ful 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 luxuries—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 bal