[MUSIC] So you use the phrase earlier deliberate practice. Do you want to say a little bit more about what, what that means? >> Hm, yes, I, yes, because it's at the heart of kind of expertise I think. It is that, Malcolm Gladwell and his outlier says nobody gets to the top of anything without 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, which is about ten years at three hours a day, basically. And that seems to hold out for musicians, for sports, and things like that. And deliberate practice is where you're setting yourself up to improve the things that you're not good at. Most of us practice when we say we're going to practice something, we do the bits we enjoy and leave out the bits we don't. When I practice tennis, I practice forehand and backhand. I can't serve for toffee, so I say we won't do serving today, we'll just practice. Oh, that was a good practice. It's exactly the opposite with the professional tennis player. If your serve's off one day. You're back on the court for three hours 'til, 'til it becomes automatic again, 'til you're making it. That's the stage at which people say, he's a natural. Look how he does that. Well, this is, this is constant practice, of, of/ the kind that your are deliberately trying to improve your performance. So I think that's. That's what's been got at here. And it includes quite a bit of failure, because people practice the things they haven't quite mastered. In sport, they talk about the 50/50 sweet spot, which is where 50% of the time you'll do it, 50% of the time you won't, that's a crucial kind of learning thing, because you can. You can improve your success rate and then it becomes much more automatic. So that's what, you know, that's where there, the deliberate practice, the setting out to improve and it's quite, quite difficult, quite painful and quite mentally mentally draining if you're doing it, if you're doing it properly. So, in your book, you talk about this idea of an expert learner. >> Mm. >> Can you just explain a bit about what you mean by that phrase? >> Yeah, I think, I think that I picked this up not from education, but from reading Malcolm Gladwell, for example, and some other books in this area about what's it like to be a top performer. What do top performers in sport, in music, in art, in business. What have they done that you'd say oh, they're a real expert at this? What's gone into making them an expert? And I was surprised to find there's huge amounts of literature on this that, coming through the educational route. I've never come across the guy called Anders Erikson in the states who's been doing this for 30 years of looking at what, what makes people get to the top of their field? What is a, how the best example is the, I mean they started with this in fact. How does a, a chess grand master do things differently to a novice chess player or a good chess player? And they, they examine what, what went on there, what goes into, a, a grandmaster. And one of [COUGH] on of the interesting things that are about, the, the expert learning that way is that then, they've got a much, more flexible and stronger mental framework to make sense of stuff. So, my example from chess would be [COUGH]. A grand master can look at a 21 piece chess game and remember it in fifteen seconds. He can take it away and he will remember where every piece is, or she will remember where every piece is, and will be able to remember it this afternoon as well. If we do it as a novice. We probably remember three, four, five pieces. And, and if you've never played chess, you're really struggling with one or twopieces because you have to make up stories about what are these pieces. So that, that, that whole notion of the, how an expert sees the bigger picture quicker and better and so can make use of new information coming in, can sort of absorb it and make sense of it much more quickly than, when we're a novice. Everything's new when your a novice cause you can't organize it. So I was interested in that, that side particularly and the deliberate practice. And what I was trying to do then is to say well what are the implications for the classroom because there's some good books about experts in business, experts in medicine, nobody does experts very, nobody in this tradition. There's experts in education, what's an expert teacher, so I've tried to, tried to look at that and I've tried to say, amd what do we need to do if we want our kids to become expert learners. And I'm not thinking of turning out lots of Mozart and Beckhams, could do with a few. Particular at the moment. But I'm thinking just kids who are effective learners, who pick up things as you were talking about earlier. Some kids pick up things quickly. My reading of that would be that's often because they've got, they understand the big picture. They've got the. They know the game. That can see what's, what's happening here. So they can make sense of things a lot more quickly than a kid who has no idea why we're doing this topic, what the relevance is. It's very hard to remember anything or learn anything if you haven't got that kind of mental, mental framework. So, that's, that's my interest in that.
