HOW TO PRACTICE

On May 2, 2011, members of the United States Special Forces landed under cover of night at a strange and heavily bunkered compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. You know by now how things panned out. The nation’s bravest and best-trained soldiers ably executed a dangerous and critical mission culminating in the death of Osama bin Laden and—at least as important it turns out—the capture of reams of information that have compromised al-Qaeda operations around the globe. The raid constitutes a bright spot for our military forces and our nation. In some ways we take the sort of flawless execution we imagine from the SEAL team members who landed that night for granted. They are our best and our brightest, our most indefatigable, and trained to execute this kind of operation. They underscore this perception; on the rare occasions when they speak about it, you’re almost assured of hearing something like, “We’ve trained all our lives for this kind of thing. It’s what we do.”

It is easy to expect this kind of performance from our Special Forces. They are the elite of our military. Yet, consider the events of April 24, 1980, when a Special Forces team attempted to rescue 52 American hostages in Iran. A sandstorm and a broken hydraulic system began a downward spiral of catastrophe that ended with the collision of a helicopter and a transport plane, the deaths of eight American servicemen, a disastrous blow to American prestige, and the continuation of the Iran Hostage Crisis. What made the difference between success and disaster by highly trained experts? Certainly not just the accidents of helicopter crashes and wind storms. After all, the mission in Abbottabad began with one of just two helicopters crashing into the compound itself.

After the failed mission in 1980, a White House commission set out to understand what had gone wrong and to reconsider how the command prepared the Special Forces team in order to prevent a similar disaster. The commission prompted rethinking by the Joint Special Forces Operations Command, which then made concrete changes in the way it prepared for these missions. In preparing for the mission in Pakistan, it gathered extensive intelligence on all aspects of the mission, including bin Laden’s specific location, the detailed layout of the compound, and exactly whom else they would expect to be inside. In Rule 9, “Analyze the Game,” we will pick up this idea that you must first know exactly what outstanding performance requires before you dive into practice. The SEAL team also practiced the operation, over and over again. They built a full-scale replica of the bin Laden compound at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. They practiced for weeks in the replica compound, preparing for details such as the direction in which a doorknob would open to ensure that they weren’t distracted by mundane complications as they focused on key strategic goals during the actual operation. This is an idea we will examine more in Rule 12, “Integrate the Skills.” In short, they operationalized the new principles, and as a result, the diligence and humility of the nation’s best soldiers in preparing through effective practice resulted in one of the most successful days in recent memory for American forces.1

We too have learned from struggle. We recognize that while we made dramatic shifts in our thinking of what constitutes effective practice, the most important shifts we made were in how we practiced. Some of these shifts were seemingly subtle, such as giving our techniques and skills, as well as the drills we use to practice them, names. Some changes have been more intensive, such as redesigning our drills to first isolate and then integrate skills. Some of these changes have been easy, while others we resisted.

The key to moving from rethinking your practice to executing effective practice is that it is not enough to know how you want it to look. Your ideas have to translate to concrete action. Prepare to roll up your sleeves and design practice that yields results. Here’s how.

RULE 9 ANALYZE THE GAME

Potentially the most important rule for how to practice is to know what it takes to be great. Whatever your field, a disciplined approach to identifying top performers and analyzing top performance provides you with the curriculum. The skills you see in your top performers are the very skills you then work to develop in everyone on your team. This knowledge doesn’t just come with experience. Experience is important, but unless that experience is studied and analyzed carefully to uncover the factors that actually contribute to greatness, its potential is limited to a chance match between insight and application.

The story of the transformation of the Oakland A’s entered our national consciousness through the best-selling book and major motion picture Moneyball. Eschewing the tendencies of scouts and coaches to overpersonalize their view of the game, A’s manager Billy Beane and his assistant Paul DePodesta studied the game and analyzed stats. As journalist Michael Lewis describes in the book, the Oakland A’s were able to identify talent that had been lying fallow, buy it cheap, and develop it to create a team that could compete with the Yankees at a fraction of the cost. The key was not trying to acquire stars but to understand better than anyone else who the real stars were by understanding the skills that actually won games. The old talent scouts, the ones with the deep experience, were looking for star power, for something intangible that they were convinced separated the great from the not-so-great. Meanwhile, A’s manager Billy Beane, armed with data and looking for concrete skills that other teams had overlooked—getting on base, or taking lots of pitches rather than swinging—succeeded in building a winning team on the cheap.

Analyzing the game allows you not only to break down the specific skills that point the way to success but to understand the role they play, to prioritize and rank. Beane and DePodesta wanted players who took pitches rather than just swung. They knew that the players who demonstrated discipline at the plate and took more pitches (even if that meant they didn’t get a hit) often had a higher rate of getting on base. And it seemed obvious yet overlooked that you had to get on base to score. One piece of data they collected on their players to understand their discipline at the plate was the rate of swinging at pitches that were outside the strike zone. They coached and coaxed and finally insisted that players stop swinging at bad pitches.

But given the amount of time they had spent trying to teach players plate discipline, and given that they hadn’t learned it, Beane concluded that plate discipline was not something one could learn but was rather nearly a genetic trait.2 He wrote off his ability to change his current players and placed more stock in his ability to recruit the type of players they were looking for.

But what if Beane were wrong? When Moneyball came out, it was read as a parable of selection and recruiting and seemed like a triumph of analysis over a game previously run on instinct. Yet, once Beane’s recruiting analysis was made public, the success of the A’s faded as other teams quickly replicated their recruitment strategy and began to beat them at the data game. What if Beane had analyzed further? What if he had developed the power of practice and his deep analysis had surfaced the specific behaviors and skills that went into plate discipline, skills that responded to practice? Interestingly, an interview later in the book reveals that perhaps it isn’t that this skill of plate discipline can’t be taught, but that it requires more analysis to understand exactly what builds plate discipline in those who have it.

The author interviews Scott Hatteberg, the player with the lowest percentage of swings at bad pitches. When Hatteberg describes his patience at the plate, he describes a different approach from simply waiting for the right pitch. He knew that the more he swung at balls, the greater the chance he would risk exposing his weakness, and once exposed he would either have to adjust his swing or lose his career. He therefore developed (1) his ability to hit almost anything, (2) his ability to know what pitches he could “do something with,” or the pitches he should look for, (3) his ability to look for those pitches, and (4) his ability to spot and avoid those pitches he knew he couldn’t do anything with.3 It is possible that the insight Beane would have gained in analyzing players like Hatteberg—the list of more discrete, subtle, and potent skills that could be practiced in isolation—would have transformed the A’s into a talent hotbed.

Our experience at Uncommon is not unlike that of Billy Beane in that we rely heavily on the research we’ve done to identify what goes into top performance. When our team first started observing the best teachers (teachers with the highest test results as well as the highest numbers of students living in poverty), we noted that these top performers were often unaware of the discrete skills they were using that yielded such great results, and indeed so were we. Regardless of their ability to self-reflect and improve, and regardless of their ability to reliably use a blend of powerful techniques, these teachers hadn’t broken down the specific skills that went into their performance.

For Doug and the team he has brought together over the years to develop the techniques in Teach Like a Champion, it meant devoting several years to the work of watching and carefully parsing the work of the teachers who were getting the best results, and then parsing some more. It began with identifying a common ability in high performers—such as their ability to ask for and achieve 100%: 100% of students following their directions 100% of the way, 100% of the time. Next, Doug and the team observed that those teachers all used common principles to achieve that 100%. The team continued to analyze key moments and saw that there were specific types of corrections those teachers used, which were governed by one rule: always use the least invasive correction to achieve the desired result. When the team looked closely, they realized that there was a tremendous amount of finesse to this technique, and that it was made up of several discrete skills that could be taught.

Just imagine how powerful this information borne of detailed analysis of the game of teaching is. Without specific techniques to provide direction, we fall back on vague platitudes (“Teach from your heart!” “Mean business!” “Have high expectations!”—all equivalent to “Stop swinging at those pitches!”) with the best intentions but a lack of actionable specifics. With slogans guiding the way, we make the assumption that the greatest lever to developing talent is motivation or mindset rather than specific actionable steps for incremental improvement. In our search to know what it takes to make teachers great, we first looked to the data to find the best teachers. Then we videotaped those teachers. Next we watched hundreds of hours of footage until commonalities and skills emerged. We described, discussed, and revised those observations. We put the techniques into action to see if they were truly the key skills and to understand what teachers needed to know in order to replicate the key techniques correctly. We showed top teachers the moments on video that we identified as moments of great technique, and they applied the models and improved them. It was a long, recursive process.

The result is a set of clearly defined techniques for becoming great at teaching (see Doug’s book, Teach Like a Champion). This is the curriculum and starting point for us in developing our teachers—both those who have never taught before and those who have taught for years. It is our lens for continued practice and improvement, and our guide in developing our objectives for practice time with our staff. The first step for any team or individual in getting practice right is to get the game right, and we do that through analysis of who and what wins the games we set out to play.

Analyze the Game

• Use data to pick out the top performers.
• Observe and analyze performance data to discern what skills top performers have in common.
• Analyze and describe those skills in terms that provide a clear map to others who want to replicate them.

RULE 10 ISOLATE THE SKILL

Heart surgery is complex. It takes several years to learn. So where do you begin? While it is important to provide a context for medical students to get an overview, the real learning, the real practice begins with one skill and then another done over and over again in isolation. What do we mean by isolation? Consider suturing, one of the many steps in heart surgery. Suturing is complex in itself and must be further broken down. The novice needs to know how to hold the surgical instrument, how to make the knots, how to close wounds, how to suture through scar tissue, how to select suture materials, and how to suture when drains and tubes are needed. Before she can try this out in the real-world setting of surgery, she has many hours of practicing knots on oranges and suturing tubes to cadavers ahead of her. This is the central notion of Rule 10: having identified each skill or technique you need to build in your performers, you begin by teaching and practicing those skills in their simplest form and by breaking the unit of learning and practice down into bite-sized chunks.

The ultimate objective is still to successfully use your new skills and others in an integrated setting—in the big game, in a surgery, or in a reading lesson. Practicing the technique in isolation, in a simplified setting, is ironically often the necessary first step to achieving that objective. This is what we described in the first chapter as a drill. But we caution that drills have to be carefully designed to meet the objectives you set forth in practice. Not all drills isolate skills. In your process of planning, be sure to design the drill that isolates first. (We will look at ways to add complexity in Rule 12.)

To better understand what an isolated-skill drill could look like, let’s see an example from our training workshops at Uncommon. For teachers to better implement the technique we call “100%,” we knew we had to teach them to effectively use nonverbal hand gestures. So we developed a special drill. First we give teachers a list of student behaviors they might see in a typical class (for example, students putting their head down or their hand up at an inappropriate time, looking out the window, or fooling with their shoe). The teachers each design two or three hand gestures they could use to let the student know what behavior they would like to see in that moment (for example, pointing their finger toward their eyes and then toward the person speaking to remind students to look at the speaker; lowering their right hand from high to low in the air to signal putting their hand down; or folding their hands and straightening their back to show the posture they would like to see). In order to effectively isolate this particular skill, we have teachers practice implementing these new hand gestures by asking them to teach something they know well—a nursery rhyme or the Pledge of Allegiance—while predesignated participants demonstrate the problematic student behaviors. The teachers must use the hand signals to correct behavior while not breaking the flow of their teaching.

We also remove other complications of the classroom setting in several ways. Most students comply entirely with a teacher’s lesson, eliminating the need to scan and monitor the majority of students. We make noncompliance planned and predictable—the teacher knows what the behavior will be and whom it will be coming from—and we even ask the participants to make the behavior visually exaggerated so that teachers can easily identify it. We simplify the lesson plan and do not spend any time discussing how well they taught the lesson to the class. And we take away the pressure of pacing: with the guarantee of student compliance and engagement, the teachers do not need to go faster than they can comfortably practice the hand signals.

The teachers use their hand signals several times over the course of this exercise with the goal that the signals become more and more natural to them, ideally creating an inextricable link to the behavioral expectations they will reinforce every day. Teachers will be much more likely to use this form of intervention when appropriate in their classroom, sometimes without even being aware that they are using it, because they have practiced it. They become more comfortable with the skill in isolation and ideally enter it into muscle memory.

Now let’s meet Tony, a manager who has just brought on a new sales team with high hopes of outselling every other sales team in the company. Tony wants to get them out there selling as soon as possible, so he gives them all the information they need to know and then has them practice multiple skills at one time: cold-calling clients and running sales meetings. They all participate eagerly, happy to practice the skills they will need for success. Tony sees that right away everyone is getting better, and that some of the new hires have strong technique already, so he sends them out to begin selling. The early results are poor: sales are low and so is morale. Tony again observes his team and realizes that they are all over the map. The ones who are not doing well are missing some of the basic skills of eye contact and listening. Some of the successful ones are missing some of the basic skills as well, but have figured out ways to compensate. A couple of them have not mastered what the bottom line for clients would be, nor are they able to communicate about it. Others are good at providing the bottom line but are not listening to their clients. The team is spending their time on the equivalent of writing while holding the pencil the wrong way, or practicing sutures while holding the needle incorrectly. They are inscribing poor technique by using it again and again, and getting by. Tony knows that at some point they will plateau unless he goes back and retrains them with these basic skills.

This situation can easily unfold in performance professions. The unfortunate norm is to bring new people into a company and expect them to perform regardless of the degree to which they have developed individual skills. In on-boarding new employees, trainers rarely ask them to practice discrete skills in isolation. In the best scenarios, professionals go back and develop those skills as necessary. More often, though, they try to get by with compensation skills. You eventually hire others to mask their weaknesses, or you work around the skills they never developed. Far better is to consider preparation programs as an opportunity to break down performance and ensure a strong foundation.

Isolate the Skill

• When teaching a technique or skill, practice the skill in isolation until the learner has mastered it.
• Uncover and retrain when compensatory skills are masking the need for isolated skill development.

RULE 11 NAME IT

Every start-up company (and every new parent) is well aware of the importance of naming. When it comes to branding a new company, people willingly spend hours of time and often considerable amounts of money on finding the perfect name. You select the names that show exactly who you are and who you aren’t, names that inspire your staff to strive for greatness and that hook people in to exactly what you offer. You avoid the bland, the overused, the gimmicky. You do this because your name sets the course for your company, and as it grows and changes, you hope your name will continue to represent the outstanding company you established.

While you clearly understand the power of a name, you often neglect this important rule when it comes to developing your team. You have an opportunity to name the skills you use each day, to create your own shorthand for the skills that matter the most. If done thoughtfully, giving the skills you are working on and the drills you use to practice them meaningful names can be a powerful tool, indeed too powerful to dismiss or ignore.

Naming the skills you aim to practice in isolation creates a language for your team. Given that these skills of high performance are exactly what you want your staff to spend their time talking about and focusing on, ideally their names will be logical and memorable. Not only that, but the best names will continue to shape the skills. The technique name “100%” is much more powerful and absolute than if Doug had named the technique, say, “Everybody.” Each time we use “100%” to discuss the technique, the name signals and reinforces the muscularity of the technique in a way that “Everybody” never would. Identifying skills is a prerequisite to naming, but it does not guarantee an apt name. Likewise, simply naming techniques without surfacing the discrete skills will not provide the clarity people need to improve. It’s the combination of identifying and naming skills that makes the design of practice effective. A set of names for essential techniques becomes a powerful shorthand for talent development. It becomes a highly efficient management tool as well, conserving one of the most precious resources you can never get enough of: time. With this common language comes an efficiency which creates greater capacity to develop more talent.

Sometimes the best names come in spontaneous moments of practice, but often the best are those you have chosen carefully. You don’t want to create more profession-specific names to make people feel like insiders who use a special language, to give the appearance of complexity to otherwise simple and straightforward aspects of performance, or to sound clever. There is a vast difference between names that build, sustain, and even amplify meaning, and jargon, which the more it gets used, the more vague and lifeless it becomes. You want to avoid the pitfalls of jargon, which can be nonspecific language that replaces and obscures otherwise perfectly clear messages (for example, “Let’s put our heads together” could simply mean “Meet with me,” or you may really mean “Figure it out”). Or, words can lose meaning when terms are misused and the original concept is diluted (such as with the term “synergy”). To avoid these traps, the descriptions of the techniques have to be specific, the names have to be meaningful and clear, and the use of the names has to be monitored and reinforced to ensure that terms are used consistently.

The power of naming goes even further. When school leaders have become fluent in the techniques from Teach Like a Champion and use them regularly to discuss teacher performance, this taxonomy of skills becomes a framework and influences the way we see and analyze teacher performance. In debriefing lessons with teacher candidates, our school leaders invariably reference these techniques because we analyze teacher performance according to that framework.

Invest the time in creating powerful names for the skills that are important. Then, as you develop people, use these names so that they don’t collect dust on a shelf. Insist that people use the names when discussing performance, an idea we will pick up again in the sixth chapter, “Post Practice.” And listen closely that your team consistently uses the names to refer to what you are referring to, and correct the team when there is misalignment. You will preserve the hard work of crafting the best names by ensuring they don’t mean different things to different people. This will also preserve the names’ power to shape practice.

Name It

• Name each skill or technique you have identified as an important building block for outstanding performance.
• Monitor the use of this shared vocabulary: use the names, ask staff to use them, and then ensure that the names are being used correctly.

RULE 12 INTEGRATE THE SKILLS

After breaking down performance and practicing discrete skills, it’s time to scale the complexity of the practice back up and begin to integrate the skills into authentic contexts. This does not mean that you should turn immediately to the scrimmage (the limitations of the scrimmage were laid out in Rule 7). When you begin to integrate skills and make the practice look more authentic, a variety of drills is still the most effective way to practice. As you begin practicing skills in combinations that more closely resemble the game, you need to attend to three aspects of practice: (1) practicing skills in game-like scenarios, (2) applying the skill of “matching” the right techniques to the right moments, and (3) putting practice into the game environment.

Game-like Scenarios

Manchester United coach Rene Meulensteen has a video on the website FourFourTwo.com about improving technique. He observes that most teams use a “one v. one drill,”4 with one player in possession of the ball and the other player charging straight at him, attempting to take it away. They do this to practice the basic skill of maintaining possession of the ball, but he argues that that is not enough. You need to practice “one v. one” drills with a defender coming from the side, from behind you, and from an angle in front, all possible (and we’d argue more likely) scenarios you would see in the game. This is the overlap between isolation and integration: you have to master the basic skill (maintaining possession of the ball) in a variety of realistic settings, or you haven’t really mastered the skill. Most people assume that practicing with the defender coming straight in covers the development of that skill, but it doesn’t. It prepares players to perform in the situation they will be least likely to face in the game.5

We took this lesson to heart when creating a practice drill for “No Opt Out,” a technique that describes the way teachers respond to students so as not to let them off the hook for answering a question. It starts simply with the practice of a basic scripted sequence. Then we changed it slightly to include times when students don’t give the answer because they are shy or are refusing to answer. We changed it again so that the student who provided the answer in the first and second rounds doesn’t get it in the third. In this drill, teachers are preparing not only to use No Opt Out, but to use it nimbly in all the ways they might need to use it in the big game.

Matching

A story from a summer professional development session at one of our Uncommon schools illustrates the idea of matching. The workshop was designed to introduce teachers to the technique “100%.” A rookie teacher had done the first activity for nonverbal corrections, practicing her hand gestures. She was doing well. Next, the practice switched to integrating “100%” into a role play that more closely resembled a typical class. The teacher was to practice her procedure for lining up students to leave class, using the teachers in the workshop as her “students.” The goal was to line up the students while quickly and successfully correcting off-task behaviors. Again, the skill she had just practiced was correcting student behavior with gestures while continuing to teach. But suddenly, in this role play, she was confronted with off-task behavior from two students while she was not in the middle of teaching. The whole “class” watched as she stood in the front of the room and awkwardly paused, trying to get students’ attention so that she could use her very best gestures. What she and others now realized was that that wasn’t the right intervention for that moment. She needed to give a lightning-quick verbal correction, either anonymously (“I still need one; you know who you are”) or a lightning-quick correction (“I need Josh, but I have Ethan”), and then move on. Instead, her least invasive intervention turned out to be much more invasive than other corrections would be. Why didn’t she pull out the other interventions?

While this teacher demonstrated that she was prepared to use the skill she had developed in isolated practice, and she might have been ready to integrate that skill into a more authentic setting, she was not ready to integrate the whole repertoire of corrections. She was blindsided by this shift from the application of one skill to having to decide which skill to apply. On the surface it looked like the integrated practice was just adding the next layer of complexity. In fact, it was introducing a new skill, that of knowing which correction to use in which situation. We have to acknowledge that there is another skill to be built to ensure success: the skill of matching the right intervention or skill to the right moment. This skill, like the others, can be built through practice. The objective of a matching drill is to make the right decision about which move to use. Drills to practice matching fold two or three skills together and/or two or three situations together. This could mean you role-play a scenario several times: each time it starts the same, but then it takes a different direction requiring one of the moves in the newly built repertoire. Each iteration requires reflection and feedback on whether you made the right choice, so that you intentionally develop the decision making skills so that they will become instinctual.

Game Environment

When crafting your practice to resemble reality, the goal is that by making the practice look and feel closer and closer to true performance, the skills will transfer over during performance; the instinct you have built in practice will kick in. Another way to ensure that practice “resembles reality” is to attend to the practice environment. “State-dependent learning” is the idea that your ability to learn and retain information is affected by some element of your state of being. One element would be your environment; that is, you do better on a test when you take it in the same room you learned in. (Doug used to put this research into action in college by studying for exams in the rooms where he would take them.) Applying this to practice, the closer the practice environment is to the performance environment, the more likely people will replicate their success in performance.

Consider the design of the skills center at Weill Cornell Medical College. It is specifically engineered to create realistic scenarios in which residents and attending physicians can practice in the clinical setting without risk of injury to the patient or damage to the patient relationship. This environment is as similar as possible to the rooms of the hospital, and as such the practice spaces are outfitted identically to the real thing: the same beds, the same tools, even the same wall color are used in the simulation room. The college makes this level of investment in its practice space because it yields results and helps doctors apply their learning when they are in actual hospital rooms.

While integrating skills in more authentic contexts, teachers can get more from practice if they stand up and use the formal pose they will use with their students. It is even more helpful if the room is set up as their classroom and they can move around as they will when actually teaching. Practicing in their actual classroom is even better. All of this will leave teachers with the memory of being successful, of being the teacher they want to be in the big game.

Integrate the Skills

• After teaching discrete skills, create practice that places the skills in situations participants could face in the game.
• Create practice that helps people learn to match the right skills to the right situations.
• Consider simulating the performance environment to ensure that successful practice translates to successful performance.

RULE 13 MAKE A PLAN

No one would argue the notion that you need to plan out your practices. Coaches, managers, organizational development teams all plan for the time they have to develop their staff. Agendas are made, slide decks are polished, and discussion topics are wordsmithed. But what makes a good plan? What details should you attend to in the planning process to ensure it is effective? As we have learned from our work at Uncommon over the past several years, chances are that what you are doing now probably isn’t nearly good enough, if you want exceptional results from your practice sessions. Specifically, we are perpetually astonished at just how much it pays off to do three things: (1) plan with data-driven objectives in mind; (2) plan down to the last minute; and (3) rehearse and revise the plan. This may seem obvious. Once again, we’ll take a big bite of humble pie and say that we, like most people, were initially reluctant to invest the time and energy into such planning. We will also exhort that when you do it, it is well worth it.

Plan with Data-Driven Objectives in Mind

In the previous chapter, we made a case for practicing with clear, measureable objectives, limiting the number of those objectives and knowing in concrete terms what it looks like when an objective is met. Having that mindset will dramatically alter practice for many of us, but it still leaves the question of how to identify what your team needs so that it can practice for the right objectives.

In the documentary The Heart of the Game, we find our answer. This documentary tells the story of Bill Resler, a tax professor at the University of Washington turned high school basketball coach. In the movie, you observe how Resler’s bias towards numbers and spreadsheets translates into using video and data to improve the performance of the Roosevelt High School girls’ basketball team. Five years after Resler’s first season, the Roosevelt High School Roughriders go on to win the state championship.

You watch Resler work late into the night analyzing game and practice tapes and data on the precise skills (for example, one-to-one defense, inbounds, passing, fast breaks) that each girl needs to work on. From this he determines the number of minutes that need to be spent on each discrete skill at practice, and which skills are most important to overall individual and team performance. Using these valuable statistics, he creates a practice plan that details which skills players will practice, for how long, and with which players. He sets the objectives first and then plans the particular drills he will need to meet those objectives.

Coaches and leaders often fail to recognize that planning practice must be a data-driven endeavor. What is more, the best coaches constantly adapt their practice in response to what they learn about the needs of their team from on-the-job performance and from the results of practice itself. As people succeed at tasks, you add complexity; as they struggle, you reduce it. This data-driven process works alongside the set of skills you have worked so hard to identify. You develop your list of skills that lead to top performance in your “scope and sequence,” a generic document that captures the order in which you would logically roll out each skill, and the amount of time you would expect to spend on each skill. That document is invaluable in reminding you what your team needs to learn. But any document has to be flexible to accept revisions once the data tell you what your team really needs.

Plan Down to the Last Minute

Good plans for practice leave nothing to chance. There is no question of which drill will be inserted where, or who will get a chance to practice which skills. There is no midpractice poll of what favorite drill to do next, no free time earned for efficiency in completing activities. Plans that lead to successful practice account for each minute with useful activity.

At Uncommon Schools, we have begun to plan our practices with this level of detail. Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, managing director for the North Star Network, developed a planning process and template that has spread to all our networks: the “Living the Learning” template (detailed in his book Leverage Leadership). It asks planners to map out exactly the objective for each section of the practice, the types of activity they will use to achieve those outcomes, how many minutes each piece will take, and exactly what materials will be required. Some were initially resistant to this level of planning. It is time-consuming and requires presenters to plan precisely what they will say, how they will word each question, and what answers or ideas they hope each question will generate from the participants.

Yet, planning with this level of detail is the way you can know in advance just how you need to spend each minute of a workshop to ensure that the participants reach the objective. This is how you ensure that what you get out of practice (results, as your team grows and develops) is on scale with what you put into practice (the resource of your staff members’ time).

Rehearse and Revise the Plan

Coaches who care about results don’t just plan to the last detail; they actually go so far as to try out the plan, rehearse it, and revise it to make sure that the practice will be perfect. Take Mike Shanahan, coach of the Washington Redskins, who spends more time preparing for practice than actually practicing. When reporter Barry Svrluga followed Shanahan around last December, he observed, “Wednesday and Thursday practices are preceded by walk-throughs—rehearsals for what will happen in practice.” The coaches have mapped out a script—sometimes 40 pages long—of the plays they intend to use. Then before the practice, they bring the whole team to rehearse the practice they have scripted, walking through to check that everyone knows where he needs to be and when, and to ensure that the plans on paper translate into the practice they are looking for on the field. Questions that might arise from translating the written script to the playing field are answered; explanations of the next steps or the next moves are made during this time. The team comes to practice ready to use each moment doing—improving and inscribing success rather than talking about what they are doing.6

The time you make to practice training activities in advance always results in a better practice because it leads to better plans. We have scrapped activities, drastically revised activities, simplified directions for clarity, and built on successful activities whenever we have put in the time to rehearse the activities in advance. Is this worth the time? Realistically, you are often battling the clock to get everything done, especially to complete the painstakingly detailed plan for each practice. Not every piece of practice can be worked through in this detail in advance. It is a question of investment. Even so, the more you embrace practice as something you do to improve, the better you will want to get at helping your team practice. One of the ways we have invested in getting better at leading practice is in videotaping our practice sessions—both one-on-one sessions and practice with groups of teachers. We then analyze our sessions and get and give feedback on how to improve at practicing. When we do find the time to invest in strengthening our practices through rehearsal and revision, it always yields positive results.

Make a Plan

• Plan with data-driven objectives in mind, and plan to adapt.
• Plan down to the last minute.
• Rehearse and revise the plan.
• Videotape and reflect on practice sessions.

RULE 14 MAKE EACH MINUTE MATTER

If you want to be a coach, go buy a whistle. We are speaking metaphorically here, though in some cases our guidance may be literal; you may in fact want to go get a real whistle. If so, when you start looking you’ll have a hard time finding one. Whistles aren’t cool. The guy at the sporting goods store will look at you like you just asked for a wooden racket and a pair of too-tight double knit polyester tennis shorts. What are you, some kind of relic? You aren’t supposed to blow a whistle. You are supposed to say, “OK, guys, I need everyone’s attention over here. Please stop what you’re doing. Come on over. I want to talk about what just happened,” and here you humanely begin to discuss one of your participants’ mistakes (or successes) from practice.

Frankly, doing this is a disaster. Whether you are running a large ad sales training event with hundreds of participants, gathering a small group of managers together to practice how to conduct effective performance reviews, or coaching a church choir, these words can undermine the efficiency of your practice. Speaking them aloud takes 10 to 15 seconds, assuming that everyone hears you the first time and feels accountable enough to come right over (which they will likely only do if they see everyone else doing it). You’ll be lucky if you’re talking about your teachable moment within 30 seconds. By this time the moment will essentially have been lost. You will have extended the feedback loop (see Rule 25) and eroded its effect. And more important, you will have wasted time.

Unfortunately, trying to get a room full of professionals gathered at a training to all come to attention isn’t easy. They are our colleagues. They are adults, not children in a classroom. It feels uncomfortable hauling out the whistle. But we learned the hard way in our trainings at Uncommon that it was essential to do just that. At first, whenever we had people break into, say, small groups and then needed them to stop and gather together again in a whole group, we struggled. They wanted to keep talking. But we tried to be very respectful in our efforts to get everyone’s attention, and so we let the minutes tick away while we waited for all to finish their thoughts. We knew we had to fix this problem and so we instituted a simple clap. The first time we tried it, we told people that when we clapped it meant we were asking them to break off their conversations. We knew they wouldn’t want to, and we apologized. We were glad they had so much of value to talk about. But we wanted to honor their time and make the most of it. So we would ask them to come to order quickly.

Things went pretty well. We definitely saved a lot of time. But the clap wasn’t perfect. People didn’t always hear it or know whether it was deliberate. Over time we decided to improve our signal. Three quick claps in a row, it turns out, is distinctive enough that people tend to hear it and respond right away. Sometimes we add two short claps as a ten-second warning before the three claps. This lets people start winding down so the cutoff isn’t quite so abrupt. Sometimes we have participants give a response clap to actively engage them in the process of coming back together. We use a clap cue every time we need to bring a room back to attention from small group work, and every time people hear it they do the same thing. This, in short, is our whistle, and it saves us literally hours of time.

The difference between a great practice session and a good one—and often the difference between a great organization and a good one—is established in systems like these that allow your productive work to be obsessively efficient. Without these systems, practice sessions are characterized by one thing above all others: the wasting of time.

Great organizations step in with whistles—clear, distinctive signals—to make people’s practice as efficient as possible, even in professional settings and even with adults. This means signals not only for when to close out small group work but for when breaks will end, for example. (We’ve started putting an online timer up on the projection screen showing people how much of a 10-minute break remains so that our 10-minute breaks don’t become 20-minute breaks.) It means letting people know how much time they’ll have for an activity so they can plan to finish it on time. It means setting expectations for when and how people can and should ask questions; that is, whether they should hold questions until the end or feel free to interrupt you. (Hint: if you opt for the latter, be prepared to risk not getting through all of your material.)

How are you wasting time? What can you do differently? Below we describe typical ways that time gets wasted in different settings, and we offer preliminary ideas for using time more effectively.

Finally, simply being alert to the fact that efficient use of time is the obsession of every great coach can help you be alert to the critical task of problem solving when inefficiencies happen. Sometimes the solution is as simple as “having enough balls at the ready.” John Wooden’s plans for a drill he used included not just where players would stand but how many would stand in each place and where the balls would be placed and how many balls would be in each location and whose responsibility it would be to chase balls for the group so that they were never short. Be creative. Be urgent. Efficiency matters.

Make Each Minute Matter

• Get a whistle—real or metaphorical—to conserve the resource of time.
• Identify the ways you inadvertently waste time and create remedies as soon as possible.
• Turn those remedies into routines.

These rules will get you started, but there are two big aspects of effective practice that we have not yet discussed: modeling and feedback. They are so important to making your practice powerful, and so complex on their own, that we spend the next two chapters on rules for using both as part of practice.

Notes

1. “In SEAL Team Six, Lessons from ‘Horrible Night’ in Iran 30 Years Ago.” http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2011/0503/In-SEAL-Team-Six-success-lessons-from-horrible-night-in-Iran-30-years-ago

2. Michael Lewis, Moneyball, p. 148.

3. Michael Lewis, Moneyball, pp. 172–175.

4. Nearly everyone who has played soccer knows what this drill is from its name. Here is an example of using shared vocabulary for skills and drills.

5. http://performance.fourfourtwo.com/technique/improve-your-technique-with-manchester-united

6. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/when-it-comes-to-practice-the-redskins-pay-attention-to-every-detail/2011/12/22/gIQAEQqTCP_story_1.html