Chapter 9 - Where Do We Go From Here?

Studies

• The students in the deliberate practice class got more than 2.5 times as many right answers as those in the other class
• Comparing physics experts with physics students, students may sometimes be almost as good as the experts at solving quantitative problems, but students are far behind the experts in their ability to solve qualitative problems

Key Terms

• Homo exercens: meaning “practicing man,” the species that takes control of its life through practice and makes of itself what it will

General Information

• By modifying traditional teaching approaches to reflect the insights of deliberate practice, we might dramatically improve the effectiveness of teaching in various field
• Athletes should verbally report their thinking while they are performing, which would make it possible for researchers, coaches, or perhaps even the athletes themselves to design training tasks to improve their representations of game situations
• The less accomplished athletes don’t understand how much weaker their mental representations are than those of the best in their sport
• There is great potential for improvement by focusing on individualized training and the assessment of the athletes’ mental representations
• When preparing a lesson plan, determining what a student should be able to do is far more effective than determining what that student should know
• When teaching a skill, break the lesson into a series of steps that the student can master one at a time, building from one to the next to reach the ultimate objective
• In almost any area of education the most useful learning objectives will be those that help students develop effective mental representations
• We should begin by identifying what students should learn how to do, and the objectives should be skills, not knowledge
• You should give plenty of repetition and feedback; the regular cycle of try, fail, get feedback, try again, and so on is how the students will build their mental representations
• Redesigning teaching methods using deliberate practice could dramatically increase how quickly and how well students learn
• There is tremendous value in helping children and, especially, adolescents develop detailed mental representations in at least one area
• One benefit that a young student gets from developing mental representations is the freedom to begin exploring that skill on his or her own
• Students who develop mental representations can go on to generate their own scientific experiments or to write their own books, in the same way as many successful scientists and authors started their careers at a young age
• Having students create mental representations in one area helps them understand exactly what it takes to be successful not only in that area but in others as well
• We need to map out the various factors that make up an expert over his or her entire lifespan to provide direction for other people who want to develop expertise
• We humans are most human when we’re improving ourselves
• The most important gifts we can give our children are the confidence in their ability to remake themselves again and again and the tools with which to do that job