My book for this week was “The Talent Code,” by Daniel Coyle (again recommended on the “Can genius be learned?” thread). It was very good. I think it’s coming in as my second favorite, after “Mindset.” (I still have several more to get through, so relative rankings will probably change.) “Mindset” is about believing that practice can improve your ability; “The Talent Code” is about how to practice and how to get others to practice. It’s split into three sections: Deep Practice, Ignition, and Master Coaching.
Deep Practice
Throughout the book, he repeats and repeats: “Skill is myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows according to certain signals.” If you want to know the biology of it, read the book or one of the studies he cites; it’s fascinating! If not, just accept that there’s a biological process that goes on each time we repeat an act (fire a neural circuit) that makes it easier and easier to repeat the act the more we practice.
He offers Three Rules of Great Practice:
- Chuck It Up - First absorb the whole thing, hopefully in a motivating way (watch a star playing your sport, listen to a professional musician play the song, etc), so that you want to imitate it. Then break it down into chunks and slow it way down for practice. He quotes a music teacher as saying, “If a passerby can recognize the song being played, it’s not being practiced correctly,” and a sports coach as saying, “It’s not how fast you can do it, it’s how slowly you can do it correctly.”
- Repeat It - Daily practice is important, but most people can’t practice at this level for more than an hour at a time, four hours a day, and many do it much less and are still great.
- Learn to Feel It - Practice concentrating until mistakes bother you a lot and you can feel when it’s right.
He talks about how anyone he saw doing deep practice had the same furrowed-brow expression on their faces. I tried following these rules for my daily five minutes of piano practice and found the same expression on my face! So it seems accurate. However, I haven’t thought yet how to apply this. I don’t think my 18 month old is ready to learn to do deep practice yet, other than encouraging her to keep trying when she fails. Maybe setting an example of deep practice would help. I also haven’t thought about how to apply this to parenting, like I did with “Talent is Overrated.” Any ideas?
Ignition
He talks a lot about “talent hotbeds,” places that churn out lots of talented youngsters at once. He found that they all give the same “primal cues” to the kids to get them to want to put in the effort required for deep practice:
- You belong to a group.
- Your group is together in a strange and dangerous new world.
- That new world is shaped like a mountain, with the paradise of [goal] at the top.
So how can we apply that? Hopefully belonging to a family is enough of a group, especially for the little ones. I don’t really want to teach my baby that she’s in a dangerous world, though. Of course, that’s somewhat figurative. One of the examples was run-down sports and music centers; if it’s got all the luxuries, it tips off your subconscious that there’s no need to work. Still, I’m not moving to a run-down house and teaching my kid that learning is the only way out! I really don’t know. He also quotes the Tom Sawyer “painting the fence” example, where Tom convinces all the kids in the neighborhood that his chore of painting the fence is actually the coolest thing around and has to be done right, and if he judges that you’re good enough you can pay him for the privilege of painting it for him. Still not sure how it applies, though.
Master Coaching
He calls the master coaches in any field “talent whisperers.” They have “a vast, deep framework of knowledge which the apply to the steady, incremental work of growing skill circuits, which they ultimately do not control.” Sounds like as good a description of parenting as I’ve heard!
However, he also says that the first teacher need not be a world-renowned master. More important were a love for the child and a love for the subject, with enthusiasm and an expectation of progress. That sounds doable. 
He also mentions that some fields require a lot more moment to moment improvisation and so coaches focused on practice that would allow fluidity, while others require a scripted, precise action that had to be practiced over and over. The difference between a soccer game and a gymnastics floor routine, he says. So not all great practices look the same, but they have the same goal.
He goes into a lot of detail about the sports coach John Wooden. Some of his great coaching techniques included modeling the right way to do something, showing the wrong way, then remodeling the right way. He would set specific goals for each practice session and spend hours coming up with minute-by-minute plans (reminds me of some of the “Talent is Overrated” ideas). He used short, imperative statements to catch and fix errors at the moment they were made.
His summary of the things master coaches have in common:
- The Matrix - a lot of task-specific knowledge that allows them to adapt their teaching for each student
- Perceptiveness - an ability to see what each person needs and how they’re responding, whether they ‘get it’
- The GPS Reflex - short, vivid, high-definition bursts of information, more than lots of praise or criticism: like this, like that, not like that, right.
- Theatrical Honesty - telling it how it is, but not in a way that makes them defensive; many of the coaches dressed or acted flamboyantly
So, those are my notes, but I really don’t know how to apply them to parenting. Music and sports are easy, but what about reading and math? Or just parenting in general? Any ideas?
I have caught myself three times already this week doing it wrong :unsure: As much as I am usually an upbeat, enthusiastic teacher most of the time, when I blow it, it always seems to be in the same areas/subjects. Well at least I can see where I need to improve!. :yes: