Practice Perfect E-Book

Doug Lemov

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Rules for developing talent with disciplined, deliberate, intelligent practice

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

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

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

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

Leseprobe

Contents

Foreword

Preface: Why Practice? Why Now?

Introduction: The Power of Practice

Rethinking Practice

Rule 1 Encode Success

Rule 2 Practice the 20

Rule 3 Let the Mind Follow the Body

Rule 4 Unlock Creativity . . . with Repetition

Rule 5 Replace Your Purpose (with an Objective)

Rule 6 Practice “Bright Spots”

Rule 7 Differentiate Drill from Scrimmage

Rule 8 Correct Instead of Critique

How to Practice

Rule 9 Analyze the Game

Rule 10 Isolate the Skill

Rule 11 Name It

Rule 12 Integrate the Skills

Rule 13 Make a Plan

Rule 14 Make Each Minute Matter

Using Modeling

Rule 15 Model and Describe

Rule 16 Call Your Shots

Rule 17 Make Models Believable

Rule 18 Try Supermodeling

Rule 19 Insist They “Walk This Way”

Rule 20 Model Skinny Parts

Rule 21 Model the Path

Rule 22 Get Ready for Your Close-up

Feedback

Rule 23 Practice Using Feedback (Not Just Getting It)

Rule 24 Apply First, Then Reflect

Rule 25 Shorten the Feedback Loop

Rule 26 Use the Power of Positive

Rule 27 Limit Yourself

Rule 28 Make It an Everyday Thing

Rule 29 Describe the Solution (Not the Problem)

Rule 30 Lock It In

Culture of Practice

Rule 31 Normalize Error

Rule 32 Break Down the Barriers to Practice

Rule 33 Make It Fun to Practice

Rule 34 Everybody Does It

Rule 35 Leverage Peer-to-Peer Accountability

Rule 36 Hire for Practice

Rule 37 Praise the Work

Post-Practice

Rule 38 Look for the Right Things

Rule 39 Coach During the Game (Don’t Teach)

Rule 40 Keep Talking

Rule 41 Walk the Line (Between Support and Demand)

Rule 42 Measure Success

Conclusion

Appendix A: Teaching Techniques from Teach Like a Champion

Appendix B: Sample Practice Activities

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Summary of Rules

Index

PRAISE FOR PRACTICE PERFECT

“The critical difference between ‘good-enough’ and exemplary is not talent or desire. It’s practice. Deliberate practice. That’s why Practice Perfect is such an immensely important book. It’s the first to provide evidence-based rules, rich examples, and detailed techniques on how to design and conduct practice routines. If you want to improve your own—or someone else’s—performance, you’ve got to read this book. The authors have given everyone a great gift in Practice Perfect. They’ve handed over the key that unlocks excellence. Take that key and use it. Now.”

—Jim Kouzes, coauthor of the bestselling The Leadership Challenge; Dean’s Executive Fellow of Leadership, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University

“Doug Lemov has done it again. In Practice Perfect, one of America’s best teachers widens his focus to help all of us move ever closer to mastery. If you are interested in getting better at anything (or helping someone else get better), then this book, with its excellent collection of techniques and tools, should be your field guide.”

—Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind

“A timely, winning, and approachable proposition! The pursuit of improvement through the development of a disciplined approach to practice is an essential element to success in all your pursuits.”

—Douglas R. Conant, former president, chief executive officer, and director of Campbell Soup Company; New York Times Best Selling Author of TouchPoints; ASTD 2012 Champion of Workplace Learning and Performance

“There are no shortcuts to success, whether it be in education, sports, or business. The authors of Practice Perfect provide a clear-cut, commonsense blueprint for what we all need to know to create practice habits that ensure permanent, sustainable results. I especially hope all aspiring teachers read this book. Transforming our public schools isn’t going to be easy, but it can be done through hard work and the right kind of practice—the kind taught explicitly in this book.”

—Michael D. Eisner, former chairman and chief executive officer, Walt Disney Company; founder, The Tornante Company; cofounder, The Eisner Foundation

“Practice Perfect will provide a recipe for organizations that are committed to their people—to helping them grow and get better in simple but powerful—and perhaps overlooked—ways. Practice Perfect will create the conditions I believe necessary to equip schools, school leaders, and teachers with the tools essential for student success.”

—Jean-Claude Brizard, chief executive officer, Chicago Public Schools

“Just like Teach Like a Champion, Practice Perfect is a treasure trove full of perfectly polished, just the right size ‘gems.’ I couldn’t read it fast enough. I wanted to quickly pick up each of the ideas the three authors crafted and figure out how to bring the practices into my own work. Building on the work of the Heath brothers, Atul Gawande, Daniel Coyle, Marcus Buckingham, Daniel Willingham, and others, the authors take a classic problem—the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it—and provide forty-two wise and practical ‘rules’ to close that gap. Each rule is grounded in a story and related in a familiar tone, making it a fast and fun, and often even funny, read. Each of the rules is a concrete, actionable means to help ourselves and those we are coaching or managing to do the very thing it is we want to do but have not figured out how to do yet.”

—Heather Kirkpatrick, vice president of education, Aspire Public Schools

“Practice Perfect sets a new bar for how to practice and will be a resource that I will return to time and again. The way that I will lead practice won’t only be better on Monday, but every day.”

—Brent Maddin, Ed.D., provost, Relay Graduate School of Education

“It’s become conventional wisdom that the path to excellence—no matter whether you’re a surgeon looking to hone your craft or a teacher looking for help with classroom management—is paved with hours and hours of practice. In this book the authors provide practical guidance, grounded in forty-two concrete and actionable ‘rules,’ for how anyone can use carefully selected, but relatively simple tasks to ensure these hours of practice lead to excellence.”

—Kathleen Porter-Magee, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow; senior director, High Quality Standards Initiative, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Copyright © 2012 by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi. All rights reserved.

Cover image: Rob Richard

Cover design: Jeff Puda

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lemov, Doug, 1967-

Practice perfect : 42 rules for getting better at getting better / Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, Katie Yezzi; foreword by Dan Heath. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-21658-3 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-22872-2 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-23125-8 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-26619-9 (ebk.)

1. Performance. 2. Ability. 3. Reinforcement (Psychology). 4. Success. I. Woolway, Erica, 1979- II. Yezzi, Katie, 1980- III. Title.

BF481.L45 2012

650.1—dc23

2012026295

FOREWORD

In the summer of 2011, my wife, my parents, and I took a tour of a whisky distillery in Scotland. The tour guide seemed almost catatonically bored. At each stop, she’d recite a memorized script and then ask, “Are there any questions?” but of course there weren’t, because that would mean we’d been listening. And what I remember most about the tour—other than wishing we could skip ahead to the tasting—was that I spent most of my time thinking about Chris Rock.

I’d been reading a book (Little Bets by Peter Sims) that described Rock’s process in developing new material for his standup act. In preparing for one tour, Rock made between 40 and 50 appearances at a small club in New Brunswick, New Jersey. He’d show up, carrying a yellow legal pad with his ideas scribbled on it, and start experimenting with new bits. Sims writes, “He watches the audience intently, noticing heads nodding, shifting body language, or attentive pauses, all clues as to where good ideas might reside. In sets that run around forty-five minutes, most of the jokes fall flat.”

But with time, he digs out the material that works. The jokes get sharper and the transitions get tighter and the delivery gets smoother. (So if you’ve ever cracked up at one of Rock’s lines—“I live in a neighborhood so bad you can get shot while getting shot”—then you might have New Jersey to thank.)

By the time Rock performs the routine for an HBO special, or in an appearance on David Letterman, he has long since mastered the material. Perfected it. And, as a result, he’ll give the illusion of effortlessness: Chris Rock is such a funny guy.

A few months after the whisky tour, I was giving a speech, and I caught myself telling a story the same rote way I’d told it a dozen times before. And a nasty thought struck: I am the whisky tour guide. (Thankfully, I stopped short of verbalizing this thought, thus avoiding what could have been a deeply confusing moment.)

In life, we’ll face this choice again and again: to be the whisky tour guide or to be Chris Rock. Will we be content to cruise along on autopilot or will we scramble and suffer to get better? Will we plod or will we practice? This book is a guidebook for anyone willing to make the latter choice.

There are many full-stop moments in the pages that follow—ideas so interesting that you can’t help but pause for a second and consider them. One of those ideas is that practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent. For example, you have been shampooing your hair for decades and yet you are not getting any better at it. (As a matter of fact, you will likely die never knowing whether there was a better shampooing technique.) The mere fact of doing something repeatedly does not help us improve.

What we need is practice—real practice, not mere repetition. As Michael Jordan said, “You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way.” Practice makes permanent.

As kids, we were constantly practicing something: shooting a basketball, playing the piano, learning some Spanish. Those practices could be a drag—it’s the rare athlete who can’t wait for wind sprints—but because they were thoughtfully designed, they came with a wonderful payoff: the certainty of improvement. From week to week, we couldn’t help but get better.

How did practice get squeezed out of our lives? Certainly the need hasn’t disappeared—practice is as critical for our performance in the office as it was for the playing field and the concert hall. There’s a long list of skills we’d all be wise to hone: How to run a meeting that doesn’t drag on. How to listen (really listen) to your spouse. How to get through a stressful commute without barking out profanities.

The enemies of practice are pride and fear and self-satisfaction. To practice requires humility. It forces us to admit that we don’t know everything. It forces us to submit to feedback from people who can teach us. But surely practice isn’t a sign of weakness—after all, some of the people most famously disciplined about practice are Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, Roger Federer, Mia Hamm, and Tiger Woods. To practice isn’t to declare, I’m bad. To practice is to declare, I can be better.

And of course we’re all practicing something every day. Twenty-four hours of daily practice. We’re practicing the way we interact with our kids and the way we collaborate with our colleagues. The question is: Are we getting better? Are we plodding or are we practicing?

The fact that you bought this book suggests you’re a Practicer. If so, you’ve chosen the right handbook.

Prepare to get better at getting better.

—Dan Heath, senior fellow at Duke University’s CASE center; coauthor of Made to Stick and Switch

For our children. We wish them a world of possibilities.

PREFACE: WHY PRACTICE? WHY NOW?

The three of us are first and foremost teachers. And though this book is for readers in a wide variety of fields, it began some time ago as a book for and about teachers. Still, if you are a parent or a manager or a coach or a mentor or a leader in your organization, you’d have a hard time convincing us you weren’t a teacher anyway, so perhaps the book was always destined to become something broader. But in the end, because we are teachers first and foremost, this book tends to see the world from an educator’s perspective.

So forgive us if we begin by saying something strange about teaching, which is that we are optimistic—humble, but optimistic. We are optimistic not only because we still believe that the greatest, most gratifying work in the world is teaching someone how to factor a quadratic equation, field a ground ball, run a meeting, read a nineteenth-century novel, or examine an elderly patient with insight and compassion. We are also optimistic because we think that the teaching profession is on the brink of greatness. Teachers around the country feel attacked and cornered in a climate marked, they say, by the overlap of political turmoil and austerity budgets. But when those temporary aberrations fade, we will be left with a series of creative tensions that just may reshape the profession, giving it for the first time a clear way to study and learn from itself, and providing it the tools to get better in ways we’d never before considered. This will happen not just through practice but also in the use of data and analytical tools to find out and capitalize on what teachers do best—“Bright Spots,” in the words of Chip and Dan Heath, who wrote the Foreword to this volume and whose work inspires us and so many others.

We are also humble, though, because we have made many mistakes—several of them public and some more embarrassing than others—in learning what we think can be a small part of the equation that reframes teaching. We are humbled because we believe humility—constantly facing the likelihood that our work could and should have been better—to be the way to do our work in this world. We are humbled so much that we almost didn’t dare write this book. And yet we did, because we think it can help, within the teaching profession and well beyond.

This book is about what the three of us—Doug, Erica, and Katie—learned in responding to the struggle for talent in one very important sector of the economy, public education, and in attacking one very critical social problem, the achievement gap between children of privilege and children of poverty. But it’s also about what this experience led us to observe about developing talent in other sectors of our lives and other sectors of society. So while we believe this book has important lessons for the field of education specifically, and while we often write about examples from our work in schools and in training teachers, we believe it is also relevant to a wide range of organizations and people who want to get better, who must get better. We also think this book is applicable beyond education because we have each gone through the process of applying what we’ve learned in the hothouse of our professional lives to the world of our personal lives. Having redesigned the trainings we provide for teachers over and over to wring incremental improvement, we constantly see the issues we faced in that struggle as we try to raise our own children to be caring and positive as people and skilled as mathematicians and musicians and soccer players. We see the issues as we try to develop our own skills at skiing and home repair, at knitting, managing people, and most recently, at writing books. The first step is getting better at getting better.

In these cases we see the role that a humble and overlooked servant could play in spinning straw into gold. That servant is the underestimated concept of practice. Generally seen as mundane and humdrum, poorly used and much maligned, or too familiar to be interesting, practice is often considered unworthy of deep, sustained reflection and precise engineering.

We had each separately been working for years on how to help people get better at teaching: Doug as a teacher and school leader, who later delved into his study of champion teachers that would become the highly successful and instructive text, Teach Like a Champion; Erica as a teacher, grade team chair, and then founding dean of students, who came to the techniques in Teach Like a Champion as a young school leader hungry for a common language to use with developing teachers; and Katie, who came to the team having spent 15 years as a teacher, principal, and consultant to charter schools. She found the collection of techniques in the “Taxonomy” (as it was known before the book’s publication) a revelation: it made outstanding teaching replicable. In the fall of 2008 Erica and Katie joined Doug’s team to develop ways to train other school leaders in these techniques. The techniques in Teach Like a Champion were aimed at transforming the lives of all teachers and students, whether they were in district schools, private schools, or charter schools. But what was surprising was how many people—coaches, parents, tutors, medical faculty, and professors of higher education—saw other applications. So when we looked closer at practice, we looked for broader applications and drew from fields that were much more developed on the topic of practice than teaching.

Along the way, at the recommendation of our colleague Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, we read Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code about various hotbeds of talent throughout the world that have shown us the key elements that lead to talent development. We took away many useful lessons from this book, not the least of which was the central role of practice in the development of talent. We read Gladwell, Gawande, Dweck, and Willingham, trying to better understand how we could take the techniques of champion teachers and develop them in others. We were completely convinced by, and perhaps obsessed with, practice, but we lacked a practice manual. So we revised our practice activities, going on instinct and searching for what worked. Our conversations always came back to practice: What does effective practice look like? What separates true practice from repetition or performance? And what were the key design principles to ensure that practice truly made performance better? And so we arrived at the work before you: a collection of 42 rules to shape and improve how you use practice to get better.

We begin these rules by asking you to rethink your preconceived notions about practice. We address this first because these notions lay the foundation for practice. In the next three chapters we present practical rules for how to set up practice and use the power of modeling and feedback. In the fifth and sixth chapters we look at how to build and maintain a team that embraces practice and leverages its power. Success—for individuals, for organizations, for communities, even for nations—is the struggle for talent. More specifically, it is the struggle to attract talent and the struggle to develop talent, to make people better. Though this has perhaps always been true, the lines of this struggle have never been as starkly drawn as they are today, when local competition is global, when talent is more urgently required throughout every seat in an organization, and where specialization yields higher standards for individual effectiveness. The rules in this book will assist you in developing talent in a highly competitive world, and help you get better at getting better—one practice at a time.

INTRODUCTION

THE POWER OF PRACTICE

Everybody has the will to win; few people have the will to prepare to win.

—BOBBY KNIGHT

It’s a funny thing. The more I practice the luckier I get.

—ARNOLD PALMER

John Wooden is a legend. The coach of UCLA’s basketball team for 27 years, he was anointed “Greatest Coach of the 20th Century” by ESPN and the greatest coach ever—in any sport—by the Sporting News. Wooden led his teams to ten national championships in 12 years, won 88 consecutive games, and achieved the highest winning percentage (.813) of any coach in NCAA basketball history—all while building an enduring reputation for developing the character of his players at least as much as their skill. It’s not surprising that in the decades since Wooden retired, his influence has spread far beyond the basketball court. Books by and about Wooden apply his insights to life, learning, and business as much as to basketball.