Techniques for deciding what to practice

Six methods for deciding what to practice

Deciding on which mental representations will actually be useful to help us with performance is the most difficult part. Which is why it is best if we can follow an established programme (such as the Couch to 5K for running). But this is not always possible. In those cases, we have to find our own path. This takes more time but it has some benefit because it helps us reflect on the process and journey.

Here is what you need:

1. Establish a feedback loop
2. Reflect on break points
3. Establish measurement
4. Retrace your steps
5. Build scaffolding
6. Learn from others

1 Establish a feedback loop

This is the most important component of any practice. You need feedback to help you judge your performance but most importantly changes to performance. This is easy for things like running where all you need is the objective measurements of distance and time. These can be supplemented by measures of exertion such as heart rate. But even here, subjective or semi subjective measures come into play. Perception of effort or running form form an important part of the development of a runner.

But effective feedback loops exist even in much more subjective disciplines such as musical performance. They do have an objective component (number of errors, keeping to rhythm, etc.) but even subjective components such as expressiveness can be evaluated.

Every discipline has some objective and some subjective sources of feedback, as well as some in between. For example, in here are some in academic writing:

• Objective
  • Spelling or grammar errors
  • Choice of vocabulary
  • Number of words written
  • Length of sentences
  • Correctness of citations
• Semi-subjective
  • Accuracy of paraphrasing a position
  • Correctness of assertions
  • Cohesion or coherence
  • Conformance to genre conventions
  • Readability
• Subjective
  • Persuasiveness of argument
  • Stylistic beauty
  • Feelings about the writing process
  • Feelings about how accurately you expressed what you wanted to say

There may be other measures that are relevant to you. You can find them by:

• Analysing feedback from others (explicit or implicit)
• Comparing your output to that of others (quality or quantity)
• Reflecting on your emotions

2 Reflect on breakpoints

Once you have an effective feedback loop, you can get information about where you need to improve. You have to do two things:

1. Reflect on what the source of the issue is.
2. Reflect on how you could break down the activity into smaller chunks to practice and develop more effective mental representations.

For example, you feel that you don’t write enough during your writing sessions. You’ve measured it and you only write 100 words in 30 minutes even when you do know what you want to write and would like to increase it to 200 words.

1. Think about when you stopped or slowed down. Was it because
   1. You did not know how to start
   2. You did not know how to express what you want to say
   3. You stopped and rephrased every part of a sentence or you agonised over every word
   4. You had to look up too many words in the dictionary
2. Which ever of these issues is slowing you down, you can then think about breaking it down into smaller components to practice
   1. If starting a sentence or writing is a problem, only focus on that. Think further about at which point you feel most pressure and think about how you could focus on just the point.
   2. What parts of expressing yourself were the problem? Words, academic phrasing, paragraph composition? Any one of these could be practiced.
   3. If you stop frequently, analyse why. Which aspects could you practice to get better at?
   4. What kinds of words do you most often look up? What is the problem?

3 Establish measurement

Measuring your performance and changes over time is essential to successful practice. It gives you focus about what to practice, suggests new directions, and also helps with monitoring about whether you are practicing the wrong thing. But seeing your progress can also motivate you to do more.

In short, we can say that measurement plays two different roles in practice:

1. Direction
2. Motivation

How and what you measure is a more difficult question. We already gave examples of what to measure in the section on establishing a feedback loop. Now let’s have a look at how to do it. Essentially, there are two categories:

1. External measures such as speed, quantity, error rate
2. Perception of effort such as feelings of tiredness, how hard an activity is, or how we feel about the quality of our performance or even the activity itself

To improve, you should always keep an eye on where you are at the moment and reflect on whether you are getting better or worse. But for specific improvements you need to keep records.

For example, in writing it is easy to keep track of both subjective and objective measures of your writing:

1. Keep a log of writing times and words written
2. Keep a diary of your feelings about writing
3. Count the number of spelling or grammar errors your spelling checker found

You can then compare changes over time and think about what you did to make that change.

But how do you measure the quality of your writing? How do you know whether you are writing in the way that will fit in with people in your discipline? Here you can use several comparative techniques.

1. Reading for writing
2. Flash paraphrasing

When you read for writing, return to some important papers in your discipline you had read and focus on the various phrases and expressions that make it seem special. Make a list of them and see how many of them can you use in your own writing. You can also go to a writing guide such as the ‘Academic Phrasebank’ and see how many of the phrases the authors you are reading are using.

Do not just go from the phrasebank to your own writing. Find the examples in your discipline first. Then try to internalise them (you can even make flashcards with sentences in which they were used) and then measure how many you naturally start using.

You will eventually find that this comes to you quite naturally. That is how people who ‘are good at writing’ learned it (they just did it informally).

Another more targeted approach is what we might call flash paraphrasing. This was inspired by this quote:

“[Benjamin Franklin] first set out to see how closely he could reproduce the sentences in an article once he had forgotten their exact wording. So he chose several of the articles whose writing he admired and wrote down short descriptions of the content of each sentence—just enough to remind him what the sentence was about. After several days he tried to reproduce the articles from the hints he had written down.” (from Peak by Anders Ericsson)

A similar recommendation was made by Stanley Fish in his book on ‘How to write a sentence’. The ideas is that you start by replicating sentences and focusing on the parts that make them tick.

4 Retracing your steps

When you are finding your own path to improvement or even when you work with a coach, you sometimes find yourself going down blind alleys and have to retrace your steps. For example, it turns out that what you are practicing is not a meaningful part of the performance, or you are working with chunks that are too small or too large.

This is a part of the process and you should embrace it. It will not feel great at the time but you should always appreciate the learning opportunity.

With exercise, they say, if it does not hurt, you’re not doing it right. With learning it is the same. But you should always be on the look out for the right kind of pain and wrong kind of pain. The right kind of pain is tiredness and soreness. This leads to growth and you can even appreciate the pain as leading to the satisfaction of your goals. The wrong kind of pain is one that leads to injury. It is not always easy to tell which kind of pain you are experiencing.

Which is where reflection plays such a vital role. Take note of your discomfort and how you felt later. You can then use that lesson to remind yourself next time you experience that the pain passed, that you’d been there before and it led to a good result.

5 Building scaffolding

Not all things you practice are a part of the target performance. But they are still necessary to develop the skill.

For example, when you speak a language, you don’t really use individual words very often. You speak in sentences. But as part of the learning process, it is very helpful to memorise lots of vocabulary using flashcards. You can then use that in developing your ability to speak in conversation even though, flashcards would not help you have a proper dialogue. Children do not use flashcards to learn their first language but very few adults can learn a new language well without some component of rote memorisation.

But not all of this scaffolding is easy. It may in itself be a skill that you can get better at with practice. There are useful and less useful ways of using flashcards to memorise vocabulary. There are good and bad strategies for converting that memorisation into an ability to have a fluent conversation.

So, you may have to spend some time working on the process of memorisation. Read some guides, dry different digital tools, make or find flashcards, etc. This may seem like it’s not a real part of the process, something that doesn’t count. But it takes time and effort and without it the rest of your practice would not be as effective.

There are many types of scaffolding involved in academic writing. It could be simply typing, keyboard shortcuts that make writing in your word processor faster, learning how to use a reference manager. But it could even be things like spelling, learning academic vocabulary, getting better at grammar, etc. And it definitely involves behaviours and habits that enable your to write.

Every single item on the above list is a skill that you can improve with practice. It may not have to be your main focus for very long but do not neglect it. Without it, the rest of the practice will be less effective.

6 Learn from others

Deliberate practice at its most effective is when you can build on the experiences of others who came before you. That’s why most elite performers work with coaches and spend time reflecting on the process.

You should build learning from others into your reflection. Read books or articles about writing. Watch YouTube videos of people talking about their writing. Have conversations with others about it.

But most importantly, you need to feed those lessons into what and how you practice. Try them out and see how they work for you.

Do not discount ideas from any corner but also do not think that there is only one way that can work for everyone. In fact, nothing works for everyone.

But do not judge whether something works for you until you’ve tried and measured the outcomes. And also do not think that what does not work for you now, will never work for you. Keep a list of things that sound intriguing to you and try them.

Finally, learn about practice techniques from other disciplines. Not everything will be directly applicable but many of the strategies, approaches to planning, and attitudes, will be useful. In the next section we will have a look at some lessons we can learn from other disciplines.