s—no one has to take them.
Furthermore, as econpomists have observed, many modern parents have, in broad historical terms, lots of money and leisure time but few offspring, which puts them in a position to be obsessive with regard to almost everything about their children’s upbringing. In that situation, the approaches that work, whatever they might be, will rapidly win out in the free market.
So I think that is the bottom line. The approach to education that we are seeing emergent in my daughter’s lessons is what works.
Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus ten thousand repetitions is skill–Shin’ichi Suzuki
“Our knowing is ordinarily tacit, implicit in our patterns of action ….. It seems right to say that our knowing is in our action.”–Donald Schon
“What we pay attention to and how we pay attention determine the content and quality of life.” –Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
“The greatest efforts in sports come when the mind is as still as a glass lake.”–Timothy Gallwey
There’s been a lot of criticism in the media lately of parents who “over schedule” their children by enrolling them in too many structured activities. My six year old daughter takes lessons in gymnastics, piano, ballet, swimming and tennis, so as you can imagine I’m a little sensitive about this. My only excuse for my overzealous parenting is that herlessons are so good that I would hate to take her out of any of them.
I disliked virtually every organized educational experience I had before graduate school, so I’m actually pretty surprised about the seeming abundance of high-quality training for kids these days. Apparently there has been some kind of revolution in extra-scholastic education since I grew up, and no one bothered to tell me about it. In this column I try to figure out why my daughters lessons are so good, and what we as instructional designers can learn from that.
My first tennis lesson consisted of a long lecture about “eastern” versus “western” grips—a distinction that escapes me to this day—plus a bunch of weird drills like rolling a ball around in circles on the face of the racquet for ten minutes straight. Actual tennis did not occur until several lessons later. I’m still bitter about that, in case you can’t tell.
In contrast, my daughter got to start hitting tennis balls, which were bounced to her by an instructor, ten minutes after the start of her first session of her beginning tennis camp. Throughout the camp, she and her fellow students spent most of their time with racquets in hand, hitting real tennis strokes. Instructors kept them focused on simple outcomes, while being careful to avoid ratcheting up the pressure. Results were dealt with dispassionately—data points to be considered, not indicators of individual success and failure. There was no detailed presentation of theory about stance, grip, swing, and so on–instruction was brief and to the point, and coaching inputs were confined mostly to specific, individualized suggestions that learners could put into practice immediately, and that slowly built on one another over time. By the end of the camp, which was about four hours total, most of the kids could hit a variety of surprisingly solid shots including ground strokes, serves and volleys. My daughter emerged feeling confident about the skills she’d learned. “I think I’m going to be better than you at tennis,” she confided to me in a whispered aside. I think so too, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
I think the improvement in how tennis lessons are taught is to a significant extent due to the influence of one man: Timothy Gallwey, a tennis playing Harvard graduate who in 1974 wrote a book called The Inner Game of Tennis.
Gallwey describes the travails of the tennis novice as being the result of a struggle between two inner selves: Self 1—“the teller”—and Self 2—“the doer”. Self 2 learns physical skills through trial and error, building competence reliably, gradually and unconsciously. Self 1, on the other hand, is good with theory, but not with execution. Skills like tennis are the natural province of Self 2, but Self 1 has a bad