Daily Practice

On a bad weather day a few months back, my boys were suffering a bit from cabin fever. I started thinking and researching activities that could burn up some of their energy without destroying our house.

About the same time, I was watching the Super Soccer Skills DVD by Dan Metcalfe. In this video, Dan demonstrates a bunch of drills that can be done in the living room in front of the TV. The drills are all footwork drills, dribbling in place. The DVD fits right in with the fundamental skill of soccer as shown in the Coerver pyramid below, ball mastery. In particular, beginning players (like my kids) really benefit from spending lots of time with the ball at their feet, learning the feel of the ball and how it responds to various types of dribbling, turning and passing.


Coerver Pyramid of Player Development (coerversoccer.com)

Now the really cool thing about the drills in Dan's video is that its the kind of thing that can be practiced every day. It doesn't require good weather, special equipment, etc. The problem with these drills is that they are a bit too hard for young kids to do and also they are quite boring (according to my boys). Also, my boys already have so many daily requirements such as chores, piano practice, daily reading and math that I hesitate to add another requirement. (Interesting how Scott's first grade class has gone to daily, at home, extra practice of fundamental skills like reading and math.)

But, I really like the concept of trying to work in extra soccer practice when the kids would be watching TV anyway. The key, I think, is to make practicing fun enough that they'll want to do it. So I put two and two together and came up with a set of quick and simple activities that kids can do indoors to work on their soccer footwork (with minimal damage to the furniture). And, I'm working on an idea for incorporating these activities into some type of game, to make the drills less mechanical and more fun. So far, the game is coming together nicely. I'll post back here if anything comes of it.

Education and Practice

I've been thinking a lot about education lately. My wife is getting her teaching certificate, my three sons are going through preschool and elementary school, I'm coaching soccer, I'm learning new skills and I've been working on several computer-based training projects.

I'm just starting to dive deeper into educational theory, so much of what I'll be posting will be from my limited point-of-view. On first glance, there seems to be dozens or hundreds of different educational theories or systems in the literature. A large percentage of these seem to have very little in terms of independent validation.

With regards to teaching a new skill, the following elements seem to be widely accepted:

• Explain
  
• Demonstrate
• Practice
• Assessment
  
• Feedback

From my limited reading and experience, practice is king. From everything I've seen and read, if you want to improve performance, you need practice -- the more the better (almost always). The other four bullets are about setting the student up to practice the right thing in the right way. I'll discuss this more in my next post, but for now I'll lay out a series of references that I've come across recently that show the importance of practice.

Power Law of Learning
I first learned of the power law of learning when I was taking Dr. John Anderson's cognitive psychology class at Carnegie Mellon University. Also called the power law of practice, this law states that memory performance improves as a power function of practice and is one of the most validated findings in education. Basically, the more you practice, the better you get and this improvement follows a logrithmic power curve -- faster improvement at the beginning followed by slower improvement as you reach peak performance. This curve is one of the origins of the term, "learning curve." The following graph from Dr. Anderson's cognitive psychology textbook demonstrates this effect.



The 10,000 Hour Rule
The next reference comes from a very popular recent book called Outliers by Malcom Gladwell. In this book, Gladwell researches and interviews successful people on the extreme outer edge of what is statistically possible and tries to determine how they got there. He finds that in almost all cases it is an accumulation over time of high-quality practice and repetition. Read the wikipedia review of Outliers for a more complete description.

Sports
Not only is this effect true in academics and business skills, but it also applies to sports and physical skills. Gladwell's book documents the case for Canadian youth hockey. Similarly, I remember an article about Russian youth tennis camps based on the same premise (but I can't find it right now). Coaching Youth Soccer by John McCarthy has this nice little nugget, "The more you get your players drilling their skills, within reason, the better your team will be. That's the surest thing about any sport."