Deliberate practice: It works for writing, too (2/2)

Aug 21

4 min read

In my first post on deliberate practice, we established that:

Deliberate practice = focused, well-designed practice that incorporates feedback.
Deliberate practice is crucial for success, but it rarely figures into writing curricula.

So how can we use deliberate practice to get better at writing? Let's consider three case studies.

Maddie is in third grade. She has no problem coming up with ideas; the challenge is staying focused. Her writing reads like an Energizer Bunny brainstorming session, with a kajillion fascinating thoughts that never quite answer the prompt.
Jimmy, a seventh-grader, tells me that writing “isn’t his thing.” He'd rather be outside exploring or playing board games with his friends. When we look at the Google Docs revision history, together we see that he might write for five minutes, then drift off for three or four. A half hour working on an assignment might only translate to 10 minutes of real writing time.
Emma is a junior in high school. She tends to get stuck when writing if she can't quite come up with the right phrasing to express an idea, so short assignments take forever and leave her feeling frustrated.

Step 1: Choose a target skill

There are a million ways to get better at writing. We have to start somewhere, though.

Maddie would benefit from learning to write tight, focused paragraphs that answer a prompt directly.
Jimmy needs to build his writing stamina, working efficiently for decent chunks of time.
Emma needs to learn to navigate stuck points.

Notice that these skills are highly transferable, applicable across writing assignments and genres.

Of course, we could also do deliberate practice with hyper-specific skills like, say, writing brutally honest restaurant reviews on Yelp. We want the biggest bang for our buck, though, so we're going for the most transferable skills.

Step 2: Set goals

I'm going to invoke that SMART goal acronym. It's cliched for good reason. It's a great synthesis of the features of effective goals: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-bound.

If we apply these criteria to our students skill building we might get something along these lines:

By date, Maddie will be able to write a three to four sentence paragraph that directly answers a specific prompt (within 10 to 20 minutes)
By date, Jimmy will be able to consistently write for 20 to 25 minutes without taking breaks or becoming distracted.
By date, Emma will have three effective strategies to navigate stuck points and independently apply these when she reaches a stuck point in her own writing.

Notice that with each of these goals, we won't have to guess whether or not we've accomplished them. Either Maddie can write those paragraphs, or she can't. Either Jimmy says focus for 20 minutes, or he gets distracted.

Step 3: Break it down more

We know what we want to accomplish. Now we need to know how to get there.

Enter successive approximation, behavioral psychologist-speak for breaking something down into smaller steps. I swear a good 5% of psychology is making up polysyllabic names for intuitive concepts—and then another 15% is giving counterintuitive names to equally counterintuitive concepts.

But I digress. Back to successive approximation.

Jimmy’s goal will be the easiest to break down. We can start with a baseline measurement to get a sense of how long he stays focused while writing, td then extend that time until we meet the goal.

The other two are a little more complicated. Maddie's working with two variables: writing length and writing focus. We could...

...have her write full paragraphs and make the prompts increasingly specific (i.e., keep length constant, increase focus)
...have her write very focused phrases, then sentences, then paragraphs (i.e., keep focus constant, increase length)

With Emma, we’ll start by identifying strategies to navigate stuck points. Emma can begin practicing those strategies with lots of scaffolding, then gradually do more on her own until she’s implementing each skill independently. Finally, she needs to generalize the skills, meaning that she applies them on her own across different contexts.

Step 4: Design practice sessions

This is the fun part! At least, I think it's fun.

An optimal deliberate practice session is short, intense, and focused, with a clear definition of success.

Jimmy will write for six minutes without a break. After, we’ll ask him to rate his focus and indicate how challenging the session was.
Maddie will spend 15 minutes working on writing a focused few sentences. She’ll write her first attempt, reread and evaluate how well it fits the prompt, then revise to make the writing more focused.
Emma will practice using a strategy called “write a super messy version of what you want to say, even if it sounds clumsy and awful” (really descriptive name, I know). She’ll do that for three prompts per 20-minute session.

We're also going to set students up for success by considering the environment. Deliberate practice works best in a quiet, low-distraction setting. There's an emotional aspect here, too. Writing can elicit really strong emotions–frustration, anxiety, even dread. I've got some other techniques to help deal with these tricky emotions. More on that in a future blog post.

So, to recap, we’ve helped each of our kiddos pinpoint target skills, develop goals, and practice accordingly. We don’t know exactly what the trajectory will look like, but because deliberate practice necessarily includes feedback, we’ve got a built-in error-correction mechanism. If the sessions aren’t successful, we’ll know, and we’ll course-correct.

Besides making progress toward their target skills, our students are also developing strong executive functioning habits. They’re organizing their time, staying focused during sessions, monitoring their progress, and chunking big goals into little ones.

A final thought

Is deliberate practice alone enough for greatness, though? The Internet’s skill-learning nerds are divided on this one. If you Google “deliberate practice,” you’ll find some critiques of the concept and of the notion that deliberate practice is necessary and sufficient for expertise.

I think these arguments are legitimate. Deliberate practice alone won’t turn your average Joe into an Olympian; innate ability undoubtedly plays a role there.

But for our purposes, this doesn’t matter. We don't need our students to be the world's best writers (whatever that even means). We just want them to build skills that are going to help them express themselves confidently and effectively. That is, we’re aiming for progress, and I think few people would disagree that the method laid out above is a solid way to get there.