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One of my most important tasks as a teacher is to prevent unnecessary frustration.
That implies that some frustration is necessary, which is true. But the feeling of losing ground (“I could do this perfectly yesterday, I swear!”) can be avoided.
It’s totally normal to have a warmup or review phase in any activity. I teach my students to do this in a systematic way that we call The Undertow. It provides a strong foundation for successful practice and progress. Here’s how it works:
Read MoreRecently, I wrote about the Comfort Scale and how it can help you to calibrate your practice to precisely what is needed. Having briefly mentioned backchaining in that context, I wanted to go into more depth on this magical learning strategy.
Have you ever had the experience of driving home “on autopilot,” where you find yourself in your driveway after making a series of turns you were hardly aware of? That’s how backchaining works: Every action automatically suggests the next one with virtually no conscious effort. This ability to “make it look easy” underpins the feats of successful gymnasts, dancers, actors, musicians, orators, and dog agility champions; backchaining is a fast and effective way to reach that high level.
Read MoreHow do you know exactly how much to practice a new skill or how long to spend preparing for a performance or speech?
You can go through the motions until things are pretty familiar; you can push yourself past the point of exhaustion through relentless repetition.
But the best approach is to carefully calibrate your effort to exactly what is needed, no more no less, using something I call the Comfort Score.
Read MoreA friend’s daughter, a first-grader, was invited to do math with the second graders at the start of the school year.
My friend was conflicted about it. She, herself, skipped fourth grade math and still remembers the feeling of being lost and confused in fifth grade math and resented for the privilege. She was worried that her daughter would have the same experience.
The way school subjects are organized in the American system contributes to these kinds of age vs. ability conflicts. Students are expected to move in lock-step with their cohort, regardless of whether they understand the material. If they don’t, they will be with kids of a different age, which has the potential to cause social problems and still doesn’t guarantee that they’ll have their academic needs met.
Read MoreThe secret of my success in my early days as a piano teacher was a simple tweak that motivated my students to practice more, made them sound great, and caused them to stick with the instrument instead of quitting. On the strength of this basic framework, I built an entire music school.
This tweak can be applied to learning virtually anything, at any age, to create massive results in a short period of time. However, in order to accept it, we need to give up our desire to be the hero and resist the temptation to tell ourselves unhelpful stories about our progress.
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