t, or you risk breaking your neck. This makes it problematic to learn how to do such maneuvers in the first place. It turns out that the instructors have a lot of tricks up their sleeves to allow kids to practice partial or simplified versions of complex skills. These include the use of trampolines, ultra-bouncy floors, foam-rubber-filled pits, reduced-size apparatus, and so on. My personal favorite is their collection of large vinyl-covered foam rubber pillows, with which the instructors are especially ingenious. For example, if you want to learn to do a back somersault, you start by putting your hands over your head and bending backwards over a large, hexagonally shaped pillow, which your instructor rolls slightly at exactly the right moment to help you over. Vygotsky called such devices scaffolding—learning aids that allow students to attempt a skill that is otherwise beyond their ability. I think that is a pretty useful term. A lot of detailed thought that has gone into providing such scaffolding for gymnastics, and that has a lot to do with why that training is so successful. The reason this is so important is that it allows the gymnastics instructors, like the tennis and piano instructors I’ve talked about, to get learners right into performing real skills.
Some of the principles that can be abstracted out of the lessons we looked at are:
1. Be ambitious about what can be learned. Suzuki thought four year olds could play an instrument well. Gallwey thought beginners could hit solid tennis shots in their first lesson. By rejecting conventional wisdom about the limits of what could be done through training, they both made huge advances.
2. Allow students to learn by doing. All of my daughter’s lessons are centered on having the learner practice the skills in question. Everything else that happens, including coaching and presentation of information, is designed to support the learner’s activity.
3. De-emphasize “success” and “failure”. When learners get their egos too involved, they get in their own way. Powerful natural learning mechanisms are thwarted when the learner is obsessed with instant success, or angry about apparent failure. In the old-school sports training that I got as a kid, coaches made success and failure as personal as possible, deriding those who failed and lauding those who succeeded. This approach is hugely destructive to learning.
4. Avoid overloading learners with technique. This distracts them from the fundamental mechanism of learning, which is trial and error.
5. Help learners focus on one or two key feedback areas at a time. When learners can practice with an intense focus on the results that matter, their natural learning mechanisms ensure steady improvement.
6. Deliver simple coaching inputs just when learners are ready to implement them, and not before. This approach guards against overloading learners with technique.
7. Be skeptical of the idea that people have to master “fundamental skills” before moving on. Suzuki realized that the traditional insistence on teaching musical notation before anything else had created a roadblock for learners. By eliminating this roadblock, he revolutionized the training.
8. Break down skills and provide scaffolding for learners. Many important skills are too complex to learn all at once, yet not easy to break into component parts. Overcoming this requires a lot of detailed effort, but the result it worth it.
Out of all this, a general picture of a modern, effective lesson emerges. It is hands on and fast moving, with minimal presentation of information, clever preparation of scaffolding, a deliberate de-emphasize of ego, an intense (but not emotionally loaded) emphasis on observing outcomes, and a central role for highly skilled coaching. This, I think—and hope–is what the future of education looks like.
Is there a common thread that has caused instruction in so many different fields to converge on a similar, highly effective approach? My guess is that it is mostly just the economics of the marketplace. Lessons like these are relatively expensive luxurie