Post 24- Doug Lemov's "Practice Perfect"

Motivational School Leadership with Michael Horton

Doug Lemov's "Practice Perfect"

After I read “Outliers,” “The Talent Code,” and “Talent is Over-rated,” I was convinced that there’s no such thing as talent.  There are those who have put in 10,000 hours of deliberate practice and those who haven’t.  Many examples of musicians and athletes were given who were not truly experts until they had put in at least 10,000 hours of this specialized kind of practice.

I was now ready to go out and practice!  Unfortunately, these books mostly talked about how to practice music and sports.  I wondered, how do I become a better administrator?  First of all, administrators do a million different things.  Which of them are impactful enough to spend time practicing?  Second, for those things that are important enough, how does one deliberately practice administration?

An administrator sees this situation from two perspectives: 1) How do I practice to become better? and 2) How do I encourage my teachers to practice to become better?  The book, Practice Perfect by Doug Lemov (co-author of Teach Like a Champion) gives examples of how professionals can deliberately practice and specifically how principals can help teachers practice.

The keys to deliberate practice are outlined in Practice Perfect.  First of all, simply performing the task isn’t considered deliberate practice.  Playing basketball isn’t the same as deliberately practicing basketball skills.  So, being an administrator isn’t deliberate practice for being a better administrator.  The task must be broken down into tiny, individual pieces and those pieces practiced in an environment as similar to the real thing as possible.  For example, let’s say that you read Crucial Conversations and you want to practice this communication skill.  You don’t call in your toughest teachers and practice having difficult conversations with them.  First, you go to lunch with a colleague and practice “Speaking Tentatively” (one of the skills in Crucial Conversations).  Have your colleague say 50 things to you and you respond tentatively (“Well maybe you might try . . .” or “Have you considered . . .”) until you're comfortable speaking this way.

The second key to deliberate practice is to receive expert feedback on your performance.  Let’s say that your Instructional Rounds determine that a lot of class time is wasted correcting misbehavior during lessons.  Some of your teachers use simple hand gestures to correct the behavior without breaking their stride.  So, you set up a faculty meeting where those teachers show the entire faculty how to use the gestures and typically, that’s where it ends.  Practice Perfect suggests that you set up chairs like fake classrooms and have teachers rotate through practicing the hand signals with their fake classes filled with colleagues.  The trainer teachers would each be with one group giving feedback and having teachers try again when necessary.  Of course, the administrator would need to do classroom walkthroughs, follow-ups, and retraining after the meeting.

For administrators, this feedback often comes from an expert coach.  Every leader should have both a coach who can provide one-on-one feedback as well as an advisory committee to give big picture feedback.  The coach can sit in on meetings with parents and teachers, attend faculty meetings, or tag along during classroom walkthroughs and give feedback on specific skills that the administrator is practicing.

It is possible to practice being a better teacher or a better administrator.  How has your school used practice to become even better?