“But we’ve done this before!” "Yes, we have. And yes, we’re going to do it again."
Today, we are going to address why it is that practice is so important.
“Natural talent is a myth…” asserts Matthew Syed who was the English number 1 table tennis player for many years and competed for GB in two Olympic Games. He is now a freelance journalist and author of Bounce and several other books which attempt to unpick the process by which high-performing individuals are made.
In the clip below, Matthew Syed shares part of his narrative on ‘How Champions are Made’.
When you read Bounce in its fullness, you are left with a powerful message: “Natural talent is a myth – you’re not born good at something, you work hard to become better at what it is you do”. Through the study of high-performing individuals, Matthew Syed attributes the success of individuals to four key things (which can be applied to both sporting and academic success):
The environment and opportunities within their local area.
The opportunity to work alongside people that are better than them.
Having outstanding coaches.
The quantity and quality of deliberate practice (on their areas of weakness)
Syed’s research indicates that high-performers do not reach an ‘expert-level’ until they have invested at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice! Luckily for us, for many things we are trying to learn, we do not need to reach world-class expert level - competent and confident will do. This may decrease the number of hours needed but it does not in any way take away the need for dedicated, consistent, purposeful practice.
Dr Jared Cooney Horvath (educational neuroscientist) says, “there’s no such things as a free lunch. If you want to learn something you have to devote time and effort to it.”
Painful as this truth may be for some students, you must practise in order to improve. The good news is that you can make your practice more efficient, so you get bigger results for the time and effort you put in. The key is called spacing. Research, across many subjects and all ages and stages of learners, shows that spaced practice is more effective to learning than cramming practice together. For example, three hours of maths practice on Monday will be less effective in terms of learning gains than one hour of practice on three different days.
It is also beneficial to space out review practice at intervals of weeks and months in order to embed the learning into your long-term memory. Dr Jared Cooney Horvath talks about the importance of a circular curriculum for this reason. I have always told my French and Spanish learners that learning a second language is like being on a circular path; you come back to the same topics again and again, reviewing what you know and adding further depth, detail and understanding. However, the effort part of the paradigm is also vital; purposeful practice, especially when things become slightly difficult and you are out of your comfort zone, is where the real learning gains happen.
In conclusion, every learner can take heart from the arguments given above that with practice we can improve our performance in whatever it is we put our mind to. To make the most efficient use of our time and effort, we need to ask ourselves whether we are doing the following three things with our practice:
spacing it out
regularly reviewing and testing knowledge
being resilient and continuing to practise when the going gets tough
It is up to us to decide how much time and effort we want to put in and this will correlate with the success we eventually achieve in our chosen area.
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