The Purpose of Practice

I am currently reading Doug LeMov's book, Practice Perfect. I love it when you are reading something and the whole time you are thinking, "This makes so much sense. Why didn't I think about it this way before?" In Practice Perfect, LeMov goes deeper into reflecting on how effective instructional practices become a part of our practice - it's not that we either have it or we don't, it's that we can develop it with purposeful practice.

I am a pianist. My parents insisted on getting piano lessons for me beginning at age 5. I understand practice and both it's value and purpose. But as I read this book, I am seeing that I have not often in my career truly practiced, or rehearsed, for an "in-classroom performance" - like I would if I were putting on a recital. This is where LeMov distinguishes between practice and preparation. As teachers, we spend a lot of time preparing. But preparation is actually dramatically different from practice. When I am preparing, I am thinking about what I will do when I have children in front of me, but I am not actually rehearsing what I will say, what I think they will say or do, and how I will respond next.

When I was preparing for my recitals in college, I wasn't practicing until I got it right - I was practicing until I couldn't get it wrong. What a difference that is. Think about that in terms of your instruction. What if we practiced our instructional delivery? What if we practiced our questioning and our re-directions? What if we practiced our pacing and our flow of our read aloud?

Does practicing my instructional delivery make me a robot? I know that practicing for a recital did not make me play like a robot. I know that when I see a play or a musical that I don't believe I am watching robots on stage. I know that mastery requires practice. The musical analogy to putting all of our time into preparation and not into practice is sightreading. When I sightread music, my time is invested in gathering the music and looking it over. But the first time I play it, I am sightreading the music, which means I might leave out notes, miss things, and make mistakes, but I would always keep on going. That's what we do in teaching. We gather our materials, we look things over, but then we are basically sightreading in front of a classroom of students who are counting on us to get it right. Then we reflect on the lesson and try to fix it tomorrow.

We all have had lessons where we walked away and said "that didn't work." We have all had times where we had to re-teach because we realized that we didn't hit it out of the park. Ultimately, our effectiveness is gauged by student actions - our teacher actions must lead students toward productive struggle, engagement, and ultimately, mastery of the skills and material. What if purposeful practice allowed us to have fewer "misses" and more "home-runs?" Wouldn't that be worth it?