USING MODELING

In the quest to set up practice in the right way for your team, to start them off practicing success, you will find moments where the best way to teach a skill is to model that skill. Indeed, many of the seemingly simplest things defy description. Consider the simple act of following a recipe. Let’s imagine James, a novice to baking, who one day decides he wants to bake a loaf of bread. He pulls out a cookbook and finds a recipe for bread and decides to give it a try. At first glance, the recipe seems simple enough. Measure three cups of flour. Check. Pour three tablespoons of warm water into a large bowl. Good so far. He follows each step, but before long, James finds himself at a loss. The recipe says, “Proof the yeast.” Huh? How do you proof yeast? James reads ahead. The recipe calls for James to knead the dough but warns against kneading until the dough is tough and elastic. From this description, he feels pretty certain he could figure out how to get it wrong, but he is unsure what it would look like to knead to the point of perfection. The recipe calls for James to “let the dough sit and rise, then punch it down.” They want me to punch it? Really? This is the moment when James realizes that the recipe will take him only so far; this endeavor calls for Julia Child herself.

What James needs is a model. The recipe, he realizes, might be a great guide for someone who knows what he is doing, who has already acquired the techniques, but for a novice, seeing someone execute the steps is essential. This is where the cooking show comes in. One reason cooking shows are so popular is because they provide that model. In every field, with every profession and performance you set out to master, there are skills and techniques that are either more easily and efficiently mastered through modeling, or nearly impossible to learn without it. Think about your areas of expertise and learning. What needs modeling? What would be impossible to teach without demonstrations? It could be kneading dough, threading a needle, dribbling a ball, answering a client phone call, or etching a microchip—you likely wouldn’t want to teach these skills to people without showing them.

But modeling can backfire too. As a parent, coach, or manager, you are watched by those who look to you for guidance. It can be terrifying to realize that you may inadvertently be demonstrating all the wrong things. Back in the 1990s, NBA star Charles Barkley announced, “I am not a role model.” But of course he was, just as you are when you accept a leadership role, when you are selected by your boss to train others, or when you launch your own team. The reality is that people will model their own actions, consciously or unconsciously, after the actions of their leader or coach. We have seen over and over the power of modeling in accelerating successful practice. The best developers of talent will harness this natural inclination to follow models and deliberately use it as a key part of practice to support the growth of their team. Knowing that they are being watched, they deliberately choose and shape their own actions to influence the group. They also realize the cost of not doing this. If they fail to give their staff explicit direction about the model to follow, the staff will still follow a default model, either consciously or not. In teaching, this means teachers will most likely teach in the way they were taught rather than the way that is most successful. The rules here focus on how to present a model as part of practice to show learners exactly what you want them to learn to do. A model articulates a goal, a performance to emulate. Modeling a small, discrete skill can help make the expectation for action crystal clear. Modeling a complex skill, or modeling several techniques at once, can show how all the discrete pieces will eventually blend together into proficient performance.

RULE 15 MODEL AND DESCRIBE

Part of teaching a technique well is to describe for learners in no uncertain terms what the skill involves, what it looks like, and how to do it. Modeling is showing them what all these things look like. When a well-crafted description and a model are used strategically in tandem, they can be a powerful way to help people learn. Consider the following example: Denise has just started her new job in the development department of a nonprofit. This is her first job out of college, and she is whip smart and ready to do whatever it takes to build her career and realize her ambitions. After a few weeks on the job, her boss gives her positive feedback and a new assignment: to make calls to potential donors to gauge their interest in the organization as well as begin cultivating them for future fundraising and informational events. The only time Denise has made anything resembling an outreach call was when she asked her grandparents to donate money to her walk-a-thon. In other words, she has no idea what she is doing.

If these calls don’t go well, it will reflect poorly not only on Denise but also on her boss and most importantly on the organization. Luckily her boss realizes this and has wisely set up a time with Denise to practice with another colleague who is particularly good at these types of calls—we’ll call her Helen. Denise could not be luckier: not only is Helen great at calls to investors; she is also great at structuring practice for developing talent. First she describes, breaking down the pieces of the call into an outline and providing sample language for each piece. She talks Denise through the outline, answering questions and explaining where the outline is flexible or inflexible—in other words, where Denise has some room for improvisation and where she has very little. Then Helen models a call for Denise: she calls another colleague, whom she has prepped on how to respond, and runs through the call with her. She also tapes it so that as she and Denise talk about it later, she can replay particular parts. As needed, she will go back through the model with Denise and talk more about what she did and why at each step of the call.

For the novice, the model alone wouldn’t do. Denise, having high aptitude for this task, could listen to what Helen does and go off and probably do a pretty good job. But without the description, Helen would leave a lot to chance. Inevitably, as Denise strikes out on her own to make calls, she will need to go off script and improvise. It’s the description that provides the critical decision-making parameters to ensure she makes good choices.

On the other hand, just providing Denise with the description leaves a lot of room for her to get a call wrong. She may strike a false or condescending tone, or awkwardly facilitate the conversation by not quite managing the transitions between segments. Helen has demonstrated that in a practice session, when teaching a new skill, leaders need to balance modeling and describing. Together they make a powerful combination.

Model and Describe

• Use modeling to help learners replicate, and use description to help them understand.
• Using modeling and description together ensures that learners can flexibly apply what they have learned.

RULE 16 CALL YOUR SHOTS

Many professions use some method of “shadowing” as part of their training or on-boarding process. We understand why. When you have highly skilled staff members, people who consistently demonstrate excellence in performance, you want to leverage that strength. You also want to be clear with your new staff about whom they should emulate. But shadowing can be one of the least effective ways of modeling what you want new recruits to learn. Why? Because all too often you neglect to do the one simple thing that would make for a great learning experience: you don’t call your shots. Some versions of billiards require that before you take your shot, you announce which ball you are going to sink, and where: “3-ball in the corner pocket.” In modeling, you should make your intentions transparent as well, taking the time to preview and to prepare learners for what they should be looking at and for. Your newest staff members are untrained not only in what they are able to do but also in what they are able to identify as skill in others. If you don’t tell people what to look for, they can end up observing useless things. It is funny when it’s your mother-in-law making random observations about football (“Why do they do that butt-slapping thing?”) but less so when you are determined to close the achievement gap.

Let’s say that Amir is the newest hire to join a sales team. He is bright and eager. His training includes shadowing the senior member of the sales team, Sarah. He first follows Sarah into a meeting with a new client. The client is clearly interested in their product, but they still need to negotiate the terms of the sale in order to seal the deal. Amir watches in amazement as Sarah proposes various figures and then falls silent. The client is not speaking, and neither is Sarah. The tension in the room is palpable, and Amir worries that perhaps he should leave—he has caught his new mentor on a bad day. By the end of the meeting, however, Sarah and the new client find mutually agreeable terms and sign a new deal. The client leaves and Amir awkwardly smiles and looks away. When Sarah immediately whisks Amir off to the next meeting, he feels deep relief at avoiding an awkward conversation with her about what he just saw.

He next follows Sarah into an important meeting with a big client. Sarah is friendly and clearly knows the client well. She remarks to the client on their long history working together and the ways their partnership has been fruitful but also challenging. She gives the client a sense of where the company is heading next, and voices her concerns that the client may not like the changes ahead. Amir watches as Sarah seems to respond to the needs of the client and demonstrate her best effort to come up with a mutually agreeable contract. He is relieved for her and for himself, believing that this was just how these meetings should go, and ready to provide Sarah with lots of specific, positive feedback. Sarah and the client end the meeting with big smiles and robust handshakes.

Afterwards, Sarah asks Amir what he thought about the two meetings. He first expresses sympathy for the trial Sarah had to endure at the first meeting, an awkward moment made public by his presence. He stops before saying more—he doesn’t want to dwell on it. He turns the conversation to the second meeting. He effusively compliments Sarah on her engaging manner and her ability to keep the conversation focused on the negotiation at hand while still keeping the conversation professional and pleasant. Sarah looks at Amir apologetically. She realizes that he has completely missed what was actually happening in the two meetings.

From the perspective of the experienced salesperson, the first meeting went even better than she had anticipated: her negotiations resulted in a contract that would increase revenue to the company by a wider margin than she had hoped. Knowing that she can sometimes overtalk in these situations, she was purposeful in being silent and putting the responsibility on the client to respond. As for the second meeting, while appreciative of Amir’s enthusiasm, Sarah points out that she didn’t meet her objective. Going into the meeting, she knew that the right course of action was to end the contract with the client. Instead, she caved in to the client and changed the contract, knowing full well that the client would end up upset and looking for a new distributer in a few months. What Amir read as pleasantness, Sarah critiqued as her own inability in the meeting to give a direct message.

Now Amir realizes that he read the situations all wrong. Sarah realizes it too. Imagine if they hadn’t had time to debrief and Sarah had left Amir to make his own sense of the day. He would have learned the wrong things by focusing on the wrong moments and misinterpreting the moments he saw. In hindsight, Sarah sees the pitfalls: the reason Amir was shadowing her is that he is brand-new to this work; it was unfair and unrealistic to believe he would know how to interpret what he saw.

Consider how this experience might have unfolded had Sarah previewed for Amir what to look for in these meetings. She might have said, “Amir, watch what I do with this client. Here is the price I am looking for them to agree to. There may be periods of silence while I wait for the client to respond—it could feel awkward—but if I jump in to end the silence, it usually means backing down on the price we are asking for. See if you can identify other techniques I use to this end.” Now he knows what to look for, increasing the likelihood he will see it, while she can assess his aptitude by seeing what else he picks up on, given her specific prompt, “What else do I do to achieve my goal?”

The real danger in using modeling without calling your shots is that it could start the cycle of practice off incorrectly, with the learner practicing the wrong thing—something peripheral or even detrimental to success. Amir would have started on his own work with the wrong idea of job proficiency, and quite possibly would have done a worse job in client meetings because of the ways he misinterpreted the model. A soccer player might watch what a star player does with her feet but miss what she does with her eyes, thus missing out on the key to making the play so effective. Struggling teachers often ask to watch the masters in the hope that they will learn how to “do it right,” shore up their own weaknesses, and see ways to tackle some of the challenges they have been facing. This sounds good, but the problem is that they don’t know what to look for. They may focus on the posters in the classroom when they really need to focus on how the teacher gives directions. As the lesson progresses, there is almost never anyone there to identify and label the discrete techniques the teacher is using. Unless the teachers doing the observing have a highly developed ability to pick out technique and identify each of the teacher’s deliberate moves, they will draw their own conclusions about what makes the model teacher successful. When you take even a few moments to call your shots, you turn what could be a negative experience into a powerful opportunity to learn from the best.

Call Your Shots

• Before you model, tell those for whom you are modeling what to look for.

RULE 17 MAKE MODELS BELIEVABLE

What learners are looking for in a model, in addition to guidance on the proper technique, is to be convinced it works. They want to see the beautiful loaf of bread emerge from the oven, or see the final price agreed upon after the negotiations, to understand not only how to perform the skill but what will happen if they do it right. When a novice violinist sees a model of how to hold a bow properly while playing a short piece of music, the clear strong sound of the music signals the results of using the proper technique. When we see a demonstration of a powerful teaching technique, we hope to observe that the result is 30 out of 30 students on task and learning. Even the most motivated among us have moments of doubt and need convincing. When your first loaf of bread emerges from the oven steaming hot and hard as a rock, you want to see that a beautiful loaf can emerge not just from a commercial-grade oven but also from a twenty-year-old relic like the one you bought at your neighbor’s yard sale. Seeing is believing. When people see that a technique or skill actually works, it can take away the excuses they might make for not trying.

That’s why we use a lot of video of outstanding teachers when teaching the techniques from Teach Like a Champion. Our hope is that showing the technique done expertly will not only convince participants of the impact the techniques can have on students, but it will also help teachers learn that technique as well. The key is not that the video has to be a flawless demonstration of a technique for it to be a valuable model; it has to be believable and authentic. If not, if there is any way for a teacher to poke holes in the technique—“Of course the teachers in the video are successful. There are two of them and only one of me!”—then the model is worthless. What we don’t want is for teachers to leave the workshop feeling like the model was great but “would never really work for me.”

Sometimes the doubt goes deeper. Practitioners want to see and believe that the technique being modeled will work in their exact context. If they don’t believe, they may not ever try it. You can see this phenomenon on the television show Nanny 911, or shows like it. On Nanny 911 the nanny comes in every week and uses the same techniques to create order in a disorderly household with previously unruly children. Presumably, the parents who participate in these interventions on national television have regularly watched the show. They have seen what the nanny does in other homes. So why haven’t they learned from the model? Quite likely they have decided that their children are different. Their children are the ones who will not respond to these techniques. They sometimes profess they have tried everything and nothing works. In fact, some viewers buy in to this notion that there may be some children out there who finally bring the nanny down: each week the children’s behavior is described in new alarming detail, convincing viewers to tune in because Nanny might just meet her match. And so, each week Nanny not only tells parents what they must do to support their children (Be consistent! Give time-outs! Be calm! Use a behavior chart!); she shows parents that these methods actually work by modeling the techniques with their children. Only then do they believe it.

One way to make models believable is to ensure that modeling takes place in a context as close as possible to the context in which learners will perform. If they see that a particular technique works with a company that looks like theirs, they will have a hard time devising a reason not to try it. If possible, model for them in their own context. We call this push-in modeling. Let’s say you want to introduce a manager to a new meeting facilitation technique; nothing will be more persuasive than modeling with the manager’s staff in a meeting. If we apply this to teaching, having a struggling teacher go to a great teacher’s room is good modeling, but much more believable is having the great teacher teach the students of the struggling teacher. For the hold-outs and doubters, the ideal is to model exactly in their context—their classroom with their students. More important to learners is that they see themselves following suit than that the model itself is flawlessly executed. While capturing the perfect moment on video can open the door to learning, push-in modeling with a few bumps in it is often better.

Make Models Believable

• Model in a context that is as similar as possible to the one in which the learner must perform.
• In-person modeling is often more believable than models that are prepared on video.

RULE 18 TRY SUPERMODELING

When teaching a new language, teachers often conduct class in the language they are teaching and by so doing, double down on the learning time. Not only do students practice conjugating verbs and complete exercises in the text to improve vocabulary and sentence structure, but they are also immersed in the language. Students hear the language every day: how the teacher strings words together, uses verb tenses, asks and answers questions, and pronounces the words. While the objective of the lesson focuses on the skills laid out in the text, students can learn so much more when the lesson is taught in the target language by absorbing the modeling the teacher provides.

Similarly, every staff meeting or professional development workshop is an opportunity to create an immersion experience—to model the best practices you want your staff to use even when (and particularly when) those practices are not the objective of the workshop. Let’s say the objective of your professional development is for your managers to learn effective ways to motivate direct reports to meet or exceed their sales targets. You know that you will model those motivational techniques for them before they practice each one. You will attend not only to the words but to the posture, eye contact, and tone—the delivery of those words. In “supermodeling,” you will also model how to give feedback as you do that for each person during practice. You will model how to present to a group. You will model how to manage time in presentations with the use of your timer. These additional skills that you model are not skills you expect your managers to master from this session, but the more practitioners hear and see the language and conventions of success, the more they will become ingrained and habitual for them. A simple way to reinforce the skills you supermodel is to ask staff to reflect not only on the content you have delivered but also on what they can gain from how you have conducted the workshop.

While this seems like a fairly obvious point, when you get supermodeling wrong you can get the whole cycle of practice wrong. When working with your staff, you are modeling, and whenever possible you need to model exactly as you wish to see them do things, in the tone and at the pace you would want to see. Let’s say you are modeling a presentation and you want the staff to focus only on the way you use the slide presentation you have created. Even though you have created a focus for them (calling your shot), you are still modeling overall expectations for a quality presentation. As you model, you have a choice: to treat the time with adults as more informal and purely about the objectives of the specific demonstration, or to deliberately model your overall expectations for your staff. The strong likelihood is that when others apply your model, they will apply the tone and energy you modeled in addition to how you used slides. If you modeled in a casual way, they will no doubt practice in a casual way. The danger there is that people often perform in the big game in the way they have practiced, so monitoring the quality of your modeling is crucial.

Try Supermodeling

• Model in the way you want learners to perform.
• Model the skill you are teaching, but use teaching time also to model any other skills that you expect people to eventually learn.

RULE 19 INSIST THEY “WALK THIS WAY”

The intuitive nature of imitation has become clear to us through our experiences as parents. When Katie was out to dinner one night with her then three-year-old daughter, her daughter starting gesturing in a way that she had never seen before. She was rubbing her brow, folding her arms, looking a bit distressed and considerably older than three. After a few seconds, Katie realized that her daughter was directly imitating the gestures she observed in the man sitting at the next table—it was unmistakable. As he shifted his gestures, she followed his model, carefully studying him. Katie and her husband had a little laugh and then tried to distract their daughter for fear this imitation would offend the gentleman.

What happens to the intuitive nature of imitation as you get older? There’s a classic moment in the film Young Frankenstein when Marty Feldman, playing Igor, beckons Dr. Frankenstein, played by Gene Wilder, to “Walk this way.” When Dr. Frankenstein simply follows along behind him, Igor, hunched over and limping with the aid of a small cane, hands him the cane and says, “This way!” and pantomimes walking with the cane until Dr. Frankenstein is also hunched and limping along. When Wilder starts imitating Feldman, it is a perfectly silly moment in part because of the physical humor, and in part because of the surprise and even levity you experience when someone closely imitates. This kind of imitation comes naturally. As Katie and her husband realized after dinner with their daughter, her imitation wasn’t an isolated event. That in this instance their daughter had imitated gestures which were so unfamiliar called attention to something that she in fact did all the time: exactly imitate the ways she saw others acting. But at some point you train people out of it. You place a higher value on originality, and devalue copying. Yet, sometimes the best way to benefit from a model and practice and learn a new skill is truly to walk this way.

Consider the recent experience of one of the teacher leaders at Uncommon who was working with a struggling teacher. The teacher, we’ll call her Rosie, was challenged by basic classroom management, and in particular was often creating more behavior issues as she slowed or stopped her lesson to correct students. Her coach had tried many interventions with her, and finally decided to teach Rosie’s class while she observed. He reported that after she watched the demonstration, and they debriefed the modeling she had seen, Rosie seemed to get it. She saw that he had created nonverbal gestures for correcting students while continuing to teach. She heard him make very quick corrections of students as he then returned to the text. So he was stunned the next day when she was struggling as much as before. She was using nonverbal signals that weren’t intuitive to students, so they didn’t know how to comply. She was creating corrections that were quick but not clear, and they were negative, so again students didn’t know how to follow the directions and didn’t want to. Rosie had analyzed the model, but she got the application wrong.

You can easily overlook the notion that novices can and should apply a model by directly imitating it. It might seem obvious to some, but when presented with a model, most people feel they are supposed to put their own spin on it. We are often uncomfortable with this kind of imitation, which, when we were infants and toddlers, came so naturally. Indeed, it is the impulse to imitate that is responsible for our being the learning machines we are in the first years of our lives. But as adults, some people overintellectualize. They try to think through whether the model matches their style or their personality, and they get stuck there, not ever applying it. Some learners misapply the model in an attempt to give it their own spin, and then mistakenly assume it was the technique that didn’t work for them rather than their implementation of the technique.

Learners need to hear that direct replication of the model is a completely legitimate way to approach a technique. When skills are clearly technical in nature—such as putting in a central line or replacing a motherboard—learners are much more apt to do exactly as their teachers do. You need to convince learners that even the seemingly soft skills of presentation and human interaction that are at play in so many professions can be learned more readily if you treat them as technical skills. You might assume that it squashes practitioners’ freedom and creativity to tell them that what you expect is for them to copy the model you present. In fact, it can free them to do simply as they see, to think less and act more, to feel the success of a simple moment, and it can ensure a proficient performance—the predecessor to creativity.

Insist They “Walk This Way”

• When asking people to follow a model, a useful first step is for them to imitate the model exactly.

RULE 20 MODEL SKINNY PARTS

Katie recently spent some time teaching her daughter, Aliza, to tie her shoes. She blocked off a chunk of time, and they sat down with one shoe and a clear goal. Katie started by modeling the whole tying process. She tied the shoe a couple of times, taking her time and trying to use exaggerated motions so there was nothing too subtle. She talked Aliza through it as she went. She was sure this would lead to shoe-tying success. Then Katie had Aliza try it. But Aliza couldn’t even remember where to start. She didn’t even know how to hold the laces—which hand? Katie quickly realized she had modeled too many steps, too quickly. So she slowed down and modeled each step. She showed her how to hold the laces, then watched her try it. She showed her how to form the first loop and which hand to hold it in. Aliza’s turn. Then the big loop-around move. Katie modeled that one again and again, because it was the trickiest part. She had to model small chunks for Aliza until she could do those small pieces. She made up phrases for each piece she was modeling so she could reinforce when it was Aliza’s turn to try it out. Then they could go on to the next part. After a time, they could put all the steps together. When Aliza forgot, Katie modeled again, and when she got it, Katie backed off. Then Aliza tied them with Katie just cuing her with the phrases. Finally, she could do it without any guidance at all.

You might make the mistake that Katie originally made all the time in professional settings, but unlike Katie’s daughter, who willingly admitted she didn’t get it, your employees usually work hard to cover up for the fact that they are lost. You show them how to do a presentation, how to use various programs or analyze data, moving quickly through your modeling. You often speed along because you don’t want to insult your new hire’s intelligence. Usually, you have lost sight of the learner’s perspective and you’ve forgotten how complex the task is for a novice. You model too much and then cheerfully ask if there are any questions. Your new, eager employee, out to prove his competence, smiles and says, “No. I am all set. When would you like me to send this to you?” He walks away and immediately breaks into a sweat trying to figure out what he should do first.

In the second chapter we made a case for teaching skills in isolation, for breaking down the learning into manageable parts so learners can focus on one skill at a time. That is in part the issue here—not trying to learn and practice overly complex skills too soon. But while Katie’s daughter could do most of the small skills related to shoe tying, modeling skinny parts helped her to build the connections between skills and to sequence them by following along a clear, deliberate modeling of the progression of the parts.

Modeling “skinny parts” of skills or techniques takes time, but it pays off tremendously in terms of successful practice and performance and the eventual time it takes the novice to learn the new skills. If the learner is struggling in her practice of a new skill, model a skinnier part, as small as it needs to be, and add to it only when she is ready.

One way we model skinny parts for staff is by playing “Copy Cat.” This form of micromodeling can be applied when you are teaming up on a performance—teaching a class, running a meeting, or making a presentation. The expert models something and then gives the novice the chance to try it. They go back and forth until the novice picks it up. The expert can emphasize different aspects each time to cue the novice on how to adjust his practice when it is again his turn. In this form of in-the-moment modeling, the practice is more successful not only because we model smaller chunks but also because learners are practicing concurrently with the modeling.

Model Skinny Parts

• Model complex skills one step at a time and repeat when necessary.
• Play a game of “Copy Cat” with learners to model small skills until mastery and then build on that.

RULE 21 MODEL THE PATH

In some cases, with some techniques, for modeling to lead to successful practice, novices need a model not only of proficient performance but also of the steps that experts have taken to get there. Let’s say you are a highly successful soccer coach and today you are modeling for a young, up-and-coming coach what you see as key to your success: how you coach during the game. He watches you as you draw diagrams, take notes, and have a few small side conversations as players come out. He sees that occasionally you call out to specific players in short, one-or-two-word commands. He watches you do very little, in fact, because that is one of the keys: you pull back during games, knowing that you have taught the team what they need to know in advance. While this is important for the new coach to see, it alone doesn’t show him how to coach during a game. What is not obvious from that modeling is how you developed your team such that your way of coaching works. What is missing are the ways you put those short commands into place so that they could trigger complex action from the team. If the new coach were to just apply what he saw during this game on his own team, they would likely receive no guidance because he would have missed all the hard work and intentional steps that led to this successful coaching.

One of the keys to the success of all the Uncommon schools is the development of strong classroom systems and routines. As we thought about how to train people in creating and maintaining systems and routines, we started where we often start, by scanning hours of video of the best teachers for great examples of the technique. One of the golden moments we found was of Shadell Noel, a founding kindergarten teacher at North Star Academy Elementary School. In the video she greets each of the 30 kindergarteners one at a time, shaking their hands at the doorway. The camera turns into the room, and what we see are those 30 five- and six-year-olds sitting up straight at their desks, hands folded. Ms. Noel walks to the front of the room, and the students do their college cheer in perfect unison. Within seconds they are standing up, and filing in line over to the carpet. Instruction begins right away. It takes your breath away: the children are happy and smiling, the classroom orderly and calm, and not a second is wasted. This is the power of routines.

We also realized the risk involved in showing this clip to teach novices about systems and routines. If you have spent much time with kindergarten-aged children, you will be stunned by the apparent magic Ms. Noel has worked in teaching them the systems and routines of her classroom. This video succeeds at modeling what we want the end result to look like, but it doesn’t show how to get there—an equally important piece to model. We have some amazing teachers in our schools, and we have been fortunate enough to catch glimpses of their brilliance on video. Sometimes showing our novice teachers these videos has an unintended consequence of overwhelming them and making them feel further away from being great, rather than one step closer. They end up feeling that excellence is really magic rather than something they can achieve. Some of this can be minimized through how you frame the use of models. However, to the extent possible, the models you provide should demonstrate something replicable, or they should give the learner insight into where to start practicing.

One way to solve this is to present a model of major steps along the path to creating the end product. In other words, you can model both process as well as product. For the systems and routines example, we decided to capture video of teachers on the first day of class as they first taught their systems to their students, and then again a month later once the systems were more routinized but still not complete. Another solution is to model something imperfectly, and then model taking and applying feedback to improve. This can relieve the pressure of trying to be close to perfect on beginning practice and can still be controlled by the person modeling, who can choose where to make mistakes. Most learners will miss the mark in small ways as they begin to practice, and their ability to take and apply feedback will dictate whether they practice successfully.

Consider the applications for your area of expertise. If you are successful in sales, it is highly likely that you devote time and energy to building relationships with your clients, with potential clients, and even with unlikely customers. If you model sales meetings with current clients only, your new hires will miss out on all the hard work you put in leading up to that moment. They might watch you make inside jokes or strike a more casual tone with a particular client—you know the client so well and that the person doesn’t require or respond to formality. If a new hire tried to apply that tone with a client without taking all the steps you had taken to build that relationship, chances are it would completely backfire, offend the client, and make the new guy look unprofessional.

When you become great at your job, you often make it look easy. While being a great achievement that supports you in doing the work for a long time, it can cause new hires to panic or doubt their ability because they can’t just replicate what they see. Avoid this potential pitfall of modeling by carefully considering what steps you needed to take to build top performance in yourself, and then model that path for others.

Model the Path

• Model the process as well as the product to ensure that people have a clear picture of how to get to the end goal.

RULE 22 GET READY FOR YOUR CLOSE-UP

Modeling live, during practice, can be great. It allows for flexibility and spontaneity. But it can be disastrous as well. Humidity can make an instrument fall out of tune; rain can make the ball extra slippery; and the team you model with can throw curve balls you never predicted. When you want to control the message, the best way to provide strong models is by using video to demonstrate champion practitioners at work.

You can select and cut video to show exactly what you want and no more, culling out any footage that may dilute the power of the precise technique you are trying to highlight. Also, you can re-watch a model on a video as many times as you need to in order to break down, slow down, or repeat a technique to better learn it. You can focus practice on different pieces of the model in stages: what was said, how it was said, and what was communicated nonverbally. Rather than sending someone to watch another colleague model a skill or technique and hoping that the model goes according to your vision, you can have the learner watch a video which you know will show your precise model, and then ask him to report back to you. If he misses the point, you can together review the video to correct his observation or modify your own.

People use video in various ways to model as a launching pad to practice. We have compiled hours and hours of powerful models by filming our best teachers and then cutting up the video into 30-second segments showing techniques modeled particularly well. We have devoted a lot of time to this endeavor because it was worth it to us. The result of our use of video for modeling has meant the rapid spread of the best techniques to our team of highly competent teachers in our schools across three states. This has yielded more and more high-quality models, which we have again captured on video as the teachers have applied what they saw modeled in the first round and made even better. It also means we can now share models more easily: rather than traveling to a classroom in Boston or Rochester, we can watch videos posted on various sharing sites on the internet and have nearly immediate access to high-quality models for use in teaching the techniques to more teachers.

Every video need not be a masterpiece of editing to be helpful. If you don’t have the time or expertise to work for quality, you can focus your efforts on quantity instead. This can mean that you have a camera at the ready to capture great models as they occur, can easily capture them on your computer, and then quickly turn them around to share with other staff—in a weekly staff meeting (“Look what Denise did this week; this is what we hope all our client meetings look like”) or in e-mail (“Check out the first 20 seconds of this video; Denise implements the skill we learned last week. Send me your analysis of what works here by the end of the day on Friday. Nice work, Denise!”).

Just by using modeling frequently to shape the learning of others, you will prompt more frequent and more precise conversations about what the best performances look like. When you take the extra step to capture those moments on video, you are codifying for your organization, across all employees, and for the talent you have yet to hire and develop in your organization.

Get Ready for Your Close-up

• Use video as an easy way for you or others to capture models that you can analyze, use, and reuse.

When effective modeling is an integral part of practice, it multiplies the effect of practice. We have seen teachers improve more and faster when the skills that can make them great are frequently modeled for them. For James, our novice baker, modeling is essential for every moment where technique is involved. Basing his practice on what has been modeled makes the difference between failure and success (brick or bread).

In the next chapter, we will add another essential component to practice that could help James even more: feedback. This would take James from watching a baking show to attending baking class, where the teacher models and then watches as James immediately applies the model, and then gives him feedback and has him do it again if needed. In the class, James has the recipe and the modeling and the chance to immediately apply the model in practice, with corrective feedback. The use of modeling in this combination can lead to rapid success and encourage the learner to continue to practice and, with all of these tools, develop.