Can you become an expert with 10,000 hours of practice?

[Dien Rice]

Originally Posted by Dien Rice

I think I remember reading somewhere that "how" you practice is also very important...

Here's an example of the kind of thing I was referring to, which I just found...

From http://www.radicallearners.com/?p=348

Malcolm Gladwell has popularized Anders Ericsson’s finding that great performers become great because they have at least 10,000 hours of practice. The Beatles, Bill Gates, and other superstars, Gladwell argues, became superstars because they put in at least 10,000 hours of heavy lifting to become the masters they become.

Time practicing, unfortunately, is not enough to enable us to become rock stars. 10,000 hours of sleeping on the job during any task is no better than 100 hours.

Driving is a good example of this phenomena. Most of us have put in thousands of hours behind the wheel, but few of us are significantly better drivers today than we were back when we first mastered the finer details of driving. Many experienced drivers are actually worse today than they were ten years ago. They’ve had lots of practice, but they next to nothing from all that time controlling a car.

What separates the good from the average, and the great from the good is a particular kind of practice. Ericsson refers to it as “deliberate practice,” Daniel Coyle calls it “deep practice,” and Matthew Syed calls it “purposeful practice.” “This is not ordinary practice,” Coyle explains, “this is a highly targeted, error-focused process.”

Syed, a former table tennis world champion, describes purposeful practice as follows:

Aspiring champions have a specific and never-changing purpose: progress. Every second of every minute of every hour, the goal is to extend one’s mind and body, to push oneself beyond the outer limits of one’s capacities, to engage so deeply in the task that one leaves the training session, literally, a changed person.

Purposeful practice (I’ll choose Syed’s term) only happens when we (a) get really clear on very specific areas we need to improve, (b) choose to step outside our comfort zone and make attempts that challenge us to get better in those specific areas, and (c) gather data on how well we are doing at improving in those specific areas.

There are many implications of this research, and anyone interested in any kind of learning or improvement would benefit from reading all of the authors mentioned above. I plan to discuss the methods and implications of purposeful practice (in professional learning and in the classroom) in a few posts over the next few months. But I want to mention one particular implication here.

All of us, whatever we do, have the chance to get much better if we choose to do purposeful practice. In schools with instructional coaches, for example, teachers can dramatically improve if they work with their coach to refine their skills in particular areas. This could involve discussing the research on instruction, targeting an area for improvement, and then having the coach gather and share data on our progress. We might even gather our own data through video or audio recording a lesson or gathering data from students.

Purposeful practice, by definition, takes us out of our comfort zone. In our first attempts we will feel uncomfortable both because of the experience of truthfully confronting reality and by struggling to do things we’ve never done before.

(Emphasis added by me.)

That probably helps to support the point you were making too, Bozo, in that just "practice" is not enough... If you accept that "how" you practice (by pushing your boundaries, and going beyond your comfort zone) is also important...

Here's another article on the same topic of "deliberate practice" or "purposeful practice"...

http://www.onespoonatatime.com/lesso...erate-practice

Best wishes,

Dien