Success – it’s not all about the hours
‘Purposeful Practice’
Is 10,000 hours enough?
• Many people drive every day, every week,
every month - for years.
• Most people clock up at least 10,000 hours of
driving yet rarely do we end up excellent
drivers.
• The key to success is NOT just the NUMBER
of hours but WHAT WE DO in those hours.
A case study
UK National table tennis champion, Matthew Syed
Matthew Syed in his book 'Bounce' describes being coached
by a world famous Chinese player
The first day of coaching revealed why the Chinese dominate
the world of table tennis.
A case study
Chen Xinhua, the new coach, presented Syed with far
more challenge in his training
eg did not train with a single ball back and forth,
instead a bucket of balls were spread on the table and
fired at him quickly and at different angles and speeds
Incidentally this example is also about seizing
opportunity. The Chinese coach had married a women
from Yorkshire and so moved to the UK and Syed
asked Chen Xinhua to be his coach.
Purposeful Practice
Chen Xinhua made Syed's side of the table wider so he had
to run more, stretch more and be even quicker.
Syed claims that the training was much harder than he
had been used to and so he made more progress than
ever before.
With even more challenging hours spent practising, Syed
progressed more and his world rankings increased.
Case study
• Serena and Venus Williams - the famous sister tennis
champions - were trained with challenge.
• Their father would get them to train to hit a ball with a baseball
bat rather than a racket.
• The sisters would aim their serves at traffic cones, not just a
large area of the court.
• Training was made up of challenge ie purposeful practice.
A case study
• Ericsson's study of violinists revealed that as
well as 10,000 hours spent practising, the top
violinists introduced harder pieces and pushed
themselves harder in practice sessions than
other (very talented) violinists.
Source: Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: the story of success (2008)
You and your learning
• Do you choose easier tasks than harder ones, when given the
choice?
• Which choice will help you learn most?
• Do you persevere at hard tasks / ask for help immediately /
give up?
• Which choice will help you learn more?
What you need to do
• Use past questions to find out both easy and hard questions.
• Use mark schemes to find out how you reach the top mark
band.
• Use examiner comments to help tackle hard questions.
• Plan answers to hard questions.
Make your practice purposeful
What you need to do
• Read and re-read material that you find hard - don't give up
after the first read.
• Think differently about hard tasks - relish them, know that
without them you will not progress as much.
• When given options to choose tasks that help you progress avoid the easier choices- even though you might achieve lower
marks, initially, on harder tasks - in the long run you will learn
more.
What have you
learned?
• Summarise what you have learned from this
presentation on purposeful practice.