From knowledge to skills. Universal rules for effective training of any skills

In the rules below, we'll take a fresh look at eight common judgments about training (all of which are presented in the summary table at the end of the chapter). By abandoning stereotypes, you will significantly improve the quality of your team's training and prepare it for any job, whether it be sports games, important meetings, difficult work situations, solving creative problems or performing medical manipulations. In all areas of activity, better practical training will put you in the lead.

We do not set ourselves the goal of turning all your ideas upside down. No, we only ask you to reconsider the training system that has become entrenched in your mind, disassemble it into elements and bring each of them to perfection. Only then will it be possible to determine the most effective techniques and create an advanced methodology for improving skills. If it works, keep going. Perhaps distrust will force you to try new methods until the most effective one is determined. So choose one or more tricks and watch the results. Our rules will help you to go this way.

We like to say: "Practice makes perfect." However, it would be more correct to say that training gives a stable result. During practical training, you can carefully work out or not work out some skill, you can perform the exercise correctly, or you can do it “with straight knees”. In any case, your actions will become a certain program, that is, they will be fixed in the mind and muscle memory and turn into a habit - either good or bad. If players learn wrong moves in training, they will move incorrectly during the match. If in training you do not have a certain focus, you will also work - without direction. Therefore, the most important goal of any practical training is to ensure that participants program themselves for success. Whatever you memorize and whatever you teach, the training must be done correctly. It would seem that this is obvious, but in real life, training often programs for failure. There are many reasons for this, but two of them are the most common. Firstly, it is not always possible to keep track of whether the students are doing everything right. Secondly, there is a risk of dooming participants to failure, for example, in a futile attempt to speed up learning. We will definitely consider these traps in more detail, but for now we will make a small digression dedicated to the idealization of a fiasco.

Surely someone close to you - some Uncle Lou - told you a story about the time when he began to learn something: to write claims, ride a bicycle, dance the tarantella or lay tiles. And now he recalls almost enthusiastically: “I swear to God, I tried to do this a hundred times. The first ninety-nine did not work, but I forced myself to start all over again. Finally I made it." Perhaps Uncle Lu really learned to do something, and even do it wonderfully. Perhaps his struggle really seems priceless to him. But even if thousands of things have been learned through Uncle Lou's method, this does not mean that you have the best and most effective method in the world in your hands. It is possible that Uncle Lou spent ten times as much time and effort on training than he needed. It would be better if his story turned out differently, and he would tell you how nice it was to study productively, appreciating every minute. If you're trying to be systematically successful at work, or want to train your students to do something better than others—manage investments, teach in public schools, throw good passes—be ironic about stories like these that idealize failure. Maybe a fiasco helps to develop character and train willpower, but he cannot afford to form the necessary skill.

Now, back to the two things that make learning program failure. The first is based on the rule that effective teaching requires constant attention to the progress of students. “You don’t teach them until they learn,” Wooden was fond of saying. The best teachers check almost every second how much their students have learned, a process called testing comprehension. In fact, the lack of understanding grows like a snowball, and over time it becomes more and more difficult to correct it. Therefore, teachers should constantly ask themselves: “Have the students really learned the material? I'm sure of it?" Systematic observation of students will do the trick: they will learn what you are trying to teach them, but you will have to not only check, but also influence the result. Teaching should be structured so that a student who fails something will try again - in class or after it individually ("Come on, Charles, let's try again right here"). A skill test should contain an important element - a reaction to failure in order to correct it as quickly and positively as possible. To do this, you will have to radically change your thinking and perceive the results of students as an objective reality. If in training three out of four did the exercise incorrectly, one would like to wishful thinking: “Great, at least someone succeeded.” Although the correct reaction should be different: "Well, well, only one of the four succeeded." In other words, the information available is cause for concern, not joy.

At the beginning of the chapter, we said that in training, young football players, having remembered the wrong manner of playing, continue to “improve” it. It's the organization of training itself that is to blame, which does not allow coaches and players to track progress and check mastery of skills. Five different exercises in a row is too many to systematically and objectively follow everything, as required by the verification process. Every time you have to pay attention to something new: tense muscles, bent knees, running on toes. As a result, trainers know almost nothing about the mastering of the task by each student. The variety of exercises increases the likelihood that the error will go unnoticed, and therefore, be fixed in memory.

Another source of programmed failure is the desire of trainers to double the difficulty in the hope that this will drastically speed up learning. If your daughter hits 100 balls after practicing in her yard and you think she is ready to be an excellent hitter on her baseball team, you might mistakenly assume that after hitting 100 mph balls, she will do much better. faster. Faced with a task far beyond her capacity, the girl will most likely try to make small changes in her usual actions, perhaps even polish her technique. However, if the serves are too fast, she will miss the balls and, in a reckless pursuit of the task, will destroy the skills already in place. As a result, the girl will act at random, instead of gradually adapting her abilities to new requirements. In fruitless attempts to catch up with the rushing ball, she risks developing a new bad habit.

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham in Why Students Dislike School? (Why Don't Students Like School?) noticed that people learn fastest when a complex problem requires a series of small, sequential steps. This does not apply to tasks from the "come what may!" series. If the task is too difficult, learning slows down. What's more, says Willingham, students tend to like things to get progressively harder, meaning people really enjoy learning the material well. The other side of the coin is that failure can be costly. Because of such misfires, some students even drop out of classes. When failures follow one after another, only a huge willpower makes a person move on. The fact that ninety-nine falls are so engraved in the memory of your Uncle Lou means only one thing: he fought his failure only once in his life.

It is important to define what we mean by success. Of course, we want everyone to succeed the first time during the training. However, the ideal success rate should not be 100%, as it follows that the exercise was too easy. A reliable success rate should be quite high and be formulated as follows: on average, the majority of participants cope. If your students make a lot of mistakes, don't stop - keep going until success is programmed into their memory. If the error is persistent and common, ask yourself if they need to be stressed like that. It may be worth changing the lesson plan, abandoning the variety of tasks and options, and temporarily simplify the task by choosing one from the list of skills or slowing down to work out all the difficult points. In practice, we have derived the following learning goal: participants must complete the task as quickly and efficiently as possible. If it doesn’t work, slow down and return to the original task. In any case, you should strive to ensure that students perform the most difficult task with stable - there will not be absolute anyway - success. If they can't get it right, reduce the difficulty. When they learn this part of the material, start from this level and move on.

Program yourself for success

Plan the curriculum so that the achievement rate is stable and high. Even when the tasks are particularly difficult, students still need to cope with them and practice the correct pedagogical techniques.

Constantly check the level of assimilation of the material. If students fail at something, temporarily simplify the task until they can do it. Then increase the difficulty.

Set up students to complete the most difficult task as quickly and correctly as possible.

Rule 2. Train twenty percent of a hundred

The 80/20 rule that economists constantly refer to is also known as the “principle of least effort.” The truth of this model has been repeatedly proven: 80 percent of the results are achieved through 20 percent of the effort. When it comes to business, if you look at the numbers, you'll find that 80 percent of your profits come from 20 percent of your customers. By studying these invaluable customers, the company learns that 80 percent of useful information comes from 20 percent of sources. Even if you spend a lot of money on collecting the rest of the information, it will not be as useful.

The principle of least effort applies to learning as well. He suggests that in order to achieve great things, you need to practice the 20 percent of the most useful skills and forget about the other 80 percent that you were going to spend time on. If you spend all your energy (that is, 80 percent of the time) on practicing 20 percent of the skills and refrain from less useful exercises, then you can become, figuratively speaking (or literally), a football team whose pressure cannot be held back by any opponent. Training will give much more convincing results if you work out only the most important.

One of our most paradoxical but very important findings is that the value of training rises after mastering the material. When students reach a certain level of proficiency, it is not uncommon to hear mentors say, “Great, they already know how. Move on". But if you're only practicing the most important skills—the cherished 20 percent that bring in 80 percent of the results—don't stop at the already know level. Your task is to bring these 20 percent to perfection. Continue until you bring them to the level of automatism, naturalness and, as we will discuss later, unleashing creativity. To achieve excellence in the main is much more important than to simply get good results in a number of useful skills. Football player Xavi Hernandez, one of the best midfielders in the world, mentioned this in an interview with the English Guardian. Xavi describes an exercise that is typical of Spanish football and even explains the world superiority of the Spanish system. "It's all about rondo, - he says about a game in which four or five players quickly pass the ball to each other in a square, and one or two try to take the ball away from them. - Rondo, rondo, rondo. Everyone! God's! Day! You can't imagine a better exercise. You learn responsibility and the ability to hold the ball. Lost - go to the center. Run-run-run-run - until you take it away with one touch ... ”This exercise is so useful that players repeat it endlessly - to the detriment of something new. Its value does not decrease with increasing skill level, on the contrary, it only increases. In the end, even the fact that the Spaniards gave the exercise a special name emphasizes its power. By the way, there is a special meaning in giving a name: it is more convenient for participants to discuss it. To become, like the Spaniards, the best in the world and develop a competitive advantage, you need to pay special attention to the most useful exercises. When the athletes, in the opinion of the coach, have learned everything, he should say: “Excellent, now let's start working on it. We train until we achieve perfection.”

How to identify the 20 percent most useful skills? You may have already found the correct answer based on personal experience. If so, congratulations. If not, the best source would be objective metrics. What do customers say they value most about your company? What do employees think makes them respect leaders? What actions will allow the student to learn this course of algebra? What manipulations are repeated in the operating room most often? Which surgical procedures are more likely to make mistakes that can be eliminated?

If it is impossible to get exact information, try to turn to the wisdom of the crowd. In this case, we are referring to the book of the same name, The Wisdom of the Crowd, by New Yorker financial columnist James Schuroviesky, who emphasizes that gathering the opinions of different people, even if there is not a single “expert” among them, always helps in a difficult situation. He gives an example of how it was possible to find a missing submarine in the middle of the endless ocean, only by collecting and analyzing the assumptions of many scientists about its location. Nobody individually was close to the truth, but the "average opinion" turned out to be amazingly accurate.

When you're trying to figure out the 20 percent skills—for example, if you don't know what moves a promising saxophonist should practice first—gather a group of relatively knowledgeable people and ask them for advice. Maybe the top five most frequently mentioned ideas are far from perfect, but for now, this is enough to start training and polishing each skill. The goal is not to master the basic skills and then move on. Remember: you must achieve excellence in the most important.

It is worth noting that the content of this 20 percent can change over time and even requires periodic reassessment. In doing so, we recommend relying on facts. Tim Daly, president of The New Teacher Project, did just that when he analyzed the teacher training methods used at his company. He revealed a certain trend: if in the first two months the teacher did not learn to control the behavior of the class, then in the future he suffers a complete collapse. Daly asked subordinates to make changes to the system of practical training: significantly reduce the number of points in the program and focus on the skills teachers need to control student behavior. The company began to spend 80 percent of its efforts on this. In addition, educators have more time to practice long-term skills—a new 20 percent.

You may think that the 80/20 learning process takes a lot of time to plan and organize. It probably is. You can't just start working out what you'll be doing at the teacher professional development workshop that opens in the evening just in the middle of the day on Friday. On the way to your daughter’s basketball practice, you can’t start thinking about what set of exercises you are going to load her with now. When you take on the whole system as a whole, there are many nuances. On the one hand, you need to create a task scheme; make a plan of action, develop high-quality exercises for each skill from the 20 percent already familiar to us, and it should be borne in mind that over time the tasks will become more complicated. On the other hand, having done all this, you no longer have to spend your precious time preparing a vinaigrette from a variety of activities that are forgotten immediately after they end. The freed up time and energy you will devote to your best exercises, to which you will constantly return. As a result, you save time, simplify your work, and maybe save its future.

Train twenty percent of a hundred

Identify the 20 percent of the skills that, once practiced, will produce 80 percent of the results.

Pay maximum attention only to priority tasks, without being distracted by secondary ones.

Keep practicing, because the value of training increases as you master the skills!

Save your time and plan ahead.

Keep participants interested by repeating high-performance exercises with slight variations. You don't have to constantly come up with something new.

Rule 3. First - the body, then - the head

One of our colleagues, let's call her Sarah, learned for a long time to correctly explain the essence of the tasks, since her students quite often had difficulties in completing them. Other teachers suggested that the reason is in the tasks themselves: what Sarah asks the students for is not very clear to them. The girl began to practice: at first she wrote down clear and understandable instructions in order - this technique is called the "action plan" (briefly described at the end of the book). Then she learned to say out loud what she wrote, imagining that she was standing in front of the class. She performed both exercises on her own and with colleagues. When Sarah discovered how her words sound from the outside, she had to make a number of adjustments. She practiced at every opportunity and in every setting, trying to turn the skill into a habit that would firmly enter her mind.

A few weeks later, Sarah asked a colleague to attend the class. At the end of it, the colleague first of all asked Sarah what she herself thinks about how everything went. According to Sarah, everything was relatively good: the students behaved in a disciplined manner, they worked well in the lesson - in any case, there was nothing to blush for. True, she had to apologize to a colleague for not being able to use the "action plan" throughout the lesson. She managed to resort to it only at the very beginning, but she never managed to demonstrate all the skills that she had honed for so long and carefully. Sarah regretted that she had needlessly disturbed her colleague. But she, on the contrary, noticed something completely different: Sarah constantly uses her achievements, especially when it is necessary to quickly correct the behavior of students and return them to the topic of the lesson. In a word, she used the new skill unconsciously.

Through training, Sarah turned the skill into a habit, and during the lesson, when her head was occupied with other things, the new habit worked automatically. This often happens with musicians or athletes - in a word, with those who train regularly. When the skill is mastered to automatism, the body does everything by itself, and only then the brain is connected. For example, customer service professionals are specially trained to calmly respond to angry customers, so they do not lose their composure during a conflict - thanks to constant training, they have worked out a balanced reaction to everything. When communicating, they act unconsciously, and this is the whole point. To get subordinates to respond appropriately to difficult situations, do not ask them to be calm consciously. It is better to teach the correct reaction so that it turns on automatically.

In the book "Incognito. The secret life of the brain ”(Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain), scientist and writer David Eagleman talks about what our brain does without our knowledge and how important it is that it absolutely unconsciously relied on memorized actions. As an example, the author cites a study of amnesiacs who were taught to play a video game. They did not remember its essence, since such patients do not have short-term memory, but each time they scored more and more points, like healthy people. The conclusion is simple: to use your knowledge, it is not necessary to be aware of it.

Moreover, awareness often gets in the way. A completely unreasonable desire to survive makes you press the brake pedal before your mind has time to analyze the situation. Representatives of public professions simply need to train the brain to work unconsciously. Eagleman makes an amazing point: “The goal of a professional athlete is not to think”, he should develop “calculated learned algorithms” so that “in the heat of the fight, the necessary movements are performed automatically.” In baseball, the ball hits the base in 0.4 seconds, so the batters don't have time to realize anything. The ball is hit before the batter has processed the information. A successful game is built on habits already developed, but which manifest themselves unconsciously at the most opportune moment.

The synergy of conscious problem solving and automatism is developed in training. This is especially true for drivers. Your actions are dictated not only by unconscious habits imprinted in memory, but also by deep analytical thinking. While you are performing a series of complex actions and inexplicably solving many tasks at the same time, your brain is completely free to analyze and reflect. If through training you purposefully master a number of skills, then unexpectedly you will learn to cope with difficult tasks and free your active mind to solve other important issues.

Do you remember we talked about how our colleagues Nikki Frame and Maggie Johnson practiced ten minutes a day to answer unexpected questions from students? By mastering this skill in a few weeks, Nikki and Maggie had the added benefit of being able to focus on more complex, intellectual tasks during class.

Imagine what great results this technique would bring in other high-tech and complex professions. For example, a physician may practice calmly responding to the behavior of an agitated patient several times a week. Equanimity will not only calm the patient, but also help the doctor focus on the examination and diagnosis. Now he solves complex problems at a higher level and does not use his brain for unnecessary communication. In the next rule, we will talk about how rote learning generates deep thought processes.

First the body, then the head

Insist on working skills to automatism so that students use them mechanically - before consciousness is connected.

Gradually layer simple mechanical skills on top of each other so that students learn to perform complex tasks without thinking.

Bring basic skills to automatism, but at the same time select more complex skills that can be performed mechanically. Do not believe that only simple actions can become a habit.

Rule 4: Unleash your creativity through repetition

John Wooden once made a wonderful point, formulating the corollary to rule 3: "Practice lays the foundation for personal initiative and imagination." If a rule 3 proposes to bring skills to automatism so that they work unconsciously, then rule 4 draws attention to what the mind is doing at that time. Let's do a little research: ask yourself what time of day you usually have bright thoughts. Most likely, when you take a shower, drive a car, brush your teeth or go for a run - that is, you perform long-familiar actions, brought to automatism. What is your mind doing at this time? Come up with something interesting. Therefore, to increase creativity, you just need to provide the brain with a “free mode”: due to mechanically learned skills, it will be free when you previously had to work at full power.

Athletes or musicians often report that as they gain experience, the game seems to slow down for them. This means that at certain moments the brain receives an additional resource, since complex actions no longer require great mental stress. Suddenly, they look around and see an open player or a good pass.

The connection between the automatism of frequently performed actions and creative possibilities was even more vividly shown by Johan Cruyff, one of the best football players of all time, who became the personification of an incredible, creative approach to the game. During a match, he could step over all the stereotypes and rules that dictate actions in a certain situation, and do something unexpected, and with amazing effect. Once in an interview, he was asked to name the players who played better than him in their youth, but for some reason did not succeed. After listing them, he said: “They were great footballers. But there are times when you need to act quickly. For example, if you control the ball within not two meters, but only fifty centimeters, and if the ball crosses this boundary, you will lose it. When you are under pressure from all sides, you have to think faster.” Cruyff does not talk about any creativity. On the contrary, he notes the automatism of key skills - the familiar 20 percent - under stress. He acted mechanically, so he had time to think about other things. If you want to be creative in critical situations, bring the basic skills to automatism and free the brain for creative work.

It is worth stopping for a moment to talk about how the case for memorization has made many American educators nervous, convinced that training, which they pejoratively call training, is opposed to the intellect and is even its enemy. To them, the clear correlation between imagination and training sounds like blasphemy. In their opinion, teaching that requires students to memorize material to automatism negatively affects their creativity and makes it impossible to make breakthroughs in learning.

The problem with such an argument is that the learning process is built differently in principle. As cognitive psychologists, including Daniel Willingham, have shown, it is almost impossible to have a developed mind without hard-wired skills and facts. Breakthroughs in cognition, intuition, inspiration - these are the terms our opponents use - are achieved through minimal brain effort when solving a problem at a primitive level and re-addressing it at a higher one. The preliminary analytical work goes unnoticed by you, because it is done unconsciously, but not ignored. The synergy of mechanical reproduction and creativity is ubiquitous among the peoples of Asia. “It was the Americans who came up with the idea of opposing mechanical reproduction to critical thinking. In their opinion, the first is bad, and the second is good,” write scientists studying Japanese schools. But they came to the conclusion that developed thinking is actually based on rote learning and needs it. Creativity awakens when the brain operates freely in situations that previously required mental work.

Once at business school, Doug worked on a group that was solving a macroeconomic problem. The board was filled with equations with dozens of variables, but it seemed that the solution would never be found. Then a student who had previously studied in Eastern Europe came up to the blackboard. “That part of the equation has to be negative,” and he circled a number of variables. “This is a negative coefficient, and all other values are positive,” and he circled two more sequences of variables. – These two must be positive, because here all the values are positive, and here we are multiplying two negative numbers. So in this equation, a negative value makes two positives, and that gives a negative. Therefore, we will all go bankrupt, ”and he returned to his place. Unlike the other members of the group, the native from Eastern Europe solved the problem not because he omitted mechanical calculations, but because they were easy for him. To deal with mundane things, you need to know them by heart. John Wooden said: "I wanted my team to impress me as much as their opponent when faced with an unexpected obstacle." Wooden had no doubt that it would. Players trained in training show amazing creativity in stressful situations.

Wanting to test the assumption that creativity and individuality are unleashed with more repetition, we started experimenting in workshops. This is how the “Strong Voice” exercise (its description is given at the end of the book) was invented, during which teachers learned to remind slouching students to straighten their backs. The participants of the seminar took turns playing the roles of a teacher, a student and a trainer who monitors the process from the outside and gives recommendations. Teachers had to communicate with students non-verbally. The first time we asked the participants to try on all the roles two or three times. But it became clear to us that teachers act and think at the same time. The participants managed to cope with the task, but did not adapt it to their own teaching style, so we changed something.

Current page: 1 (total book has 20 pages) [accessible reading excerpt: 4 pages]

Doug Lemov Erica Woolway Katie Yezzi
From knowledge to skills
Universal rules for effective training of any skills

Foreword

In the summer of 2011, my wife and my parents went on a tour of Scotland to a whiskey distillery. It seemed that our guide was about to die of boredom. At each stop, she recited a memorized text and then asked, “Any questions?” - of course, they were not, because no one listened to her. What I remember most about the whole trip - apart from the desire to start tasting as soon as possible - was that I was constantly haunted by the thought of artist Chris Rock.

Shortly before the trip, I read in Petty Stakes by Peter Sims 1
Sims Peter. Small bets. A great idea cannot be invented, but it can be discovered. Moscow: Mann, Ivanov i Ferber, 2012.

How Rock selected material for comic numbers. Once, preparing for a big tour, Chris chose a small club in New Brunswick and performed there day after day almost fifty times; in addition, he did not part with a notebook, where he constantly entered new jokes and immediately tested them on the audience. Sims describes this process as follows: “... The artist carefully observes the audience, noting when the audience nods in approval, reacts with gestures or long pauses. In other words, he tries to capture any reaction from the audience that could suggest the right direction for finding new ideas. Such performances last about forty-five minutes and are usually a sad sight: most of the replicas do not delight the public. 2
The Tonight Show with David Letterman has been on CBS since 1992. Note. ed.

However, over time, Chris got to the bottom of success and learned to select the right numbers. The artist's manners have become more natural, the jokes have become sharper, and the transitions from reprise to reprise have become more dynamic. If you ever laughed at his lines (like this one: “The area I grew up in was not very good, there was always a guy who shot faster than you”), then thank the state of New Jersey and the city of New Brunswick for it.

By the time Rock got a foothold on HBO and started performing on The David Letterman Show 3

He has long not only mastered the secrets of craftsmanship, but also brought it to perfection. The result is there: Chris Rock is such a jerk- the viewer thinks, sincerely believing that everything is given to the artist without effort and everything turns out by itself.

A couple of months after that trip, I had to speak, and I found myself giving a speech quite automatically, as, in fact, I had done many times before. For a moment, I felt sick at the thought: I'm no different from that unfortunate tour guide. Fortunately, I had the prudence not to let out my guess and thereby avoid much embarrassment.

We always face the same choice: be a boring tour guide or Chris Rock; settle for life on autopilot or move forward and challenge yourself to achieve more. Do we want to wallow in a quagmire or will we constantly train? This book is intended to be a guide for all who choose the latter.

You will find many discoveries and thought-provoking wonderful ideas. One of them is that through training, you most likely will not achieve perfection, but you will definitely achieve stable result.

For example, you have used shampoo for many years, but your hair does not got better. You can live to the day you die without learning more effective ways to take care of your hair. Regular performance of any actions does not mean at all that we improve our skills. You need to practice for real, and not just repeat what has already been memorized. Remember the words of Michael Jordan: "You can spend eight hours a day learning to shoot the ball into the basket, but if you do it wrong, you will achieve only one thing - you will perfect the wrong throws." Training gives stable results.

As children, we are constantly learning something: throw the ball into the basket, play the piano, speak Spanish. Perhaps everything was not easy for us - and what runner does not dream of a tailwind? But if the sessions were carefully planned, they brought wonderful results: we made progress. From week to week, our performance was getting better.

Why did training leave our lives? After all, the need for it has not disappeared? Office workers need constant practice just as much as athletes or musicians. Each of us would do well to perfect certain skills, and the list of them is huge. I will name just a few: the ability to conduct a meeting without delay; the ability to listen (really) to your other half; the ability to endure intense traffic without hating others and swearing at them.

Pride, fear and complacency are the main enemies of learning. After all, any training is based on humility. Turning to those who can teach us something, we are forced to admit that we do not know much. And of course, the desire to practice is not a sign of weakness at all. After all, we know many champions who have been elevated to the pinnacle of success by relentless training: Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, Roger Federer, Mia Hamm, Tiger Woods. Education does not at all indicate that I'm not going anywhere. It means: I can get better.

No doubt, every day we something practice - training takes place around the clock. All our lives we learn to understand our children and find a common language with colleagues. But something else is important to us - are we marking time or are we gaining experience and developing?

Since you have this book in your hands, you are ready to learn. So you have made the right choice.

Time to practice the art of getting better.

Dan Heath, Senior Fellow, Center for Social Enterprise Development at Duke University

Prologue

Why hands-on training? Why now?

The book is addressed to a wide range of readers. However, we, its three authors, consider ourselves teachers first and foremost. Initially, we planned to write a book about teachers and for teachers, but as the work progressed, we realized that managers, coaches, mentors, and leaders of large organizations can become our readers - moreover, they all have children, which means Everyone had to teach someone one way or another. In other words, the audience was clearly expanding. And yet, first of all, we remained teachers, so the world in the book is presented through the eyes of a teacher.

We hope you will forgive us our addiction to general discussions about pedagogy, which we look at with hope, albeit timid. We are optimistic because we still believe that this is the noblest profession in the world. And no matter what you teach - to be patient when examining an elderly patient; solve quadratic equations; score balls; holding meetings, reading 19th-century novels—the job of a teacher seems to us to be one of the greatest in the world. That is why we are full of optimism. Today, due to political confusion and budget deficits, teachers have been cornered. But in the end, temporary difficulties will pass, and there will be fruits of creative research that will change our profession, enrich it with new knowledge and provide tools that we did not know before. This will happen not only through the new teacher training system, but also through the use of analytical tools to identify and collect together the best pedagogical achievements - “bright spots”, as the Heath brothers would say. 4
The Heath brothers are American psychologists Chip Heath and Dan Heath, authors of the books: “Strengthen what has been done. Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Chip Heath, Dan Heath. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. New York: Random House, 2007); "Switch. Painless Change (Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. Crown Business, 2010); “The main decision. How to make better choices in life and work” (Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. Crown Business, 2013. Note. nepev.

By the way, it was their work that inspired not only us, but also many other teachers.

At the same time, we are modest, because, trying to develop a new formula for teaching, we ourselves made many mistakes - it happened in public - and very annoying ones. We are modest, because, in our opinion, modesty - that is, the constant awareness that you can and should work better - is the basis of any work in the modern world. Our modesty extends so far that we hardly dared to start writing this book. But nevertheless, we wrote it and we hope: it will be useful both for teachers and representatives of other professions.

In this book, we, Doug, Erica, and Katie, share our experiences in an extremely important sector of the economy - the public education system. We share what we have learned by fighting for every talented person and participating in solving the most difficult social problem - the gap in the level of academic achievement between children from wealthy strata of society and children from needy families. In addition, the book presents observations on the creative path and professional development of many talented people from a wide variety of fields. Therefore, we are convinced that the material we have collected, containing many examples from teaching practice and our personal experience in school, will be of interest not only to specialists in the education system, but also from other areas of activity, and to all those who wish to improve their professional skills. Moreover, we ourselves have long been applying the knowledge acquired in a narrow professional field in our personal lives, so we believe that the book will benefit many readers. After all, any parent repeatedly faces the same problems, trying not only to raise children as good people, caring and confidently going through life, but also to make them real professionals - mathematicians, musicians, football players. By the way, many problems arise when trying to improve ourselves, when we learn to ski, hammer nails, knit, manage people, and even, judging by our latest experience, write books. The first step to take is to learn the art of learning.

In all these situations, you will need an assistant, rather modest and inconspicuous, but able to turn straw into gold. 5
An allusion to the Brothers Grimm's fairy tale "Rumpeliytiltskin", where the dwarf helps the heroine to spin golden threads from straw. Note. ed.

We are talking about training whose role is underestimated by many. The training itself is considered mundane and routine; the idea of training is often treated with disdain and even distrust: it's too banal to be interesting. However, such a thing as constant practice deserves a more thoughtful attitude - deep study and correct execution.

Each of the three of us has been studying the problem of teacher professional development for many years. Doug worked as a teacher, was the director of the school; thoroughly studied the experience of the best teachers and summarized it in the extremely successful and useful book "Teach Like a Champion" (Teach Like a Champion) 6
Doug Lemov. Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put on the Path to College (K-12). San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2012.

Erica was a teacher, chairman of the certification committee, head of educational work; as a young school leader, she mastered Doug's method in an effort to find a common language with novice teachers. Katie has fifteen years of teaching experience under her belt: she managed to work as a teacher, principal and consultant for charter schools 7
Charter schools have existed in the American education system since 1992; are free public schools operating on the basis of a contract with local authorities (hence the name: from the English charter - charter; contract; preemptive right); financed both by the state and by attracting private funds. Charter schools have a number of advantages: children are accepted regardless of the social and financial situation of their parents; there is absolute freedom in the choice of methods and areas of study and independent selection of teachers; assistance is provided in the placement of graduates in higher educational institutions. Charter schools create a progressive learning environment and provide great opportunities for professional growth for teachers. Note. transl.

; She was introduced to Doug's system before the release of Teach Like a Champion, and his methodology was a revelation to her, as it provided a real opportunity to pass on the latest teaching methods and techniques. In the fall of 2008, Erica and Katie joined an organization led by Doot, whose goal is not only to educate thousands of top school teachers and principals, but to change the lives of teachers and students in public, private and charter schools across the country through new approaches. The most striking thing is how many instructors, parents, educators, doctors, high school teachers have found other uses for Doug's methods. Therefore, when we fully realized the value of constant practice, we turned to those areas of activity in which, unlike teaching, the method of training is used as the main one.

On the recommendation of our colleague Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, we read The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. 8
Coyle Daniel. talent code. How to help your child become a real genius. – M.: ACT, 2010.

- a book about a unique system for identifying and cultivating talent - and learned very useful lessons from it. Among them, not the last was the understanding of the leading role of training in the development of abilities. To understand how to apply and teach the methods of the best teachers, we took a close look at the work of Malcolm Gladwell, Atul Gawande, Carol Dweck, and Daniel Willingham. Their arguments completely convinced us, moreover, we became simply obsessed with different ideas of training, but we lacked specific instructions. Therefore, after analyzing our own practical experience and following our intuition, we selected the most effective of them. All our conversations revolved around one topic that raised many questions. What is the secret to a successful workout? What is the difference between constant practice and ordinary activity or repetition of what has been learned by heart? What principles should underlie exercises designed to improve skills? Thus were formulated forty two rules designed to teach the reader how to use the most effective teaching methods, and as a result, the book that you hold in your hands saw the light of day.

In the first chapter, we ask you to rethink stereotypes about the learning process. This is where we begin to present a set of rules, since it is impossible to build a new system without abandoning biased opinion. In the following chapters - two, three and four - we give practical instructions for organizing training, using examples and obtaining feedback. Chapters 5 and 6 show you how to form teams of people who are willing to constantly practice and make optimal use of the power of training. At the heart of success - personal, corporate, public and even state - is, above all, the struggle for talent. More precisely, the struggle to attract capable people and to develop them. This principle has always worked, but the struggle for talent has never been as acute as today - today, when competition has outgrown the boundaries of individual markets and turned into an international one, when any organization is in dire need of gifted employees, when narrow specialization sets higher standards for personal efficiency. The rules in this book will help you develop your own abilities, which are so necessary in today's world of competing ideas and values, and at the same time teach you the art of learning.

Introduction

Everyone has the desire to win, but few have the will to prepare for victory.

Bobby Knight

An amazing thing: the more I train, the more lucky I am.

Arnold Palmer

The decisive role of practical training

John Wooden is a legendary figure. For twenty-seven years, he was the permanent coach of the basketball team at the University of California. ESPN named him the best coach of the 20th century, and Sporting News named him the greatest coach of all time. Wooden took his team to the level of national championships, and in twelve years she became the champion ten times. He won eighty-eight games in a row and achieved the highest scoring percentage (0.813 win percentage) in NCA basketball history. The constant victories of the team and its highest reputation were partly due to the special attitude of the coach towards the players, who paid no less attention to the development of the character of the athletes than to their professional skills. In retirement, John Wooden began to write books about his vision of life in basketball, and it is not surprising that the influence of his ideas extended far beyond the basketball court. Books written by Wooden and books about him help people to comprehend not only the secrets of the game of basketball, but also reveal to them something more in education, business and life itself.

Even those who are not at all interested in sports look to Wooden's methods for the magical power that turns effort into triumph. Wooden has many followers, but few have been able to replicate his success. Why? We - the authors of this book, constantly helping promising teachers become better teachers - have found the right answer. As a rule, people miss one crucial component of the Wooden system, which, perhaps, lies the secret of success. This is a good old training, well organized, planned and correctly carried out.

If you ask Wooden what led his teams to success, he would probably talk about unknown episodes in an empty gym. For example, when players practice shooting without a basketball hoop. Maybe he would remember how in the evenings he painted the program for the next day, indicating exactly where the basket should be, so that not a single player wasted time looking for the ball. For Wooden, training was everything, he put so much energy, soul and mind into it that his passion became a legend. Usually, to everyone's bewilderment, he began each training session with such trifles that other coaches not only did not pay attention to, but did not even remember about them. In particular, how to put on socks and lace up sneakers 9
We don't invent anything. Wooden actually believed that players' blisters, caused by misplaced socks and laced shoes, were the cause of many sporting defeats. Even athletes of such a level as Alcindor and Walton could not avoid such embarrassment. According to Wooden, it all starts with socks. - Here and below, unless otherwise indicated, the authors' notes are given.

He calculated everything to the minute, thinking over how to use every second of the game wisely, and precisely planning the place of the players on the court. He logged every practice session, writing down the details on cards that he saved for future matches, checking what worked, what didn't work, and how to play better next time. Unlike other coaches, Wooden did not devote all his attention to training, reproducing situations of real competition, and separate game elements to practice specific principles and skills. He preached consistent progress and always started coaching by having the athletes train without the ball, gradually making the task more difficult. He repeated the exercises until the players reached perfection, brought to automaticity - sometimes to the detriment of practicing more complex skills. In situations where other coaches thought their teams had mastered it, Wooden's team was just getting started on the real work. From his players, he invariably demanded the careful execution of all exercises, even if some of them had already been worked out earlier.

We remember John Wooden during the championships. But what really made him great was his training. Each stage: explanation, training, re-execution - everything was organized and thought out at least a little, but better than others. The very culture of training, that is, the atmosphere in which they took place, and the mood of the players were distinguished by a little more restraint, a little more dedication and a little more perseverance. All these "little bits" had a powerful cumulative effect, leading each new generation of players to stable and systematic success.

We have already mentioned the book by sportswriter Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code. In our opinion, this is one of the attempts to comprehend the tradition of purposeful training established thanks to Wooden. Coyle talks about the amazing “hotspots of talent” emerging around the world, and attributes their emergence to good preparation that gives the same cumulative effect. What we often refer to as outstanding talent can be a brilliant skill developed through subtle but consistent practice. How else to explain that a children's tennis school that exists in a city with not the most favorable climate and has at its disposal only one old indoor court - a school that Coyle frankly calls a beggar - has produced more champions since its inception than all American tennis clubs , taken together?

The whole secret is in the "mistress" of the school, an elderly gray-haired woman in a tracksuit - teacher Larisa Preobrazhenskaya. Her wards understand that training gives a stable result, because it translates movements into muscle memory, therefore, you need to take your time and do the exercises slowly and correctly. Like John Wooden, Preobrazhenskaya pays attention to practicing fewer professional techniques, but trains skills with more quality and scrupulousness. She requires students to imitate outstanding tennis players, and does this without any regard for authority; after all, many coaches refuse such a teaching method, considering it too humiliating and therefore unacceptable. “Thanks to his tenacity,” writes Coyle. “Preobrazhenskaya actually single-handedly changed the views of Russians on domestic tennis.” The first bright performances of her students caused a surge of interest in this game in the country, and a crowd of people rushed to the "factory of champions". The success that followed was so huge that it seemed statistically impossible. Today, Russia rightfully considers itself a great tennis power, because it has created players who are absolutely confident in their abilities.

Coyle gives many examples of how a well-thought-out system, consisting of seemingly simple techniques, creates an inexplicable concentration of talented people who can change society and established opinions about human capabilities. Brazilians' passion for football has given them international recognition, but it's hard to imagine the impact their passion for football has on the development of Brazilian players. futsal.(This game is similar to football, but played with a less resilient ball in a smaller court with fewer players and usually in a closed hall.) In one hour of playing futsal, an athlete contacts the ball six times more often than in regular football. Due to the limited size of the sports ground, the skill of the players is brought to automatism. “Commentators like to talk about the creativity of Brazilian football players, but this is not entirely true. Their creative abilities have been trained all their lives,” writes Coyle. Brazilian football is formed through training, consisting of the simplest elements - in fact, they brought it to a level inaccessible to other countries.

Americans are obsessed with the passion for competition. We love to get upset loudly when we lose, to shout the last “hurrah!” outgoing veteran, nervously keep track of time at the end of the game. Watching matches, we support our favorite teams and their players to the point of frenzy, especially when our children play. But if we really want to know what real sport is in all its glory, we really want to appreciate and understand as this is done, then instead of performances, we need to watch the training. Much more attention should have been paid to game practice: exercise technique, an atmosphere of self-restraint, a culture of perseverance and the amount of practice. And most importantly, it would be necessary to find out whether any classes were held at all.

Now suppose that we could create such "hotspots of talent" like the Russian tennis school described by Coyle. This would cause an explosion of records and fundamentally change society's understanding of human capabilities and achievements. Let's imagine that the same technique is applied not only to tennis or football, but also to other much more important areas - improving the quality of management in hospitals and schools, creating thousands of companies that offer useful products to their customers.

Indeed, we did not intend to write a book about sports, although we hope that the topics covered will benefit many professional athletes. The goal that we pursued when creating it is to realize the dream of the “better”. Moreover, in those areas of activity where specialists know the value of training, but hope to conduct them more effectively, and in those where they have not yet appreciated the potential of constant practice. Believe me, we know firsthand how powerful a revolution in the most important areas of life can be produced by a specially designed, well-thought-out and organized training system.

Our journey to realizing the vital role of practical training began when we entered public high schools and began to study the practices of the best teachers, as outlined in Doug Lemov's book Teaching Like a Champion. I must say that in free schools, despite adverse circumstances and completely miserable conditions, there are surprising exceptions - excellent, amazingly effective teachers. Moreover, as our special study showed, their methodology is in many ways reminiscent of John Wooden's system: they focus on the seemingly insignificant and mundane aspects of teaching.

The best educators are literally obsessed with the idea of making the most of class time. They wage a continuous battle in seconds and minutes, closely monitoring how quickly and efficiently students learn the material. Using the Perseveration Technique 10
A novel-parable by the English writer William Golding. Note. ed.

They repeat explanations over and over again. We were struck by the paradox of what we saw: teachers whose students are the best at learning very complex and abstract material - for example, they freely solve an equation with two unknowns or easily understand the symbolism of the “Lord of the Flies” 11

, are focused on things that other teachers simply don't pay attention to. Of course, the secret of their mastery is not limited to this. The best teachers not only constantly think about the effectiveness of classes, skillfully asking questions and skillfully formulating tasks. All of them, as if by agreement, realize the significance of the daily repetition of the same thing. Think of John Wooden, who started training by teaching players how to properly put on their socks. The best teachers, as we understand, also “think about socks” first of all. We have studied their work and now we want to share the most important components of their professional excellence with other secondary school teachers. We decided to show them the path that led to the top of the best teachers. In the process of research, we learned a lot about the internal mechanisms of practical training: what specifically leads to success or, on the contrary, prevents effective work. And the first thing that caught our eye was the abyss that lies between how one should do it and what happens in a real situation.

At the first seminars, teachers were shown a short video in which their star colleague demonstrated a certain technique. We analyzed and discussed what we saw, and then, after the audience understood all the nuances, we moved on to the next video. The reviews were great. The teachers unanimously promised to use these useful and valuable methods in their pedagogical practice. But we soon noticed a disturbing trend. Three months later, when interviewing the same participants, it turned out that their optimism had somewhat diminished. They understood how to conduct lessons, but could not achieve a stable result. When they tried to fix one thing, the other suffered. It was difficult for them to focus on a particular technique, because something was constantly happening in the lesson. One understanding of how to do it was not enough.

The participants in our seminars, returning to their classrooms, tried to figuratively go to the main court during Wimbledon and learn a new backhand style in the middle of the match. Of course, they didn't get anything. Tennis players know that polishing a backhand requires hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hits in practice or they won't get the results they want in competition. You will have to repeat the same hand movement hundreds of times at the right height at the right pace, while constantly complicating the task. Otherwise, when a certain technique is required, such as a two-handed backhand, the tennis player's brain will not be able to remember it, and the player will have to rush along the net in vain attempts to calculate the reaction of the opponent, until, after a long delay, the thought of a saving backhand hits him.

It was clear to us that concrete measures had to be taken. First, to train teachers directly in seminars using the same approaches used in training athletes, even if this means reducing the number of practical techniques learned - in other words, following the example of Wooden, do less, but do better. Secondly, it is necessary to train not so much teachers as their leaders: school directors and curators who have the authority to appoint regular workshops (a significant part of the seminars had to be devoted to planning and organizing them). Instead of describing techniques, we resorted to stories about how to practice them. We realized that a single seminar would not produce any result until the participants began to practice key skills or learned how to train on their own throughout the school year.

Now let's pause for a second and think about where the idea of holding practical classes for teachers came from. While educators, like other professionals such as doctors or lawyers, need constant professional development, they lack what other performing professions call active learning opportunities. Performing professions are usually understood as professional activities that take place in real time, such as sports, music, surgery or teaching. If the teacher's productivity during the lesson is less than he would like, then it will not be possible to turn back the clock. He cannot interrupt his studies and turn to someone for advice, as a lawyer working on a contract does. He cannot, after giving a lesson with full dedication and putting his whole soul into it, then correct or change something in it, as we do when working on a book. The teacher does not have a wonderful opportunity to return to what was said and double-check his words, that is, to bear full responsibility for the final product, which reflects all his preparatory work for a certain time. Teachers "function live", conducting five classes a day. But for some reason, unlike other representatives of the same performing professions, they do not call the process of their professional development training, rehearsal or practical training. If you ask at a teaching seminar how often teachers use in their live practice what they do during "method games" - they simulate the beginning of lessons or rehearse the questions they are going to ask students - then most will find it simply funny. Teachers usually listen, analyze, discuss, question, argue, but they do not do practical training.

What are the results of all these hearings, reflections and disputes? Our educational system invests heavily in the development of teachers. A recent analytical report from the Education Policy Research Consortium found that teacher professional development accounts for 3-6 percent of school spending 12
Barber M., Murshed M. How to achieve a consistently high quality of education in schools. Lessons from the analysis of the best systems of school education in the world // Questions of education. 2008, no. 3, p. 7–60; the translation is published in McKinsey edition (Consistently high performance: Lessons from the worlds top performing school systems. McKinsey&Company. June 2007). Note. ed.

If the budget of all high schools is $500 billion a year, then $20-30 billion is spent annually on the development of the teaching staff. But that investment, the report notes, is producing dubious results: “Typically, teachers listen to lectures for several hours and, at best, receive a couple of practical recommendations or a stack of printouts. Very rarely there is any follow-up after the workshop, and the following sessions cover completely different topics. In general, the researchers concluded that regional professional development programs have little effect on the level of teaching, as they lack focus, depth, logical continuation and consistency. In other words, professional development of teachers does not contribute to the growth of their skills.

1. A new look at old systems

In his book Geniuses and Outsiders, Malcolm Gladwell explores the 10,000 hour rule. That is how much time, according to the author, you need to spend on education and training to become a world-class professional in any field of activity. Gladwell details how the 10,000 hour rule explains the emergence of both the Beatles and Bill Gates. Extraordinary talent is equal to an extraordinary number of study hours - ten thousand. But we must not forget that the quality of classes is just as important, if not more so, than their quantity. “The boy who spends hours ineptly throwing the ball into the basket is far behind the boy who trains correctly for two hours a day with a good mentor,” says Michael Goldstein, America's best teacher training specialist. John Wooden, as if echoing him, instructs future coaches: "Achievements do not tolerate mistakes in training."

On the basketball court, in the classroom, and anywhere else, a person can work long and hard with no results. During training, coaches drive athletes half to death - a very stimulating technique, since exhausting work is usually in front of everyone - but this is not enough. Hard work, like a surface polished to a shine, does not allow you to see the main thing, although it attracts the eye. Therefore, when it comes to assessing the effectiveness of a workout, people place too much emphasis on exhausting exercises. "The bustling movements and clamor are misleading," writes Wooden. Hustle and bustle, imitating strenuous activity, obscure our mistakes. And this is only the first argument in favor of our correctness: the time has come to revise the well-known views on the methods and techniques of practical training.

First, let's look at how the training of young athletes goes. On a fine evening, a group of nine-year-old football players rush about on a patch of turf. They must run the ball through a row of cones, then run it under the bench on one side and catch it on the other. Having done these exercises, the boys go to a square formed by cones, through which you need to quickly pass the ball ten times, leading it from foot to foot; then they run to another row of cones and dribble the ball alternately with one or the other foot. It all ends with practicing shots on goal. At first glance, a great workout that contains a lot of different exercises and allows you to learn a myriad of skills. Little diligent bees! But with a detailed study, it turns out that all the efforts of young football players will never lead them to the heights of skill. All their efforts are not enough even to become workers.

Let's analyze an exercise in which the players dribble the ball from foot to foot. To do it correctly, you need to bend your knees slightly, as the trainer first showed them. But many boys do the exercise with straight knees. Some people do well, but in fact they do the exercise incorrectly, because they do not know how to relax the muscles of the legs. With each workout, on the contrary, they get more and more accustomed to keeping their legs straight at the knee joints, which means they move further and further away from the desired goal. Now let's imagine how many exercises such training includes and how many of them are performed incorrectly, because children were not taught in time to relax or strain the necessary muscle groups. For example, all of them, as a rule, when they hit the ball, relax the ligaments of the ankle joint. But they do hit. And they hit far. Class? Yes. Achievement? Hardly.

Of course, the workout we described is not that bad, but it could be much more effective. “Just good” ability development training is clearly not enough to put an individual or an entire company in the ranks of the best. Even a large number of "good" trainings will not raise the company to a higher level. If you need to outperform others, then every minute of training should be used as productively as possible. Your task is to become a professional of the highest level. Fortunately, the gap between this concept and the idea of just a good specialist is not too critical, and you are able to bridge it. Even small changes will help you get closer to your desired goal.

Michael Goldstein, a teacher educator, agrees. He recently said in an interview that a smaller amount of high-quality training produces more significant results than a huge amount of low-quality training: "A young teacher, trainee or trainee usually just repeats the wrong actions." “Imagine the benefits of pedagogical science,” Goldstein reflects, “if the same number of practical classes were conducted in teaching laboratories and cost five times less than regular seminars, or for the same money the number of workshops could be increased by five once. Now think about how much money is being wasted. And doesn’t the same thing happen in medicine, law, and a thousand other professions?”

Program yourself for success

We like to say: "Practice makes perfect." However, it would be more correct to say that training gives a stable result. During practical training, you can carefully practice or not practice some skill, you can perform the exercise correctly, or you can do it “with straight knees”. In any case, your actions will become a certain program, that is, they will be fixed in the mind and muscle memory and turn into a habit - either good or bad. If players learn wrong moves in training, they will move incorrectly during the match. If in training you do not have a certain focus, you will also work - without direction. Therefore, the most important goal of any practical training is to ensure that participants program themselves for success. Whatever you memorize and whatever you teach, the training must be done correctly. It would seem that this is obvious, but in real life, training often programs for failure. There are many reasons for this, but two of them are the most common. Firstly, it is not always possible to keep track of whether the students are doing everything right. Secondly, there is a risk of dooming participants to failure, for example, in a futile attempt to speed up learning. We will definitely consider these traps in more detail, but for now we will make a small digression dedicated to the idealization of a fiasco.

Surely someone close to you - some Uncle Lou - told you a story about the times when he began to learn something: write suits, ride a bicycle, dance a tarantella or lay tiles. And now he recalls almost enthusiastically: “I swear to God, I tried to do this a hundred times. The first ninety-nine did not work, but I forced myself to start all over again. Finally I made it." Perhaps Uncle Lu really learned to do something, and even do it wonderfully. Perhaps his struggle really seems priceless to him. But even if thousands of things have been learned through Uncle Lou's method, this does not mean that you have the best and most effective method in the world in your hands. It is possible that Uncle Lou spent ten times as much time and effort on training than he needed. It would be better if his story turned out differently, and he would tell you how nice it was to study productively, appreciating every minute. If you're trying to be systematically successful at work, or want to train your students to do something better than others—manage investments, teach in public schools, throw good passes—be ironic about stories like these that idealize failure. Maybe a fiasco helps to develop character and train willpower, but he cannot afford to form the necessary skill.

Now, back to the two things that make learning program failure. The first is based on the rule that effective teaching requires constant attention to the progress of students. "You don't teach them until they learn," Wooden was fond of saying. The best teachers check almost every second how much their students have learned, a process called checking comprehension. In fact, the lack of understanding grows like a snowball, and over time it becomes more and more difficult to correct it. Therefore, teachers should constantly ask themselves: “Have the students really learned the material? I'm sure of it?" Systematic observation of students will do the trick: they will learn what you are trying to teach them, but you will have to not only check, but also influence the result. Teaching should be structured so that a student who fails something will try again - in class or after it individually ("Come on, Charles, let's try again right here"). A skill test should contain an important element - a reaction to failure in order to correct it as quickly and positively as possible. To do this, you will have to radically change your thinking and perceive the results of students as an objective reality. If in training three out of four did the exercise incorrectly, one would like to wishful thinking: “Great, at least someone succeeded.” Although the correct reaction should be different: "Well, well, only one of the four succeeded." In other words, the information available is cause for concern, not joy.

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham in Why Students Dislike School? (Why Don't Students Like School?) noticed that people learn fastest when a complex problem requires a series of small, sequential steps. This does not apply to tasks from the "come what may!" series. If the task is too difficult, learning slows down. What's more, says Willingham, students tend to like things to get progressively harder, meaning people really enjoy learning the material well. The flip side of the coin is that failure can be costly. Because of such misfires, some students even drop out of classes. When failures follow one after another, only a huge willpower makes a person move on. The fact that ninety-nine falls are so engraved in the memory of your Uncle Lou means only one thing: he fought his failure only once in his life.

It is important to define what we mean by success. Of course, we want everyone to succeed the first time during the training. However, the ideal success rate should not be 100%, as it follows that the exercise was too easy. A reliable success rate should be quite high and be formulated as follows: on average, the majority of participants cope. If your charges make a lot of mistakes, don't stop - keep going until success is programmed into their memory. If the error is persistent and common, ask yourself if they need to be stressed like that. It may be worth changing the lesson plan, abandoning the variety of tasks and options, and temporarily simplify the task by choosing one from the list of skills or slowing down to work out all the difficult points. In practice, we have derived the following learning goal: participants must complete the task as quickly and efficiently as possible. If it doesn’t work, slow down and return to the original task. In any case, you should strive to ensure that students complete the most difficult task with stable - there will not be absolute anyway - success. If they can't get it right, reduce the difficulty. When they learn this part of the material, start from this level and move on.

Program yourself for success

- Plan the curriculum so that the achievement rate is stable and high. Even when the tasks are particularly difficult, students still need to cope with them and practice the correct pedagogical techniques.
- Constantly check the level of assimilation of the material. If students fail at something, temporarily simplify the task until they can do it. Then increase the difficulty.
- Set up students to complete the most difficult task as quickly and correctly as possible.

Train twenty percent of a hundred

One of our most paradoxical but very important findings is that the value of training increases after learning the material. When students reach a certain level of proficiency, it is not uncommon to hear mentors say, “Great, they already know how. Move on". But if you're only practicing the most important skills—the cherished 20 percent that bring in 80 percent of the results—don't stop at the already know level. Your task is to bring these 20 percent to perfection. Continue until you bring them to the level of automatism, naturalness and, as we will discuss later, unleashing creativity. To achieve excellence in the main is much more important than to simply get good results in a number of useful skills. Football player Xavi Hernandez, one of the best midfielders in the world, mentioned this in an interview with the English Guardian. Xavi describes an exercise that is typical of Spanish football and even explains the world superiority of the Spanish system. “It's all about the rondo,” he says of a game in which four or five players quickly pass the ball to each other around the square, and one or two try to take the ball away from them. - Rondo, rondo, rondo. Everyone! God's! Day! You can't imagine a better exercise. You learn responsibility and the ability to hold the ball. Lost - go to the center. Run-run-run-run - until you take it away with one touch ... ”This exercise is so useful that players repeat it endlessly - to the detriment of something new. Its value does not decrease with increasing skill level, on the contrary, it only increases. In the end, even the fact that the Spaniards gave the exercise a special name emphasizes its power. By the way, there is a special meaning in giving a name: it is more convenient for participants to discuss it. To become, like the Spaniards, the best in the world and develop a competitive advantage, you need to pay special attention to the most useful exercises. When the athletes, in the opinion of the coach, have learned everything, he should say: “Excellent, now let's start working on it. We train until we achieve perfection.”

It is worth noting that the content of this 20 percent can change over time and even requires periodic reassessment. In doing so, we recommend relying on facts. Tim Daly, president of The New Teacher Project, did just that when he analyzed the teacher training methods used at his company. He revealed a certain trend: if in the first two months the teacher did not learn to control the behavior of the class, then in the future he suffers a complete collapse. Daly asked subordinates to make changes to the system of practical training: significantly reduce the number of points in the program and focus on the skills teachers need to control student behavior. The company began to spend 80 percent of its efforts on this. In addition, teachers have more time to practice skills that are important in the long term - a new 20 percent.

Train twenty percent of a hundred

- Identify 20 percent of the skills that, after training, will bring 80 percent of the results.
- Pay maximum attention only to priority tasks, without being distracted by secondary ones.
- Keep practicing as the value of training increases as you learn skills!
- Save your time and plan everything in advance.
- Keep participants interested by repeating high-performance exercises with slight variations. You don't have to constantly come up with something new.

First the body, then the head

One of our colleagues, let's call her Sarah, learned for a long time to correctly explain the essence of the tasks, since her students quite often had difficulties in completing them. Other teachers suggested that the reason is in the tasks themselves: what Sarah asks the students for is not very clear to them. The girl began to practice: first she wrote down clear and understandable instructions in order - this technique is called the "action plan" (briefly described at the end of the book). Then she learned to say out loud what she wrote, imagining that she was standing in front of the class. She performed both exercises on her own and with colleagues. When Sarah discovered how her words sound from the outside, she had to make a number of adjustments. She practiced at every opportunity and in every setting, trying to turn the skill into a habit that would firmly enter her mind.

A few weeks later, Sarah asked a colleague to attend the class. At the end of it, the colleague first of all asked Sarah what she herself thinks about how everything went. According to Sarah, everything was relatively good: the students behaved in a disciplined manner, worked well in the lesson - in any case, there was nothing to blush for. True, she had to apologize to a colleague for not being able to use the "action plan" throughout the lesson. She managed to resort to it only at the very beginning, but she never managed to demonstrate all the skills that she had honed for so long and carefully. Sarah regretted that she had needlessly disturbed her colleague. But she, on the contrary, noticed something completely different: Sarah constantly uses her achievements, especially when it is necessary to quickly correct the behavior of students and return them to the topic of the lesson. In a word, she used the new skill unconsciously.

Through training, Sarah turned the skill into a habit, and during the lesson, when her head was occupied with other things, the new habit worked automatically. This often happens with musicians or athletes - in a word, with those who train regularly. When the skill is mastered to automatism, the body does everything by itself, and only then the brain is connected. For example, customer service specialists are specially trained to calmly respond to angry customers, so they do not lose their composure during a conflict - thanks to constant training, they have worked out a balanced reaction to everything. When communicating, they act unconsciously, and this is the whole point. To get subordinates to respond appropriately to difficult situations, do not ask them to be calm consciously. It is better to teach the correct reaction so that it turns on automatically.

Moreover, awareness often gets in the way. A completely unreasonable desire to survive makes you press the brake pedal before your mind has time to analyze the situation. Representatives of public professions simply need to train the brain to work unconsciously. Eagleman expresses an amazing idea: "The goal of a professional athlete is not to think," he should develop "calculated learned algorithms" so that "in the heat of the fight, the necessary movements are performed automatically." In baseball, the ball hits the base in 0.4 seconds, so the batters don't have time to realize anything. The ball is hit before the batter has processed the information. A successful game is built on habits already developed, but which manifest themselves unconsciously at the most opportune moment.

First the body, then the head

- Insist on working skills to automatism, so that students use them mechanically - before consciousness is connected.
- Gradually build simple mechanical skills on top of each other so that students learn to perform complex tasks without thinking.
- Bring basic skills to automatism, but at the same time select more complex skills that can be performed mechanically. Do not believe that only simple actions can become a habit.

Unleash your creativity through repetition

John Wooden once had a great point, formulating a corollary to Rule 3: "Practice lays the groundwork for personal initiative and imagination." If rule 3 suggests bringing skills to automatism so that they work unconsciously, then rule 4 pays attention to what the consciousness is doing at this time. Let's do a little research: ask yourself what time of day you usually have bright thoughts. Most likely, when you take a shower, drive a car, brush your teeth or go for a run - that is, perform long-familiar actions, brought to automatism. What is your mind doing at this time? Come up with something interesting. Therefore, to increase creativity, you just need to provide the brain with a “free mode”: due to mechanically learned skills, it will be free when you previously had to work at full power.

The connection between the automatism of frequently performed actions and creative possibilities was shown even brighter by Johan Cruyff, one of the best football players of all time, who became the personification of an incredible, creative approach to the game. During a match, he could step over all the stereotypes and rules that dictate actions in a certain situation, and do something unexpected, and with amazing effect. Once in an interview, he was asked to name the players who played better than him in their youth, but for some reason did not succeed. After listing them, he said: “They were great footballers. But there are times when you need to act quickly. For example, if you control the ball within not two meters, but only fifty centimeters, and if the ball crosses this boundary, you will lose it. When you are under pressure from all sides, you have to think faster.” Cruyff does not talk about any creativity. On the contrary, he notes the automatism of key skills - the familiar 20 percent - under stress. He acted mechanically, so he had time to think about other things. If you want to be creative in critical situations, bring the basic skills to automatism and free the brain for creative work.

The problem with such an argument is that the learning process is built differently in principle. As cognitive psychologists, including Daniel Willingham, have shown, it is almost impossible to have a developed mind without hard-wired skills and facts. Breakthroughs in cognition, intuition, inspiration - our opponents operate with such terms - are achieved through minimal brain effort when solving a problem at a primitive level and re-addressing it at a higher one. The preliminary analytical work goes unnoticed by you, because it is done unconsciously, but not ignored. The synergy of mechanical reproduction and creativity is ubiquitous among the peoples of Asia. “It was the Americans who came up with the idea of opposing mechanical reproduction to critical thinking. In their opinion, the first is bad, and the second is good,” write scientists studying Japanese schools. But they came to the conclusion that developed thinking is actually based on rote learning and needs it. Creativity awakens when the brain operates freely in situations that previously required mental work.

Once at business school, Doug worked on a group that was solving a macroeconomic problem. The board was filled with equations with dozens of variables, but it seemed that the solution would never be found. Then a student who had previously studied in Eastern Europe came up to the blackboard. “That part of the equation has to be negative,” and he circled a number of variables. “This is a negative coefficient, and all other values are positive,” and he circled two more sequences of variables. - These two must be positive, because here all the values are positive, and here we are multiplying two negative numbers. So in this equation, a negative value makes two positives, and that gives a negative. Therefore, we will all go bankrupt, ”and he returned to his place. Unlike the other members of the group, the native from Eastern Europe solved the problem not because he omitted mechanical calculations, but because they were easy for him. To deal with mundane things, you need to know them by heart. John Wooden said: "I wanted my team to impress me as much as their opponent when faced with an unexpected obstacle." Wooden had no doubt that it would. Players trained in training show amazing creativity in stressful situations.

First, the group was divided in half. Now the teachers practiced in a group of four. The number of repetitions has doubled. On the first try, participants were unable to pull themselves together and used effective gestures just as often as ineffective ones. They made wide theatrical swings that looked strange and absurd from the outside. Then they got used to the requirements and began to “deep into”, that is, develop an understanding of the end result: a normal pose and unhurried realistic movements. The number of options has decreased. Participants borrowed ideas from each other and repeated them around the circle. While some might argue that training reduces creativity, we've seen new variations start to emerge after a few repetitions. Teachers made minor changes to movements and intonations. Gradually everyone developed their own style. Some were stricter, others kinder. Someone communicated with students only with gestures, others gravitated towards facial expressions. There were new options. Creativity is back - within a narrow scope, but with greater impact.

After a workshop in which the participants repeated the exercise fifteen times, one teacher came up with an absolutely amazing idea. On the last lap, we asked the teachers to imagine that they were making a remark to their best and most diligent student, who was simply not in the mood that day. “I had an epiphany. I made a remark, but in a very friendly way, because I was worried about her. When I felt the difference, I thought: “God, why does enlightenment come to me so rarely?”

We constantly remember this phrase. It inspires us not only because it characterizes the attitude of all teachers and explains why they love their work, but also because it appeared due to the meditative nature of repetitive exercises. This insight would never have come without a seemingly banal exercise. Repetition breeds reflection, which in turn leads to insight.

Unleash your creativity through repetition

- Bring the skills of students to automatism, free their cognitive abilities - and you will reveal their creative potential.
- If you need to start creative thinking, do mechanical work - unload the brain.
- Do not allow participants to analyze until they have mastered the skills and begin to understand what they are doing.

Set a goal instead of an intention

When we start training, we are driven by this or that intention, but for the training to really benefit, instead of a vague idea, you need to set a clear and specific goal. The distinction between purpose and intention, though not so obvious, can be summed up in four points.

First, the goal is measurable. Intention means you know what you need to work on, like learning how to pass. The goal specifies exactly what the student should be able to do by the end of the session, such as accurately throwing a twenty-meter low pass. If the goal is measurable, then by evaluating the results at the end of the lesson, you can tell if you have achieved it or not. How to determine that at the end of the lesson your mentee has learned to pass? What exactly do you mean? Therefore, it is not clear whether it was possible to realize the plan. Conversely, you understand whether a player can accurately give a low pass twenty meters. The goal can be formulated even more specifically: to give a low pass twenty meters, so that the receiving player does not change position, with the effectiveness of eight times out of ten. By articulating the final result, you have a clearer understanding of what the player can do and how effective the training is, and you can also set high standards: the exercise is not completed until we achieve an eight out of ten result.

The second - the goal must be feasible, that is, the skill must be learned in the allotted time. You don't think that players will learn how to make good passes in one hour. It can take years to work out all the nuances. But depending on what they have learned in previous sessions, they can be taught other aspects of passing. And only after disassembling all the elements, the players will eventually fully master this art.

Can the described criteria be applied in the training of physicians? If you were working with a group of young surgeons, then instead of the intention “we will learn how to prepare for surgery,” set a very specific goal: “we will train to conduct preoperative control, identifying and correcting minor errors.” We assure you that a group doing ten specific exercises in turn will outperform a group practicing all ten at once.

Third - the goal should be accompanied by instructions, indicating the nuances that will allow everything to be done correctly. For example, we will say to inexperienced surgeons: “The light should be directed precisely at the incision site, if it needs to be corrected during the operation, let the assistants know about it with signals.” Practicing accurate passing long distances, players hit the ball hard - so the ankle ligaments must be tense - and finish the shot with a raised knee. Now students will have a specific goal and a desire to do things right, and not just get off as soon as possible.

And fourth - an effective goal is formulated before training, and this is the most difficult. It is not uncommon for coaches to think right in training: “What are we going to work on tomorrow (or even today!)?” That is, they start from the exercise, and not from the goal, from the action, and not from the cause. After all, it's hard to decide if an exercise is worth doing if you don't know why you need it. Start with what you want to achieve, and then come up with the shortest path to your goal. By doing this in advance, you will choose or adapt exercises for it. By setting the goal after the fact, after the exercises are chosen, you are simply trying to come up with an explanation for your actions.

The best teachers start from the desired outcome. The strategic choice of the subject of study is the essence of the teacher's work. We once proposed an exercise in a seminar called the Discipline Lab to train educators to respond to student misbehavior. One teacher, like Jen, whom we talked about in the introduction, tried to teach the lesson, and her colleagues played the role of students - good and bad. Since we did not immediately determine what exactly we were working on, the teacher had to respond to a variety of violations for which she was not ready. Without a clear goal, we could not achieve the professional growth of our listeners. Over time, we have learned to set specific goals for an individual exercise, for everyone present, sometimes for individual participants. And they got excellent results.

Doug Lemov Erica Woolway Katie Yezzi

From knowledge to skills

Universal rules for effective training of any skills

Foreword

In the summer of 2011, my wife and my parents went on a tour of Scotland to a whiskey distillery. It seemed that our guide was about to die of boredom. At each stop, she recited a memorized text and then asked, “Any questions?” - of course, they were not, because no one listened to her. What I remember most about the whole trip - besides the desire to start tasting as soon as possible - was that I was constantly haunted by the thought of artist Chris Rock.

Shortly before the trip, I read in Petty Stakes by Peter Sims how Rock was selecting material for comic numbers. Once, preparing for a big tour, Chris chose a small club in New Brunswick and performed there day after day almost fifty times; in addition, he did not part with a notebook, where he constantly entered new jokes and immediately tested them on the audience. Sims describes this process as follows: “... The artist carefully observes the audience, noting when the audience nods in approval, reacts with gestures or long pauses. In other words, he tries to capture any reaction from the audience that could suggest the right direction for finding new ideas. Such speeches last about forty-five minutes and are usually a sad sight: most of the lines do not cause delight in the public.

However, over time, Chris got to the bottom of success and learned to select the right numbers. The artist's manners became more natural, the jokes more poignant, and the transitions from reprise to reprise more dynamic. If you ever laughed at his lines (like this one: “The area I grew up in was not very good, there was always a guy who shot faster than you”), then thank the state of New Jersey and the city of New Brunswick for it.

By the time Rock got a foothold on the HBO channel and began performing on the David Letterman show, he had long ago not only mastered the secrets of mastery, but also brought it to perfection. The result is there: Chris Rock is such a jerk- considers the viewer, sincerely believing that everything is given to the artist without effort and everything turns out by itself.

For example, you have used shampoo for many years, but your hair does not got better. You can live to the day you die without learning more effective ways to take care of your hair. Regular performance of any actions does not mean at all that we improve our skills. You need to practice for real, and not just repeat what has already been memorized. Remember the words of Michael Jordan: "You can learn to shoot the ball for eight hours a day, but if you do it wrong, you will achieve only one thing - you will perfect the wrong throws." Training gives stable results.

Pride, fear and complacency are the main enemies of learning. After all, any training is based on humility. Turning to those who can teach us something, we are forced to admit that we do not know much. And of course, the desire to practice is not at all a sign of weakness. After all, we know many champions who have been elevated to the pinnacle of success by relentless training: Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, Roger Federer, Mia Hamm, Tiger Woods. Education does not at all indicate that I'm not going anywhere. It means: I can get better.

Since you have this book in your hands, you are ready to learn. So you have made the right choice.

Time to practice the art of getting better.

Dan Heath, Senior Fellow, Center for Social Enterprise Development at Duke University

Why hands-on training? Why now?

We hope you will forgive us our addiction to general discussions about pedagogy, which we look at with hope, albeit timid. We are optimistic because we still believe that this is the noblest profession in the world. And no matter what you teach - to be patient when examining an elderly patient; solve quadratic equations; score balls; holding meetings, reading 19th-century novels—the job of a teacher seems to us to be one of the greatest in the world. That is why we are full of optimism. Today, due to political confusion and budget deficits, teachers have been cornered. But in the end, temporary difficulties will pass, and there will be fruits of creative research that will change our profession, enrich it with new knowledge and provide tools that we did not know before. This will happen not only through the new teacher training system, but also through the use of analytical tools to identify and compile the best pedagogical achievements - "bright spots", as the Heath brothers would say. By the way, it was their work that inspired not only us, but also many other teachers.

In this book, we, Doug, Erica, and Katie, share our experiences in an extremely important sector of the economy - the public education system. We tell what we have learned by fighting for every talented person and participating in solving the most difficult social problem - the gap in the level of academic achievement between children from wealthy strata of society and children from needy families. In addition, the book presents observations on the creative path and professional development of many talented people from a wide variety of fields. Therefore, we are convinced that the material we have collected, containing many examples from teaching practice and our personal experience in school, will be of interest not only to specialists in the education system, but also from other areas of activity, and to all those who wish to improve their professional skills. Moreover, we ourselves have long been applying the knowledge acquired in a narrow professional field in our personal lives, so we believe that the book will benefit many readers. After all, any parent repeatedly faces the same problems, trying not only to raise children as good people, caring and confidently going through life, but also to make them real professionals - mathematicians, musicians, football players. By the way, many problems arise when trying to improve ourselves, when we learn to ski, hammer nails, knit, manage people, and even, judging by our latest experience, write books. The first step to take is to learn the art of learning.

Portal for the student. Self-training

Doug Lemov Erica Woolway Katie Yezzi From knowledge to skills Universal rules for effective training of any skills

Foreword

Prologue

Introduction

The decisive role of practical training

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Doug Lemov Erica Woolway Katie Yezzi
From knowledge to skills
Universal rules for effective training of any skills