice plan that details which skills players will practice, for how long and with which players. He sets the objectives first and then plans the particular drills he will need to meet those objectives." Plan down to the minute. Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi continue: "Plans that lead to successful practice account for each minute with useful activity. Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi recommend the "Living the Learning" template from Paul Bambrick-Santoyo's book "Leverage Leadership" for this micromanaging of time: "It asks planners to map out exactly the objective for each section of the practice, the types of activities they will use to achieve those outcomes, how many minutes each piece will take, and exactly what materials will be required. It is time consuming and requires presenters to plan precisely what they will say, how they will word each question, and what answers or ideas they hope each question will generate from the participants." Rehearse and revise the plan. No plan comes into being in a perfect form. It needs adjustment and revision from the start to iron out the bugs before it is ever implemented. Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi believe that this adjustment can be implemented by means of rehearsal. They give examples from the coach of the Washington Redskins as follows: "'Wednesday and Thursday practices are preceded by walk-throughs - rehearsals for what will happen in practice.' The coaches have mapped out a script - sometimes 40 pages long - of the plays they intend to use. Then before the practice, they bring the whole team to rehearse the practice they have scripted, walking through to check that everyone knows where he needs to be and when, and to ensure that the plans on paper translate into the practice they are looking for on the field. Questions that might arise from translating the written script to the playing field are answered; explanations of the next steps or the next moves are made during this time." Also no plan can last. Every plan needs to be updated to suit the current needs of the team and simply find ways of improving. Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi give guidance on updating plans as the team evolves and improves: "One of the ways we have invested in getting better at leading practice is in videotaping our practice sessions - both one-on-one sessions and and practice with groups of teachers. We then analyze our sessions and get and give feedback on how to improve at practicing." STOP WASTING TIME. Make each minute count. "If you want to be a coach buy a whistle." This is how Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi begin this section on how to avoid wasting time, or making time usage on practice optimal. A whistle is just one of many ways of moving people quickly from one action to another. They say: "Identify the ways you inadvertently waste time and create remedies as soon as possible. Turn those remedies into routines. [Here are some they have identified for you.] Milling around. Time waster: In between activities that require additional setup or discussion among leaders or coaches, participants stand around doing little or nothing. Remedy:
Waiting time. Time waster: Participants spend more of their time waiting in line to practice than they do actually practicing. Remedy:
Remedy:
Remedy:
Remedy:
Remedy:
ISOLATE THE SKILLS Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi point out that skills are complex and that coaches need to isolate individual elements of those skills that are small enough that a learner can remember them and have a good chance of being able to to perform them in an optimal manner without too much difficulty. In other words each element selected for practice should be comprised of bits of actions that the learners are already familiar with and know how to perform. They say: "What do we mean by isolation? Consider suturing, one of the many steps of heart surgery. Suturing is complex in itself and must be further broken down. The novice needs to know how to hold the surgical instrument, how to make the knots, how to close wounds, how to suture through scar tissue, how to select suture materials and how to suture when drains and tubes are needed...having identified each skill or technique you need to build in your performers, you begin by teaching and practicing those skills [or elements thereof] in their in their simplest form by by breaking the unit of learning and practice down into bite-sized chunks. [First step.] The ultimate objective is still to successfully use your new skills and others in an integrated setting - in a big game, in a surgery, or in a reading lesson. Practicing the technique in isolation in a simplified session, is ironically often the necessary first step to achieving that objective." Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi explain a common misconception: "Not all drills isolate skills. In your process of planning, be sure to design the drill that isolates first." Retraining and unlearning. Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi say that more often than not the participants who come to learn skills come having learned the skills already but incorrectly. They may be able to perform the technique but they do it badly because they include some unfortunate element that is dragging their performance down. This can be something simple like holding a surgical tool the wrong way. In this case the element in question needs to be isolated and practiced before the learner can even begin to think about performing in a real situation. Even the ones who are doing well may still be missing some basic skills. They have merely found ways to compensate for their lack. These are all things that need to be isolated and practiced. Lemov, Wollway, and Yezzi put it like this: "This situation can easily unfold in performance professions. The unfortunate norm is to bring new people into the company and expect them to perform regardless of the degree to which they have developed individual skills. In on-boarding new employees, trainers rarely ask them to practice discrete skills in isolation. In the best scenarios, professionals go back and develop those skills as necessary. More often, though, they try to get by with compensation skills. You eventually hire others to mask their weaknesses, or you work around the skills they never developed. Far better is to consider preparation programs as an opportunity to break down performance and ensure a strong foundation." INTEGRATE THE SKILLS. Bringing them together into single fluid motions. Coaches help learners isolate skills and skill elements so that they can be learned but they are useless unless they can be combined together into into long connected continuous chains of actions that can be performed in a game, hobby or work place. A learner must also know what elements to choose and when to use each one in combination. "When you begin to integrate and make the practice look more authentic, a variety of drills is still the most effective way to practice. As you begin practicing skills in combinations that more closely resemble the game, you need to attend to three aspects of practice:
EVERYONE IS ACCOUNTABLE FOR EVERYONE ELSE. Coaching as working together. Coaches being humans often have individual agendas and goals but they will never be good coaches unless they are working as a team toward a single goal. Each teacher should be accountable for the work of every other teacher at a school and every coach should be accountable for the work of every other coach of a team. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi learned the following from Ronald Morrish's book "With All Due Respect": "Morrish introduces the idea that at successful schools - schools where teachers, students, and families are working together towards a common goal - teachers see themselves as 'school teachers' not 'classroom teachers.' That means the teachers are invested in each other's success and that all teachers are responsible for the teaching and learning of all children. The sad reality today is that many of our schools are full of classroom teachers, teachers who walk by unsuccessful classrooms and roll their eyes thinking, 'Those students behave with me.' Classroom teachers subscribe to a 'shut my door and teach' mentality. They believe they have one responsibility: to teach their kids. This type of culture is poisonous. It's poisonous to the development of teachers and it's poisonous to children." "Unless each teacher ascribes to this bigger picture schoolwide discipline cannot be implemented. In a culture of practice where people are invested in each other's success and development teachers improve and students learn, schools are better and so is our society... Encourage team members [staff, coaches] to make mutual commitments to each other."
FINDING MODELS OF BEST PRACTICE. The best way to learn a skill is to imitate someone who can already do it. In order to create or improve a skill a learner needs to be coached by being presented with an example of the skill being performed correctly. This means Coaches need to be able to model high quality performances for learners or have to find good models of those skills to present to learners. Use traditional self selection. Some areas of expertise like ballet have a proud tradition of expert teachers who pass on their skills to the next generation by coaching them. Ballerinas at the pinnacle of their careers are very aware that they will be expected to pass these skills on and that they would be wise to work toward preparing to be able to do this as a backup means of earning an income. This is true especially because a simple injury could end their dancing career at any moment. These people can model the required actions, provide feedback about learner performance, and have the additional skills in coaching needed to coach the next generation into becoming experts. Such areas of expertise have remarkable coaches turning up year after year like clockwork. Create models from the best examples. However, some areas of expertise do not have this tradition of passing the torch from generation to generation and thus skill learning is left very much up to the individual learner. Thus they do not produce exceptional coaches, their best people who could model great performances are hidden away performing, and little has been done to break down such performances and distill them into masterful feedback. Curiously one of the areas of expertise most lacking in this respect is the very expertise of teaching itself. USING LIVE OR RECORDED MODELING. Use live modeling. Doug Lemov, Erica Wollway, and Katie Yezzi in their book called "Practice Perfect" explain that live models have some advantages such as flexibility, spontaneity and believability. Live modeling is most effective when coaches need to inspire learners as it will always appear more authentic than recored performance. Likewise live modeling will always appear more believable than a performance where all the flaws have been edited out. However, live modeling has some drawbacks. Live models are persons who have off days when they will not be able to to perform optimally. Live models may not be able to perform optimally if environmental conditions are insufficiently conducive. Equipment may fail in a live demonstration causing the demonstration to be less than optimal. In a live demonstration many parts of the model may be superfluous or even incorrect and may distract the learner to pick on those wrong or superfluous elements instead of the significant elements coaches might wish them to imitate. Use video modeling. On the other hand video of model actions is in many ways superior. Video does not have off days and masterful performances will always appear optimal. Video does not vary with environmental conditions on the day. If video equipment works the demonstration will always be optimal and if it fails no demonstration will occur. Learners will not be distracted by superfluous elements in a demonstration which can lead to picking up incorrectly on those superfluous elements instead of the significant elements. In a video any superfluous elements in the demonstration can be simply edited out leaving only the significant elements that coaches might wish learners to imitate. In addition video has many other obvious advantages. In their book "Practice Perfect" Lemov et al explain: "You can select and cut video to show exactly what you want and no more, culling any footage that may dilute the power of the precise technique you are trying to highlight. Also you can re-watch a model on a video as many times as as you need in order to break down, slow down, or repeat a technique to better learn it. You can focus practice on different pieces of the model in stages: what was said, how it was said, and what was communicated nonverbally. Rather than sending someone to watch another colleague model a skill or technique and hoping the model goes according to your vision, you can have the learner watch a video which you know will show the precise model and then ask him to report back to you." Video also has the advantage of reaching many learners at once enabling fast acquiring of the skills. Video can be shared and swapped allowing for more and better videos. Video by spreading skill and expertise quickly produces another crop of often better expert models who can also be videotaped. Lemov et al point out: "This has yielded more and more high-quality models which we have again captured on video as the teachers have applied what they saw modeled in the first round and made even better." MODEL AND DESCRIBE Mirror neurons. Although learners are generally aware that seeing a model performance is a superior way of practicing or learning an action, than merely having the action described to them, it is usually not clear to them why this is so. It is now believed that when a learner observes a model of an action certain neurons within the learners brain called mirror neurons are activated. These neurons try to approximate a simulation of the action as near a possible to the modeled action. This process happens automatically. In other words the mere seeing of an action jump starts us, with a readiness to act and to improve on that action. A description of an action by contrast requires conscious stitching together elements of previous actions to try and approximate the modeled action. The problems with both modeling and describing. However, there are problems with both modeling an action and describing how to perform an action. In both cases they can be misinterpreted and imitated incorrectly. For instance, a learner can pick up on peripheral or unhelpful aspects or elements of the model's performance. Likewise a description of an action can be misunderstood or simply leave out important nuances of the action. In both cases this can lead to imitation of unimportant and even incorrect aspects or elements of the action. Combining modeling with describing. If instead, coaches were to present, not only an optimal model of the action but also to preface it with a meticulous description of the action, they could reduce the possibility of learners picking up on unimportant and useless aspects of that model. Also, by combining a description of an action with the presented model coaches could help learners to look for or pick up on those aspects or elements in the modeled action that are significant or important. Similarly the modeling of an action would highlight those significant and important nuances in the action that would be left out if a learner was only given a description of the action. Ultimately, by combining modeling with good description, the possibility of misinterpreting or piking up on the wrong aspects or elements of the model performance can be greatly reduced. Also the possibility of picking up on the correct aspects or elements of the model performance will be greatly enhanced. In this way we could greatly lower the possibility of learners learning incorrect or flawed versions of an action and greatly increase the possibility of learners succeeding in correctly imitating optimal models. MAKE MODELS BELIEVABLY POSSIBLE FOR THE LEARNER LEVEL Intimidation. The modeled actions performed by an expert can be, and often are, so skillfully performed that any learner viewing the performance can be totally intimidated by the performance. You hear it all the time. People will say that they cannot do that, they do not have the talent. They see the performance as so perfect that someone ordinary like themselves could never accomplish it. Nearly all societys seem to be cursed by this strange concept of inborn talent even though it can be shown that any so called talented person has spent long hours practicing for years. Good enough. In their book "Practice Perfect" Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi explain that models and modeled actions should be good enough to inspire but not so exceptional as to be discouraging. They say: "The key is not that the video has to be a flawless demonstration of a technique for it to be a valuable model; it has to be believable and authentic." If the learner believes a model is beyond their capacity to perform they will make excuses and the model becomes useless as the learner will not even try to copy it. Doubt can run very deep. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi explain that sometimes: "Practitioners want to see and believe that the technique being modeled will work in their exact context." To overcome this doubt models need to be performed in a context that is as similar as is possible to the one in which the learner has to perform. Also as Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi point out: "In-person modeling is often more believable than models that are prepared on video." MODEL AND PRACTICE THE LEARNER'S GREATEST SKILLS. Corrections. It is obviously important to prepare models of the skill areas that learners are unable to do, are struggling with, or are unable to do well, because coaches want learners to get better at everything. Coaches want learners to have well rounded skill sets, becoming adept at all the various skills involved in the area of learning they are trying to improve. A great deal of learning is finding errors and correcting them. Bright Spots. However, it is also a good idea to prepare models of those skills that the learners are already performing well. Dan and Chip Heath coined the term 'Bright Spots' to bring to our attention the idea that coaches that have learners concentrate on the skills they are weakest at to the exclusion of all other practice are doing the learners and themselves a great disservice. The best players, the best teachers, the best performers of any skill set all still have those areas within the skill set that they do not do well. They did not get to be the best at what they do by concentrating on the areas where they were weakest. Instead they uncovered the bright spots in their skills and doubled down on them. From strength to strength. These skilled performers got to be the best by concentrating on and practicing their strengths. They find something that they can do well and practice that until they can do it so well that they become experts in the field. All learners come to coaching practice with different strengths and weaknesses. In their book "Practice Perfect" Lemov et al examine why strengths should be singled out to be modeled: "One conclusion you could draw from this is that if you wanted to make game changing teachers, you might obsess less on mitigating every weakness and focus more on maximizing strengths, on getting them so good that they overrode weaknesses. If a participant notes that he or she is already good at something you propose to practice, its usually in an effort to avoid practicing it, but in fact it's all the more reason to practice - because practicing strengths is more likely to make them great." Motivation (strengths and successes). Lemov etc. continue: "As an added bonus practicing strengths helps us remember what we are good at and feel positively about the profession or performance at which we hope to excel. The more people enjoy practicing, the more they will do it and the better they'll get. Having strong presenters practice presenting can make them feel even more confident and joyful. You might give them advance presentation formats in which to apply their skills, or assign other job tasks where their presentation skills might be applicable. Spotting things that people are good at and finding ways to use those skills more broadly is one of the most productive things an organization can do for an employee, or that practice can do for a participant." Progress toward perfect and beyond. Perfection is not reachable. The moment you have perfected an action you see how to improve it further. The moment you reach your full potential you find you have acquired new potential. Coaches have many ways to push learners to improve what they already do well.
Teams practicing strengths. One team member's strength is another team member's model. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi continue: "Practicing bright spots can be particularly effective when practicing as a team. In any one team, chances are that not everyone shares the same strengths; one person's bright spot becomes another person's model, which can be very valuable to the entire team... The whole team benefits. The person who demonstrated gets the opportunity to shine and to feel the respect of peers. He also gets even better, as performing in front of peers who are insiders and know the difference between good and great and can raise the level of performance as well as the quality of feedback. The team is strengthened by these reminders that their colleagues bring important skills to the work they share. Everyone is inspired to strive for excellence." If coaches can present fellow learners as models of the right way to perform specific actions it will seem to the other learners much more possible, believable and realistically reachable. NAME THE MODEL PERFORMANCES. Concepts. The naming of techniques, actions, or specific skills helps solidify those performance models into concepts. In "How Emotions are Made" Lisa Feldman Barrett points out that concepts are those things that enable each of us to predict the world in which we live. With some concepts the world causes each of them to be experienced by each of us in the same way so we construct them similarly. But other concepts exist because we have agreed with others that they exist and they become real because of our mutual belief in their existence. In each case we construct these concepts as part of a codependent social reality.
Names. By naming techniques, actions, or specific skills or their modeled performances we either solidify their existence as concepts or actually create or bring them into existence. As an action or technique model becomes more real to us, by having been named, it creates a number of benefits for learning that technique or action model. Firstly as Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi explain naming an technique or skill enables communication about it: "If done thoughtfully, giving the skills you are working on and the drills you use to practice them meaningful names can be a powerful tool, indeed too powerful to dismiss or ignore. Naming skills you aim to practice in isolation creates a language for your team. Given that these skills or high performance are exactly what you want your staff to spend their time talking about and focusing on ...you have an opportunity...to create your own shorthand for the skills that matter the most." Reality construction. Secondly, the new social reality thus constructed by naming, changes how both the mind and body of the learner works and leads learners to act. Every time a learner hears the new word the new concept is brought to mind. Whether the word is spoken by a coach, a peer or the learner him/herself, the action or skill is cued in the learners mind. The speaking of the word sets off a number of changes in what Lisa Feldman Barrett calls the body budget that prepare the body to perform the action. For instance the the amount of insulin being released into the blood may go down or the amount of glucagon being released into the blood may go up or cortisol may be released. All of this means that glucose levels in the blood will go up. When this is combined with faster breathing the body is prepared for fast energy release. The body becomes primed ready to perform the model of the skill or drill. Simulation. Not only that but the cuing of the model skill or drill may also activate a simulation of the model technique which then takes place in the learners mind. Although the activity is not being performed in reality it may be being seen, heard and felt in the learner's mind as it is simulated there. This is a kind of prepractice that can occur before practice in reality even begins. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi in their book "Practice Perfect" suggest: "Name each skill or technique you have identified as an important building block for outstanding performance. Monitor the use of shared vocabulary: use the names, ask staff to use them, and then ensure that the names are being used correctly." REQUIRE EXACT IMITATION. The desire for individual expression. Learners, like any human, want their actions to be unique and to reflect their individuality. This often interferes with imitation and thus with learning. This error in imitation finds the learner making variations of the modeled action that are always slightly off of what has been presented by the model. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi explain it this way: "...when presented with a model, most people feel they are supposed to put their own spin on it. We are often uncomfortable with this [exact] kind of imitation, which, when we were infants and toddlers came so naturally. ...as adults some people over intellectualize. They try to think through whether the model matches their style and personality, and they get stuck there, not ever applying it. Some learners misapply the model in an attempt to give it their own spin, and then mistakenly assume it was the technique that didn't work for them rather than their implementation of the technique." Solutions. This results in a situation where the learner never truly imitates the model correctly at all. There are some very simple solutions to this. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi suggest: "Learners need to hear that direct replication of the model is a completely legitimate way to approach a technique." "When asking people to follow a model a useful first step is for them to imitate the model exactly." Another possibility that might be helpful is to explain that while creating variants of an action or technique is something that eventually should be done, the first step in being able to accomplish this is to first master the expert model of the technique that has been presented. Think of the model as a template that can only be varied after its mastery. Finally it might be good idea to forbid learners to create any variants of the model until such time as they can perform the action exactly as presented in the model. SIMPLIFY TO MATCH THE SKILL EXPERTISE LEVEL OF THE LEARNER. The curse of knowledge. Experts in particular and well everybody in general tend to suffer from 'the curse of knowledge'. In their book "Not Knowing" Steven D'Souza and Diana Renner define 'the curse of knowledge' as: "The curse of knowledge means that the more you know about a subject, the harder it is to think and talk about your area of knowledge in a simple way. We tend to communicate from too high a level, misjudging other people's ability to understand us, causing confusion and hindering the learning of others. Where the task is to communicate knowledge, this curse can neuter the benefits of the knowledge as it fails to be received by the intended audience."
In their book "Made to Stick" Chip and Dan Heath explain it like this: "When we are given knowledge, it is impossible to imagine what it is like to lack that knowledge." In other words the more a person knows the less able that person is able to explain it to others. Coaches need to be aware that they tend, on some level, to assume learners are able to understand anything they say or do. They the coaches understand it. They say it in nice simple words. Why can't the learners understand?
The reason is of course that learners often are not familiar with sufficient of the connected information to provide context and thus make the new information understandable. Knowledge can only be built on previous knowledge. Any new action is built up out of previous actions, in that it is always an iteration of some previous action, and even the new parts have usually existed as elements in other actions the learner knows. Any performance model needs to be made up out of elements the learner is familiar with and be specific to his/her ability to understand. The problems. Actions are no different to any other kind of knowledge. Coaches and expert models are subject to the same curse of knowledge. When performing model actions everyone, but experts in particular, often perform those model techniques in a way that is too many, too fast and too complex. How can you tell if it is too many, too fast, or too complex? If learners cannot explain it back to you or cannot get even close to performing the action as presented in the model, then you have some idea that they may have been presented with too much information, the information or action may have been performed too fast, or the action may have been performed in a manner that is too complex. Also it must be remembered that new actions are mostly built up out of elements of action that the learner already knows how to perform. If a learner is presented with a new model of an action that has too many elements that he/she has never performed before then that new action is going to be very hard to imitate and thus learn. Break it down. In any case one answer to these curse of knowledge problems, is to break down any new action model that learners are having difficulty with, into its constituent elements or aspects. In this way each aspect or element can be modeled individually. However, many elements or aspects will already be familiar to the learner so that usually only the most difficult or tricky aspects or elements will need to be practiced individually before the learner can try and imitate the initial full model action again. Lemov et al call this modeling the skinny parts. Slow it down. Another answer is to slow down the model technique or action so it can be perceived and imitated in slow motion. Once the technique has been mastered in slow motion both the modeled action and the attempt to imitate it by the learner can be speeded up again. Simplify it. Similarly the technique being modeled can be simplified until it reaches a level where the learner has sufficient familiarity with most of the aspects or elements comprising the modeled technique to be able to perform a close variant (at least) of that modeled technique. Connections. Coaches should also connect any performance models to what the learner already knows. Obvious as it is, coaches need to be able to put themselves in the learners shoes and somehow imagine what it is like not to know how to perform the actions that he/she is trying to model. The Heath brothers say this is impossible but maybe it is not. Its certainly worth a try. The repetitive group coaching exercise. When coaching a group of learners with different levels of knowledge and skill familiarity, coaches can use this exercise. It should be noted, however, that repetition of this sort will embed the early part of the action causing it to become almost automatic. Modelers or coaches simply start off with the smallest simplest first part of the action that they can. They model it and have each of the learners imitate it. If it is small enough and simple enough the learners will all be able to perform it. Then the expert modeler preforms the same model again but this time the action is extended by adding the next element of the action. Again each of the learners is required to imitate it. If they could perform the first element they will be able to perform an action containing two elements. From there coaches proceed by adding an element each time to the action that is being modeled. In turn each learner should then imitate that new model. Each time through most learners will be able to do this. If a learner fails, immediately repeat the model of the stage they are at and have that learner correct their effort immediately. At the end of the exercise all of the learners will be able to perform a quite complex action with precision. CALL YOUR SHOTS. It is suggested above that optimal models of an action should be accompanied by a meticulous description of the action to reduce the possibility of learners picking up on unimportant and useless aspects of that model. However, even if a coach clearly describes what an action or technique should be like, giving the learner some idea what to look for, by the time a learner is observes the model he or she will have forgotten a lot of it. Also in the heat of action a learner may be distracted from thinking about that particular well practiced skill or technique.
Cuing, what to look for. This can be overcome by simply by telling the learner what to look for just before the model is to be presented. In their book "Practice Perfect" Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi call this 'calling your shots'. They point out: "Some version of billiards require that before you take your shot, you announce which ball you are going to sink and where: '3-ball in the corner pocket.' In modeling you should make your intentions transparent as well, taking the time to preview and to prepare learners for what they should be looking at and for." Coach cuing. Not only can learners nudge their own memories in this way, but coaches can similarly jog the memories of learners by precising a description of the action just before it is to be presented as a model action. This should be enough to cue the full description and thus bring to mind what needs to be looked for in the model. Another way to cue the learner's observation is to have the model performed a number of times and each time call out something different for the learner to look for. Name cuing. If you have given the technique, drill or skill a name, by simply speaking that name, just before presenting the model of that skill, may bring to mind the described salient features. It may be enough, to bring to the learner's mind, what needs to be looked for in the modeled presentation and what needs to be altered during the imitation performance. The thing to remember is that not only are most learners going to be untrained in what they are able to do, but also they are untrained in what they are able to identify as skill in others. MODEL THE PATH. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi discovered that it is often not enough to present the best or most believable model of a technique to ensure its optimal imitation. They found that such models could still have a debilitating or counter productive effect on learners. Pressure to perform. For instance, even if a model seems believable a learner can still be intimidated by the sheer lack of errors and the model's apparent perfection or the learner's own current lack of ability. Lemov etc. explain it like this: "Sometimes showing our novice teachers these videos has an unintended consequence of overwhelming them and making them feel further away from being great, rather than one step closer. They end up feeling that excellence is really magic rather than something they can achieve." Cuing and triggering. Also cuing and modeling are very interrelated activities. Sometimes a modeled action may include cues that are meant for a team. If the model, the coach is presenting, is in how to coach a team Lemov etc. explain how this works as follows: "He [the leaner] sees that occasionally you [the coach/modeler] call out to specific players in short, one-or-two-word commands." A coach doing this is cuing actions in those players with those short commands. Lemov etc. continue: "What is not obvious from that modeling is how you developed your team such that your way of coaching works. What is missing are the ways you put those short commands into place so that they could trigger complex action from [members of] the team. If the new [learner] coach were to just apply what he saw during this game on his team, they would likely receive no guidance..." What the learner coach has missed is all the work where the modeler/coach instilled the cues in the members of the team so they would be able to react when given the short commands. Many examples of this kind of cuing are given throughout "Practice Perfect" especially of teachers cuing students sometimes with words and sometimes with mere gestures. Like the example with team coaches none of this can be learned by learners simply watching teachers give those commands and the students responding. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi explain how this problem can be dealt with. They say: "In some cases, with some techniques, for modeling to lead to successful practice, novices need a model not only of proficient performance but also of the steps that experts have taken to get there." Solutions. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi give a couple of suggested approaches that cleverly avoid these modeling problems. They say:
METAMODELING OR SUPER-MODELING. Role models. Anyone who becomes a coach, a teacher, a parent, famous people, in fact anyone prominent in a person's life can become a role model. Role models are what all learners aspire to become. To this end learners become highly motivated not only to imitate the impressive skills of role models but are highly motivated to mimic their every action and affectation both excellent and foible. Coaches as role models. For coaches this means learners are not only likely to emulate what they do well and right, but that learners might also copy what they do badly and wrong, displaying and absorbing their worst features. All parents are aware of wanting children to do what they say and not to do what they do. Unfortunately for parents children will always mimic what they do and ignore what they say. If they hit children the children will learn to hit others. It's just the way the world works. Burden or opportunity. Now coaches and teachers may think that this is a great imposition and a burden to have to be aware of everything they are doing and have to try and do it in such a way as to model every action the way that they would want learners to imitate it. To some extent they are right, but they should also be aware that being a role model is also an opportunity. It is an opportunity to model on another level, a meta level. An opportunity to super-coach. Some models a coach may present to learners are explained in detail and highlighted as being important to imitate now, but the rest of a coach's actions are also models running in the background, not highlighted, but seen over and over again. Just think, if coaches could make all those modeled actions optimal models that they want learners to emulate how much faster learner's imitation might improve. In their book "Practice Perfect" Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi explain that even the smallest use of of what they call super-modeling can have enormous effect on learning and improvement through practicing. They say: "In 'super-modeling' you will also model how to give feedback as you do that for each person during practice. You will model how to present to a group. You will model how to manage time in presentations with the use of a your timer... A simple way to to reinforce the skills you supermodel is to ask staff [learners] to reflect not only on the content you have delivered but also on what they can gain from how you have conducted the [presentation] workshop." These additional skills that a coach can be modeling are not skills that a coach should expect learners to pick up after a few sessions, but the more more learners hear and see the such models of optimal performance, the more they will become ingrained and cued before any practice even begins.
Motivation or information. Feedback can be motivational or informational.
FEEDBACK AVERSION. Fear of feedback. The trouble with feedback is that we live in a social environment where feedback is normally identified as criticism and that criticism is associated with all the fears that hold learners back from succeeding in appropriating new skills and improving the ones that they already have. Most societys inevitably seem to imprint on learners the dread of failure, being wrong, looking stupid, showing weakness, being incapable and of course being criticized.
This results in a situation where learners tend to experience feedback with trepidation as a personal attack as if it were these other things that they fear. This may happen despite the fact that learners may believe feedback is essential for any improvement in their actions.
Avoiding feedback. Feedback can of course be positive or negative but even positive feedback can be demotivating or the cause of anxiety. Any coach providing feedback to learners has to keep in mind that any feedback is likely to be met with resistance. In their book "Practice Perfect" Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi explain: "People get feedback all the time. The kids on your Little League team get it. So do your direct reports, we hope. This means that they probably practice 'taking' feedback quite a bit - they learn to get better at nodding with eye contact, making their tone free of defensiveness, and taking notes even. Recipients may signal that they take feedback seriously, that they value it, but this does not necessarily mean that they use feedback. Nor does it make them better at employing feedback over time. In fact the opposite may happen. People may practice ways of taking feedback that help them avoid doing anything about it."
PRAISE CAN BE DEMOTIVATING. Praise, surprisingly, can also be demotivating especially when a learner is praised as a person or their traits are praised. The work of Carol Dweck has shown that praise of a person or the traits of that person has a number of demotivating effects. For a start it has shown that when a person is told he/she is intelligent, clever, smart, talented, good at this that and the other is being affirmed in his/her level of proficiency is by those others. Unfortunately such affirmations are addictive and those so affirmed become dependent on them for their self worth, their self esteem and their believed competence. Dependence. When affirmation of what a learner is comes from others such as coaches and not from the learner's self, a learner tends to become lazy in forming their own judgments of their own self worth, self esteem, and competence and become dependent on those coaches etc. for judgment of of themselves. They may then tend to perform badly because they do not believe achievement and improvement are within their control. They may also avoid taking even minor risks and fear failing and being wrong, as they tend to doubt their own competence, and their ability to to improve by correcting their own errors. Fixed. Also, the concentration on what a learner is, assumes a fixed unchanging state that leaves no room for improvement in the future. This can lead learners to believe they do not need to try and improve and that trying may present them as less talented. After all, if they were that talented they would not need to try. Fear. On top of that, it terrifies or devastates the learner every time they fail, make errors, or in any other way fail to live up to the praise. This fear can become so intense that the learner may desist from trying just so they can tell themselves that they could have succeeded if they had tried. Also they may become terrified of criticism and so only attempt what they are sure of succeeding at. They may even cheat rather than fail or be criticized. Fixed mindset. Carol Dweck believes that trait or person praise tends to lock learners into what she calls a fixed mindset where they become demotivated, incapable of much in the way of improvement and likely to get worse. MOTIVATIONAL TYPES OF PRAISE. However, Dweck's work has also uncovered that praise can be given in many ways that are highly motivating. Praise of effort. More explicit praise that is clearly expressed in order to motivate would be praise of effort. When you praise a learner's effort or hard work there is no down side. Whether there is information in the feedback or not it will still motivate. In their book "Practice Perfect" Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi call this a statement of application. It basically indicates how the learner applied him or herself. They say: "...it may be that you want to focus less on any one thing that she is doing now and more on the practice she has put in. Stressing hard work and its connection to results is not an insignificant factor since as a culture we are probably too inclined to attribute to natural ability what is really a result of hard work and practice. 'Good Danielle. You practiced all week, and now look at you!'" Praise of progress or improvement. Praise of progress or improvement is always welcome and always motivating. This kind of praise works best when some form of measurement is involved. Coaches measure actions, techniques etc. so they can compare them with there previous incarnations. In this way learners are able to see how much they have progressed or improved. When learners make such comparisons they observe concrete evidence of their improvement or progress and this is the best kind of motivation. Although it is not mentioned in "Practice Perfect" it seems simple enough to also devise a statement of progress as follows: "Good Danielle. Last week you could not move quickly enough to get in position behind the ball but now you are doing it easily."Praise of persistence. Persistence is essential to motivation but praise of persistence can have some problems. Persistence, and praise of it, can be good for learners when it helps them overcome obstacles or it keeps them trying when errors overwhelm, or stops them giving up when the going gets hard, but it can have a down side. It can cause learners to not know when to give up, or bang their heads against a wall that will never break. It can make learners obstinate and stubborn in ways that are the antithesis improvement. Although the idea of praising persistence is not mentioned either and while we need to keep in mind its downside we can and should praise persistence when it has been successful: "Good Danielle, You kept at it trying and trying again until now you have succeeded. Well done! Praise of grit. Instead praising persistence it might be better to praise what Angela Duckworth calls 'grit' (perseverance and passion are combined in grit). Passion goes back to the Greeks. It is an interest that persists unreasonably or obsessively. It is an intense desire or enthusiasm for something. Perseverance is steadfastness in the doing of something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success. It is a single-mindedness in developing a technique. It is a determination not to give up just because some thing is hard or difficult and to only give up in the face of impossibility. Although it is also not mentioned in "Practice Perfect" a statement of grit can also be devised as follows: "Good Danielle. Your enthusiasm for improving this technique and your diligence in persevering to accomplish it has paid off."Praise of strategies. Strategies are about how learners approach solving problems. How many different strategies, how broad the types of strategies are, all serve as good indicators of how well a person will perform. Praise of strategies will also highly motivate. When you praise a learner's strategies there is also no down side. Whether there is information in the feedback or not, it will still motivate.
Growth mindset. Feedback may seek to change learner's mindsets from ones that are fixed and unchangeable to ones that grow and change for the better. This is done as explained above by praising effort, hard work, persistence, improvement, strategies etc. anything but their traits, abilities or talents. For more information the selftheories page and the work of Carol Dweck.
THE INFORMATIONAL PURPOSE OF FEEDBACK. Template. Feedback functions to inform learners what needs to be done differently and how it should be done for them to make progress or become better. It should be a template for learners to follow or imitate. Expose. Feedback functions to expose which elements or aspects of an action need to be changed and to explain clearly how to do that, while leaving other elements or aspects unchanged. Build or modify. Feedback should enable each learner to either build a new action out of old elements or aspects or modify an action to create a new improved variant of that action. Feedback about an action, the learner has previously mastered, morphs into a new iteration of itself and then is performed as a variant of itself. CRITICISM. Criticism is often unnecessary. Criticism itself is often thought of as an essential part of feedback but it may not be as essential as is believed. Almost all types of criticism tend to demotivate learners to some extent and for that very reason it should be avoided as far as motivation goes. A coach should give serious thought to whether criticism is really necessary for any reason before criticizing a learners actions. Coaches can bypass using most criticism if learners can somehow be cajoled to take on any feedback given to them and use it as quickly as is possible. The only good reason to criticize an action when coaching is to make sure a learner is aware of exactly what he or she is doing wrong and why it is wrong. This can be useful in some instances where some learners in some environments tend to resist acting on feedback that doesn't include their errors and weaknesses. Such learners need to be made aware of which elements in an action are insufficiently optimal and why those elements are dragging down their performance before they can commit to fixing those actions.
A guide to giving good criticism. Coaches then should use criticism sparingly and only when no positive way forward is in evidence. Criticism and how it can be used effectively is covered on the criticism page and so will be only dealt with briefly here as the three most important ideas that can guide coaches in giving good criticism. Criticize the performance not the performer. Coaches should criticize the action not the actor; the performance not the performer. Never be critical of the person. If you are personally critical, you are fostering a condition of learned helplessness, which is the very opposite of what you should want to do. What you should want to do is facilitate retention and improvement. Telling a person they are stupid, unintelligent or talentless and incompetent is not only demotivating, it is also creating a mindset that it is safer not to try. After all if the learner does not try, and if his/her work would have been incompetent, not trying only reflects the lack of trying and not that the person is incompetent. You can be critical of what the person has done i.e. their actions or their work or specific skill elements. When a learner's work is criticized constructively, he/she instinctively recognizes that the critic is trying to find flaws in the work only so they, the learner, can correct them, and make improvements upon them. People generally receive accurate and constructive criticism of actions with openness.
Be future focused. What learners need is feedback, that while being critical also, at the very least, gives some clues as to how to do it correctly or improve it. Good critical direction should assist the learner towards fixing problems in the future. The problems of the past have already occurred; the goal is to use the past mistakes and difficulties as tools to revise what was done and prevent similar occurrences in the future. The future is about what can be done (instead of what was done). The future offers progress toward an enhanced state which can be reached by enacting feedback about how to do it better. The criticism sandwich. In his book "The Power of Positive Criticism" Hendrie Weisinger tells us how to effectively mix praise and criticism to produce very effective improvement. He believes that learners, if they hear praise first and then hear 'but' tend to stop listening after the 'but'. Weisinger says: "Let me give you an an alternative method of giving the merits so that they are heard and remembered. Instead of starting with the positives, start by focusing on how the person can improve; then conclude by telling the person what he is already doing well. State how the recipient can improve - AND - state the positive things...
This capitalizes on three points. 1 The first is that in a sense there is no actual criticism only implied criticism. Also most people respond positively when you tell them to make something better. When you tell a person how he can do something better,...your recipient becomes more eager to hear your pointers. 2 Second, this format takes advantage of the fact that people are much more likely to act productively on the criticisms they receive when they feel good. When you end your criticism on the upbeat, you are getting the recipient to experience positive affect, and this good-feeling state translates into motivational energy. 3 The third point involves the word 'and.' ...It integrates the preceding statements. ...your recipient is much more likely to think, 'I am doing a lot of good things, and I can be that much better if I improve on some others.' ...it helps your recipient realize it's okay not to be perfect; she does some things well and can improve on others, and this is pretty good." MAKING CRITICISM AND OTHER FEEDBACK AN EVERYDAY THING Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi found that because criticism and feedback were resisted it was important to find ways of creating a culture where feedback is normal. They say: "Feedback is hard to give, and hard to craft well. But a bit of culture building can go a long way in making it feel like a gift. To make this possible you have to frame specific language that people can call upon consistently to make it safe, natural and easy to to give and get feedback. Ironically one of the most effective tools is so simple that people may overlook it: sentence starters..." Sentence starters. Here are two good starters they suggest: "One thing I thought was really effective was..." "What if you tried..." They also suggest that the following be kept in mind when giving feedback:
WHAT TO WATCH FOR TO CREATE GOOD FEEDBACK. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi discovered that they could obtain better feedback from themselves and and the learner participants by instructing them and themselves to watch for three things in the participant's performances. This worked even better if each person was assigned to coach and watch for only one of those things.
Watching separately for those three things makes sure that the feedback covers all of those three types of feedback. PRACTICING USING FEEDBACK. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi also discovered that if they were to overcome learners natural resistance to feedback they would have to put systems in place to ensure that learners would be forced to overcome their natural resistance. They say: "One of the keys to getting people to use feedback is building a culture of tacit accountability - one where participants are expected and incentivized to use the feedback they are given." [More on this later.] They suggest that coaches do not inquire what the learner thought of the the feedback but rather ask: "...how it worked when she tried it, or how many times she tried it or to publicly commit to a time and place when she'll try it." Structures. They also developed several systems or structures to help suppress resistance and actively practice using feedback. 1 Structure one. They had each teacher teach a sample lesson and appointed the other participants to specific tasks of coaching as suggested above. Here is what happened: "We stopped the activity two minutes into the role play, and the teacher received her feedback; she could ask clarifying questions only briefly to make sure she understood, and then she would start over going back to the beginning and attempting to use the feedback right away." Benefits. They point out that this system of forced iteration has three benefits:
2 Structure two. The coaches also pushed (nudged) learners to try small changes even if they did not agree with them. The learners were surprised how effective this could be. They said: "The results were immediately apparent. By being nudged to use the feedback they came to believe in it and the small changes could indeed make a very big difference. 3 Structure three. The coaches also used some tough love to get learners to force themselves to use the feedback they received. They might suggest that the learner does not really belong there if they do not make use of the feedback. No arguing or avoiding, they just go back and do it again immediately, but also, they force themselves to vary the action to follow the feedback. When learners see how effective they can become resistance tends to melt away.
Internalize feedback . Perhaps the ultimate benefit of practicing using feedback is for the using of feedback to become internalized in the learner. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi give this example: "As David roles through his intro a second time, he doesn't like what he hears. It is too sticky sweet, not like himself, and therefore not really honest. He stops himself, pauses, and looks at Laura. He says, 'Let me try that again. I just have to say it like me.' And back to the top he goes. Interestingly, David has here internalized the process of using feedback. The interruption and the feedback are his own - a self-correction. He has learned, through practice, to make a habit out of stopping and applying feedback right away."
1 If feedback becomes internalized learners can begin to notice their own weaknesses, dig out their own errors and bad performance elements. They can then begin providing their own feedback for correcting those things and then apply that feedback creating a cycle of continual improvement. 2 Likewise with internalization learners can begin to also notice their own strengths, uncover the skills they perform well, and extract those elements of their skills that typify high performance. They can then begin to provide their own feedback to make those things even better. They should apply that feedback to make those things even better creating an upward spiral toward an optimal or approaching perfect performance. 3 Also this internalization will help learners to see past their weak or strong performances and see how they might have done things differently. They can then begin to create their own feedback that details how to perform in those various different iterations. Finally they should be able to apply that feedback to continually vary and improve their own performances. DESCRIBE THE SOLUTION. Focus feedback on the solution not the problem. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi point out that words that clearly describe what to do is the best kind of informational feedback: "Good feedback describes the solution - in concrete actionable terms - rather than the problem... Consider how much more effective it would be to replace a statement that describes the problem, such as 'Stop fooling around!' with a statement that tells a student what to do: 'Sit down at the table and start your homework.'" Avoid the word don't. When coaches say 'don't' it sounds like they they are telling you what to do but really the information is vague and at most implied not told to you directly. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi say: "How many times did someone who was tasked with coaching or teaching you fail to tell you what to do? Typically that person might tell you what not to do: 'Don't overhit.' 'Don't get caught out of position.' 'Don't say tactless things in meetings.' Describing the solution would mean replacing 'Don't overhit.' with 'Take a steady even swing.' or "Try to imagine you're dropping the club face onto the ball.' It would replace 'Don't get caught out of position.' with "Stay goal side of you're man.' It would replace 'Don't say tactless things at meetings.' with 'When someone tells you what country they are from, just say you are honored or happy to meet them.'" Be specific not general. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi continue to explain that even when 'don't' is not used the feedback can still be vague, in that it is too general to be meaningfully applicable. For instance "Get in position." is not much clearer than "Don't get caught out of position." "Take it easy." is not much better than "Don't overhit." On the other hand "Get between your man and the goal." clearly tells the learner exactly what to do. Similarly "Keep your swing steady and even." supplies the needed information. Shorthand. When learners first start to listen to a coaches feedback they may not recognize the jargon or shorthand the coach uses and this is another possible way in which learners can find feedback vague or incomprehensible. Coaches need to be aware of this with beginning learners. But learners will also benefit from eventually learning any shorthand, as in both practice and application there is often no time to offer lengthy statements without pausing and resetting, as Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi explain: "However, if you had previously offered longer descriptions of solutions during earlier stages of coaching, you can develop stock phrases, shorthand reminders of those longer pieces of feedback. You can then call them out during performance, as in following examples:" "Stay goal-side of your man, and give progressively more space the further away the ball is." Shorthand: "Goal-side. Space." "Take a steady, even swing; imagine you are dropping the club face onto the ball." Shorthand: "Drop the face." FEEDBACK AND THE CURSE OF KNOWLEDGE. The curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge as explained above is the inability of experts to explain information in ways that are understandable to lesser informed individuals. This is because it is difficult for anyone to imagine not knowing something that they know. Blaming the learner. It is very easy for a teacher or coach to blame the learners for his/her own inability to make feedback or any information understandable. Coaches must try to avoid this curse whether presenting models or giving feedback and not blame the learner like Dilbert below.
Too much, too different, too complex. Coaches should be aware that their feedback, like their modeling, can suffer from the curse of knowledge. It is easy to give too much feedback, feedback for which the learner has no frame of reference, or feedback that is too complex. Just because an expert knows how to do something well does not mean he/she knows how to pass that information on to learners in a form they can understand and comply with. Indeed experts can both assume learners can understand what they say and yet lose patients with them when they fail to understand. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi give this humorous example of tennis super coach a learner might have hired to lift their game: "I am going to tell you one more time...There are nine things you must do to hit a forehand. Only nine." The learner tries and fails again and again. He gets one thing right but forgets most of the others. The learner is not even able to keep all nine ideas in memory despite being told them over and over. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi continue: "Turns out...knowledge can get in the way of learning when it isn't doled out in manageable pieces. This is Super Coach's problem: asking you to pay attention to nine things at once is all but impossible. But he is not alone; most people - the three of us included are inclined to give too much feedback at once." "One of the keys to coaching, then is to develop the self discipline to focus on fewer things" Limit information. The coach has to somehow limit the amount of information he/she gives, and limit the complexity of information in every feedback delivery. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi continue: "When performers or employees or team members or children are trying to concentrate on more than one or two specific things at once, attention becomes fractured and diluted. Ironically this can result in reduced performance."
Start with what is known. A coach must also put himself or herself in the learners shoes to understand what the learner knows, and build from that. Any learning must connect to what the learner knows, in order to provide context for the learner's understanding. Consistency. Not only that but the coach has to make sure each feedback delivery is consistent with all the other feedback deliverys and contain no inconsistencies. SHORTEN THE FEEDBACK LOOP. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi understand that feedback is most effective if it is given immediately and if it is acted on immediately. They say: "With feedback, it turns out that speed is critically important - maybe the single most important factor in determining its success." "John Wooden was notoriously obsessive about this. As one of his players wrote, 'He believed correction was wasted unless done immediately.' As the minutes slipped by, the player's mind and body would forget the situation. Once he had practiced doing it wrong, the window rapidly snapped shut and correction becomes useless."
Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi give a good example of how to do loop shortening as follows: "Katie's shortened the feedback twice. She cut off the exercise and gave the teacher feedback right away, as soon as he began to struggle, and sent him back to the beginning so he would practice using the feedback. But even before that she asked him to rehearse in his head. There were just a few short seconds between when he began to founder and when she was there to support and just a few seconds before he started to apply the feedback. The teacher did as Katie asked, even though he was nervous and perhaps not really sold on the feedback." "...the memory of the failure was truncated and instantly replaced by success... The teacher used the technique for a minute and was visibly pleased and happy..." INFORMATIVE PRAISE. Praise actions not traits. If praise is going to be informative it should not be about personal traits like intelligence or the skillfulness of the person because that leads to a fixed mindset. It should rather be about the skillfulness of specific actions and how well they work with other actions.
Praise positivity and strengths. The following is a quote from "First Break All the Rules" by Markus Buckingham: "The assumption that 'each person's greatest room for growth is his or her areas of greatest weakness' is often not correct. In fact people tend to improve most and fastest at the things they are good at or by applying their existing talents in new settings. Focusing feedback on strengths can be at least as productive as focusing it on weaknesses. If you do it right." Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi offer excellent examples of giving feedback for strengths. Praise specific elements. For a start coaches can praise or simply identify some specific aspects or elements of a technique or skill that the learner performed well. Although such praise is more informational than motivational it can become motivational when accompanied by a 'well done' or 'good technique'. Identification statement. In their book "Practice Perfect" Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi call this a statement of identification. It basically identifies what the learner has done right or well. They explain with the coaching of Danielle: "...hit her with plenty of positive feedback: 'You did that well, Danielle! Keep it up!' But what is that exactly? Telling Danielle to keep 'it' up if would be much more productive if you also told her what 'it' was." What if you reworked your original statement...to include an 'identification statement' to help her see what 'it' was: 'Good Danielle. You moved your feet quickly and got behind the ball. Keep it up.'" Replication reminder. The last statement that Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi recommend to be used as part of positive feedback is not really praise or even feedback but rather a reminder that having successfully performed an action or technique successfully one time does not guarantee a learner will be able to replicate it. They suggest a gentle reminder for the learner. They call it a statement of replication. They say: "So now Danielle knows what she did right. She can connect to the idea with a replicable action. In a perfect world, her internal narrative would sound something like this: 'Hey it worked! I'm going to focus on trying to make quick small sideways steps every time. In fact I am going to ask dad for ten more ground balls right now so I can build muscle memory. I want to remember what it feels like to to do it right'. Unfortunately, Danielle's internal narrative may not include every single one of those statements. She may not know how to replicate a success, or that doing so is a crucial element of successful practice (and successful learning). You can help her with that process by making a 'replication statement' such as one of the following: 'Good. You really got your feet behind the ball. Let's do it a few more times so you can really remember what that feels like.'" Iteration suggestion. The other example they give is not really a statement of replication but rather a statement of iteration: "Good. You really got your feet behind the ball. Now try to do the same thing going to your left." Application statement. They go on to recommend other ways that Danielle could could create other variants of the technique as follows. "Good
Danielle. Ten in a row! Your doing so well, so let's work on a couple
of other ways you could use a quick start and small steps." A hierarchy of praise. Acknowledgment or muted praise. The following is a quote from the book "Practice Perfect" by Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi: "We've learned that it's important to differentiate acknowledgment from praise, setting a higher standard for when praise is used. As Doug describes in 'Teach Like a Champion', 'In a case where where expectations have been met an acknowledgment is fitting, a simple description of what the student did or even a simple thank-you usually suffices.' Acknowledging your students, your children, your players, or you employees is important. 'Thanks for for clearing the dishes.' 'Thanks for your comments in today's meeting.' These statements recognize when expectations have been met . You expect your players to help their teammates, your kids to clear their plates and your employees to participate in meetings." Effusive praise or praise. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi continue: "Praise, however, should be reserved for when people go above and beyond the call of duty or when they truly demonstrate excellence. 'That was fantastic of you to clear and clean all our dishes tonight!' 'It was great of you to to collect all the balls and jerseys after practice today.' 'You were outstanding in how you delivered that really difficult message today in the staff meeting. I'm proud of you for tackling such a difficult issue because it will make a difference in our performance and communications.'" Praise should be earnest, genuine, public and systematic. Genuine praise. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi continue: "Using precise praise in the classroom, we have learned the importance of giving it genuinely and earnestly. Adults and kids alike can immediately perceive when praise is not genuine. When praise is delivered insincerely,it can be cloying and can undermine what you are trying to recognize. Balance sincere praise with candor and constructive criticism, and your praise will be valued. Public praise. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi continue: We use genuine praise in practice and performance, and use it publicly. Praise is often most powerful when it is made publicly because it gives the recipient that attention she deserves and further, it informs others of the actions that your team or organization values." Privacy and praise. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi continue: "With one of our practice activities in which every teacher gets individual feedback from a coach, we found that teachers weren't listening to the feedback that the other teachers were getting because they wanted to give each other privacy. We encouraged them to fight that instinct, because the feedback and praise that individual teachers were getting also benefited the entire group. When others could hear the praise, they could identify actions that they could strive to replicate. When people know how to make praise specific and applicable, making it public contributes powerfully to a culture of practice and improvement." Systematic praise. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi continue: "One way to to bring the importance of positive feedback to everyone's attention is through systems of recognition that support effective practice. Make sure that these systems extend not only to performance (for example, writing a weekly email to your sales team in which you praise one of your employees: 'Anthony knocked it out of the park in today's presentation to our client') but to practice as well ('Jen incorporated a new strategy today when we practiced out closing arguments'). Having a system of recognition that extends to practice is especially important because the positive feedback can inform people on what to do during performance. It also ensures that you won't just praise success ('Sheila was promoted!') but that you will praise the habits that led to success."
NORMALIZE ERROR. Embedded Fears. While people today may intellectually understand that feedback is a necessary part of learning and improving they may nevertheless be paralyzed by fears that have been embedded in their psyches from their earliest years. These are fears of failure, being wrong, looking stupid, showing weakness, being incapable etc. John Wooden explains: "When you punish people for making a mistake or falling short of a goal, you create an environment of extreme caution, even fearfulness. In sports it is similar to playing 'not to lose' - a formula that often brings on defeat." Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi tell the story of a skier who always performed so perfectly that she never fell. They say: "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." This is normal. This is the plateau that all learners encounter where their bodies or their unconscious minds seem to decide that it has gotten good enough. But usually this means the learners are being betrayed by their own fears. They are afraid to fall, afraid to fail, afraid to take a risk. To improve beyond this plateau coaches need to push learners to be willing to fail or fall so that they can improve. By pushing through this road block to improvement learners can cause the habituation of failure, errors etc. making risks etc. a normal part of improving any skill or technique. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi continue the story: "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:
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." Pushing through fear. Speed and accuracy are intertwined. Learners will find that for most kinds of physical learning they can speed up quite a bit if they are willing to allow themselves to make mistakes. While still moving at those faster speeds they can then correct any errors and so become both fast and accurate. This is similarly applicable to any kind of record breaking. Learners can jump higher if the are willing to occasionally knock the bar off. Ice skaters can do more difficult maneuvers on the ice if they are willing to occasionally fall on their butts. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi point out that although most people in the western world spend countless hours typing they do not get better at it because they do not push through their fear of making mistakes. The say: "Researchers discovered that when subjects were challenged to their limits by typing 10-20 percent faster and were allowed to make mistakes, their speed improved. They made mistakes, fixed them then encountered success."
"Here is what normalizing error looks like:
So be challenging, be warm, be direct, get past nice, make mistakes, failure, risks, even embarrassment a normal part of every practice. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi like to say that failure responds to practice. This site holds that this is wrong. Failure should not be practiced. What they really mean is that failure, error, all those things respond to habituation. The more learners fail (not at the same things) or make errors (not the same errors) the less fearful they will be of errors and failure. The more learners experience error and failure as part of normal everyday practice the less painful they will become. Learners can become habituated to errors failure, risk or anything that blocks improvement. BREAKING DOWN THE BARRIERS Aversion to practice. Not only do most people have an aversion to feedback they also have an aversion to practice especially in front of others. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi put it like this: "For many of us it [practice] can actually bring on negative physical reactions (racing heart, sweaty palms) and psychological reactions (fear nervousness, angst). This leads to resistance and avoidance behaviors. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi explain: "Because people would rather work on what's easy to work on than on what is psychologically difficult, you [the coach] need to be prepared for the clever ways that people will find to 'work around the work'." The barriers to practice. These are barriers to practice and take many forms such as taking bathroom breaks or urgently trying to find something when practice begins. However, Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi point out several much more insidious avoidance behaviors:
[Addressing the barriers.] "Here are some steps leaders and coaches can take to address barriers to entry.
Why? Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi explain why we may be averse to practice:
EVERYBODY DOES IT Do as I do. The 'practice is normal' problem facing coaches is the same one facing everybody who is in charge. Somebody has to tell people what to do, but nobody wants to be the guinea pig. Also nobody wants to comply with someone who isn't willing to do it themselves. Good leaders are always willing to do anything they ask others to do. Is it do as I say or do as I do? The only way to create a culture where it's normal for everyone to do it is if everybody actually does it. You can't have non participating observers or non participating leaders or non participating coaches. Everybody has to participate in modeling, performing, giving feedback and receiving feedback. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi make this very clear with the following: "When you are ready, you can take this up a level: don't frame it as a B+ version; just jump into the modeling (after you have planned it). Say, 'I'm just going to try this.' This framing shows the level of risk that you are willing to take for the purposes of practicing and improving. Always ask for feedback when you model. This shows that everybody practices, and that everybody gets feedback."
Ask for feedback. Asking for feedback is hard but if done sincerely will make the other participants feel comfortable and normal when receiving feedback from others. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi continue: "...we always ask, 'What is something I could have done better?' This is usually met with silence. People are trying to be nice, and they are usually reluctant to give us feedback. But we always push them on this in the spirit of creating a culture of practice. People assume that as leaders we shouldn't be corrected. They are socialized to believe that we aren't really asking for feedback. We have to persist: 'I know there were at least three things I could have improved. What's one of them?' When we set this expectation in the beginning as we establish a culture of practice, by the end of our workshops participants are much more willing to share their feedback." Who's first? Say it this way. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi explain there are better ways of asking participants to comply. They say: "Being thoughtful and intentional about your language can support a culture of practice. For example asking, 'Are there any volunteers to try this out?' can be a real culture killer. Subtly changing the request by asking, 'Who's going to try first?' or 'Here's a great chance to practice and get better - Who wants it?' can make the difference between no one and several people being willing to take the risk. This shift in language can overcome barriers to entry and ensure that all members of your team take a risk required in practice. Asking who wants to try first communicates that everybody is going to get a chance to try - it's just a question of who is going to go first." "When you are intentional in your language and you engage in practice as the leader, you have the necessary ingredients for creating a culture where everybody practices." MAKE PRACTICE FUN. Practice like any learning experience should never be used as punishment. Some aspects of practice are just naturally fun but other aspects are not. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi ask us this: "What do we do when the fun parts aren't the ones that help us get better?" The answer they give is to make those unfun parts fun. Here are some of their suggestions:
Post practice. THE IMPORTANCE OF JARGON Jargon is an essential part of learning. Although jargon is often seen by those who do not understand it as nonsense or as a gate keeper used by those who know it to exclude others from understanding by using words they are not familiar with, jargon's true purpose is just the opposite. Jargon is best thought of as two separate things:
Here is what Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi have to say about this: [Jargon on the field.] "When you have your players practice and master a new skill it is important to give that skill a name so people know what it is they have learned... After building your common vocabulary, how do you keep it alive post-practice? Doug's son the soccer player knows a Cruyff Turn from a Drag Back from a V-Cut. This means that he and his coach can talk clearly about how he used them. It allows him to be coached on what he learned in practice... Naming skills, techniques, strategies and approaches makes them come alive [on] the soccer field... [or any other sports field.] [Jargon in the room.] Similarly surgeons know as simple interrupted stitch from a continuous stitch from a horizontal mattress stitch. Developing this shared vocabulary and using it post practice allows surgeons to discuss and develop their technique quickly with one another. If there weren't different names, the different methods and skills would blend into one. Naming skills, techniques, strategies and approaches makes them come alive in the operating room,... the boardroom, the classroom and even your living room. [Use it in practice and discussion.] Use your common language during practice to develop skills and continue to use it post-practice to make those skills stick. In our workshops, when participants analyze video of teachers demonstrating a technique, we also ask that they practice using the vocabulary we have just taught. This helps establish the expectation that it is important to use the common language, both in practice and in discussion of practice. [Making it stick.] Once the common language has been established in practice, it is important to maintain an ongoing conversation about what you have practiced in as many different ways as you can. For example, two colleagues may follow up practice informally... Using the common language post-practice focuses on and solidifies the skills that have been practiced." The transaction cost. Jargon partly functions to abbreviate so that ideas are transmitted quickly and easily. Some of this private language does not have to comprise of words. Many fields and domains use hand signals which can be used in performance more easily without disrupting or distracting. But regardless of whether words or other signals are used the idea is to reduce transaction cost. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi explain: "'Transaction cost' is the
amount of resources that it takes to execute an exchange, be it
economic, verbal or something else. Developing a shared vocabulary
reduces the transaction cost for peer - peer discussion (between
surgeons), as well as leader - peer discussion (father -son, coach -
player, manager - employee)... While you want to keep transaction cost
low during practice in order to maximize the amount of time actually
spent practicing, it's important to keep them low in post practice as
well. Using a shared vocabulary during performance is a very efficient
and low cost way to help skills stick. Two roles. Coaches, leaders, managers walk a fine line between trying to make learners into the best possible performers that they can and evaluating or judging whether learners have reached the standard required. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi point out that on the one hand: "Practice has to be a judgment-free zone where there are no repercussions for failure: feedback is given and implemented but it still feels safe. [However] when it's game time everybody has to deliver. [If they do not reach the coaches expectation the coach has no choice but to eliminate them from the team, the game or the work group.] As a leader, one of the most difficult and important roles you play is the evaluator. As the evaluator, you have to tell your players whether they are good enough, if they are starters or on the bench, and what specifically they need to work on. [It's a sad fact that coaches cannot just be a supportive Mr. Nice Guy.] Leaders must be transparent about playing their demand and support roles simultaneously from the outset. As a leader it would be disingenuous if you only claimed to make people better through support." How to. The following is an ideal response to a learner fearing termination after some difficult feedback. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi suggest that coaches use something like it when trying to convey both support and and evaluation simultaneously: "I want you to succeed, and I am going to do my best to support you in that. I,m not ready to talk to you about leaving the organization. It may get to that point, but lets keep trying and practicing before we talk about anybody getting fired." A balance. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi continue: "This type of response would have communicated her support, but it also would have communicated that ultimately she was his evaluator and would have to act accordingly if his poor performance continued. Her supportiveness didn't remove her responsibility and commitment to the success of students... Leaders who walk this line well consistently recognize and reward hard work, but they provide specific feed back when performance doesn't meet particular standards; when necessary they communicate it with a sense of urgency... Post practice, frame feedback not as helpful advice but as something required to improve performance." MEASURE SUCCESS. Why measure? The best way to ensure success in any endeavor is to measure it's effectiveness. Measurement is feedback. Other feedback might tell you what you did wrong or how you might go about improving but measurement tells you how successful you have been. Coaches are only as good as the results they get, and to know those results they must measure them. Measuring success is a great motivator. Every time you measure the difference between before and now either your intrinsic motivation is topped up or you realize you have failed to improve. If you fail to improve you may be practicing the wrong things or what you are practicing may be ineffective. What to measure. Lemov, Woolway and Yezzi suggest in the case of practice we should specifically measure these two things:
Specific. [Coaches] ...to determine what it is that you should be practicing, you should look at games (or lessons, surgeries, or sales pitches) as a series of data points. Instead of subjectively evaluating how your team played, look for specific data that reflect the skills you have practiced. For example, how many players made diagonal runs? How many teachers asked their students to do something again if they didn't have 100% participation? How many times did a particular sales strategy result in a sale? Collecting and measuring data on performance post-practice allows you to evaluate your own effectiveness in facilitating practice... Use multiple methods to gather this data (self-reporting, observation and evaluation, performance metrics." Coaches are in a position to either encourage or discourage life long learning. Coaches, like any good teachers, have a responsibility to ensure that the learners they coach come away able to enjoy becoming and being skillful in their chosen area of expertise. In the end it is only the joy people feel in displaying their skill that will enable them to ever keep learning and improving in their skill throughout their lives. Only the intrinsic desire and motivation to learn that grows out of this enjoyment of learning and doing will maintain true life long learning. Not all coaches are equal in this. Many coaches are overly critical, shame those who fail, or those who make errors. Or they may simply make practice unpleasant for its own sake. Such coaches are doing little to help those they are supposed to be coaching. But more importantly they are adding to learner's already plethora of fears and tendency to avoid practicing. Also coaches who take no pleasure in the achievements of the people they are coaching will likely convey this negative attitude and reduce motivation further. It is true such methods can sometimes get results from learners in the short term but in the long run they will produce poor results and ultimately ruin the chances of all those they coach. On the other hand those coaches who support their charges, who celebrate their strengths, who praise their efforts and persistence, who measure and identify to them how much they have improved, these coaches do enable ever continuing improvement. But they are, more importantly, responsible for increasing the motivation of their charges to continue to practice on their own and if all goes well to continue to practice all their lives until their health prevents it. Likewise the enthusiasm and joy that coaches express in the achievements of the learners they are coaching will tend to rub off on those learners creating in them the desire to be life long learners. Of course this does not mean that coaches should be soft and make things easy for learners. Rather they should push their charges hard, challenging them to be ever better than before. Only by achieving continual improvement will the desire and motivation for further improvement appear out of the joy of succeeding. The challenges have to be great but not so great that they cannot be achieved. Remember Goldilocks, it must be not too easy, not too difficult, just right. The point is that learning any skill requires endless pitiless hard work which cannot be maintained without an intrinsic desire to continue developed in each learner. Expertise as mentioned on the expert page takes long arduous hours of practice but if its practice and performance are made also joyful it will be worth it in the end. Coaches should endeavor to pass on to learners the secret that it is possible for them to become an expert in whatever field they are practicing in. Coaches must present this as hard and difficult but also joyful. It can only be this way if coaches can make it so. To
remain life long learners, learners have to love what they are doing
and with their skills. This means loving practicing so much that they can achieve a life
of life long practicing. For this learners need to be self motivated and will
only be so motivated if their coaches have passed on their feedback and
wisdom in a way that enables learners to internalize that feedback and
wisdom. Learners must in the end internalize their coaching and become their own
internal coaches. Schools could provide coaching to open up the skill potential of all students. But schools should do it only if they can do so by means of enabling the formation of intrinsic motivation in each student, and thus awaken the student's desire to practice and improve their skills all the days of their lives. |
How
to
ensure
expertise. 
Practice 
Flexiskills
and
habit skills.
The
coaching of skills or techniques. 
The
first rule. 
Knowledge without
awareness.
Slowing down time.
Hands on
training. 
Create the right
practice. 
Feedback
on skill
or technique. 
Information. 
Bypassing
fear. 
The Goldilocks of
challenge.
Needs Interest Method Reality Keys How to Help Creative Genius Future What is Wrong Theories Plus
Thin Slicing Expertise Self Determination Self Theories Answers
Iteration
