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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
This is a great question, and a successful meme, but I’m now starting to think that it needs to die. To ask it is to misunderstand the nature of deliberate practice. It’s simply setting yourself up for frustration.
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Inês Silva
@isss111
What does deliberate practice mean for the knowledge worker? How can it be applied?
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Why? Well, because deliberate practice is a technical term, defined precisely, that describes a type of practice that is impossible in most domains that matter to our careers:
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Altogether now: if 👏 you 👏 don’t 👏 have 👏 good 👏 pedagogical 👏 development 👏 in 👏 your 👏 field 👏 you 👏 can’t 👏 do 👏 deliberate 👏 practice!
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Replying to
@ejames_c
This is not mere pedantry. For instance, both purposeful practice and deliberate practice are practice regimes with fairly tight feedback loops. But there are other kinds of expertise that demand good sensemaking and reflection, due to long feedback loops.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
There’s a theory of expertise that describes such domains of expertise, and explains how folk can become experts WITHOUT deliberate practice. It’s called cognitive transformation theory:
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
1/ Let's talk a little about how people learn in the real world. No, I'm not going to talk about classroom instruction, or pedagogical development, or enrolling in a cohort based course. None of that. Just a simple question: how do people ACTUALLY learn from doing?
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
And there’s a theory that explains how expertise is constructed in more ill-structured domains — and therefore how to accelerate it. (tl;dr, it’s possible to accelerate case based reasoning). Thread on Cognitive Flexibility Theory below:
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
1/ Let's talk about how note taking can help you accelerate expertise. Yes, I know how that sounds like. No, this isn't hype. There's some solid cognitive science here, and it has FASCINATING things to say about the nature of learning in messy, real world domains.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
To sum up, this is my current approach to learning: 1) Is there good pedagogical development in this skill domain? If yes, do DP. DP is still the best. 2) If no, are the feedback loops reasonably short? (e.g. 1-2 days?) If so, try purposeful practice.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
2a) If it’s possible to construct a simplified game approach to enable purposeful practice, then go do that. (But this is hard!) cc
@LiaDiBello4
who is an expert at this. 3) Do you have access to an expert? If so, try doing an expertise extraction using cognitive task analysis.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
4) Is this an ill-structured domain? If so, switch to searching for context instantiations. (CFT) 5) Finally, if none of the above are true, do trial and error and rely on good reflection best practices (CTT) to gain expertise.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
All of this, naturally, is subject to change as I continue to dig into the expertise research + write up notes from practice. Follow if you’d like more updates; I’m not entirely sure what I’ll find next.
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