Taming your inner expert

Here's another excerpt from Practice Perfect - a wonderful book because it clearly lays out the principles of effective practice. Lots of people practise things over and over and never improve their performance - think of golfers, for example, or bridge players - and that's because they just keep on practising their mistakes. As the book points out, "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." If you want to improve, it's critically important that you practise correctly. Although the emphasis in Practice Perfect is on improving teachers' pedagogical skills, the book's rules apply to virtually every area of human endeavour. Today's excerpt (pp 126-127) tells teachers to limit the amount of feedback they provide.

• "You want to be really good at tennis. Always have. Now you've come into a small inheritance, and so you've hired 'Super Coach' to help. He arrives wearing a Bjorn Borg headband and a cerulean blue Rafael Nadal shirt - a steely-eyed mix of retro and up-to-date. He knows everything. If you can download his knowledge, you will be the player you have always dreamed of being. But a few minutes into your first session, everything is going wrong. 'I am going to tell you one more time,' he says, as you stand like a child at the baseline. 'There are nine things you must do to hit a forehand. Only nine.' Still, as hard as you try, you can't remember them all, even though he reminds you of them over and over. You focus on getting your racket back early (#2) and he berates you for not being sideways to the net (#4). You do that, and your footwork (#3) comes under assault. You begin to think about your footwork, and he reminds you of the imperative of the follow-through (#7). 'Idiot,' you're pretty sure you hear him mutter as he bends to pick up the balls lining your side of the net.
• "Turns out, knowing what to do is a long way from doing it; in fact, 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 people too much feedback at once. When performers or employees or team members or children are trying to concentrate on more than one or two specific things at once, their attention becomes fractured and diluted. Ironically, this can result in reduced performance.
• "One of the keys to coaching, then, is to develop the self-discipline to focus on fewer things. Though you clearly see 15 things wrong with your daughter's rendition of the 'Moonlight Sonata,' you tell her about only the two most important and hold off on everything else. This is especially difficullt because it feels good to be the coach and to have so much to share. In the end, though, you have to choose between being an impressive boss - one who knows everything - and an effective boss: one who helps a team member focus on the few things he most needs to develop. Sharing everything is a fool's errand. If your game is going to improve, you are going to have to march right over and tell Super Coach as much."

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