PREFACE: WHY PRACTICE? WHY NOW?

The three of us are first and foremost teachers. And though this book is for readers in a wide variety of fields, it began some time ago as a book for and about teachers. Still, if you are a parent or a manager or a coach or a mentor or a leader in your organization, you’d have a hard time convincing us you weren’t a teacher anyway, so perhaps the book was always destined to become something broader. But in the end, because we are teachers first and foremost, this book tends to see the world from an educator’s perspective.

So forgive us if we begin by saying something strange about teaching, which is that we are optimistic—humble, but optimistic. We are optimistic not only because we still believe that the greatest, most gratifying work in the world is teaching someone how to factor a quadratic equation, field a ground ball, run a meeting, read a nineteenth-century novel, or examine an elderly patient with insight and compassion. We are also optimistic because we think that the teaching profession is on the brink of greatness. Teachers around the country feel attacked and cornered in a climate marked, they say, by the overlap of political turmoil and austerity budgets. But when those temporary aberrations fade, we will be left with a series of creative tensions that just may reshape the profession, giving it for the first time a clear way to study and learn from itself, and providing it the tools to get better in ways we’d never before considered. This will happen not just through practice but also in the use of data and analytical tools to find out and capitalize on what teachers do best—“Bright Spots,” in the words of Chip and Dan Heath, who wrote the Foreword to this volume and whose work inspires us and so many others.

We are also humble, though, because we have made many mistakes—several of them public and some more embarrassing than others—in learning what we think can be a small part of the equation that reframes teaching. We are humbled because we believe humility—constantly facing the likelihood that our work could and should have been better—to be the way to do our work in this world. We are humbled so much that we almost didn’t dare write this book. And yet we did, because we think it can help, within the teaching profession and well beyond.

This book is about what the three of us—Doug, Erica, and Katie—learned in responding to the struggle for talent in one very important sector of the economy, public education, and in attacking one very critical social problem, the achievement gap between children of privilege and children of poverty. But it’s also about what this experience led us to observe about developing talent in other sectors of our lives and other sectors of society. So while we believe this book has important lessons for the field of education specifically, and while we often write about examples from our work in schools and in training teachers, we believe it is also relevant to a wide range of organizations and people who want to get better, who must get better. We also think this book is applicable beyond education because we have each gone through the process of applying what we’ve learned in the hothouse of our professional lives to the world of our personal lives. Having redesigned the trainings we provide for teachers over and over to wring incremental improvement, we constantly see the issues we faced in that struggle as we try to raise our own children to be caring and positive as people and skilled as mathematicians and musicians and soccer players. We see the issues as we try to develop our own skills at skiing and home repair, at knitting, managing people, and most recently, at writing books. The first step is getting better at getting better.

In these cases we see the role that a humble and overlooked servant could play in spinning straw into gold. That servant is the underestimated concept of practice. Generally seen as mundane and humdrum, poorly used and much maligned, or too familiar to be interesting, practice is often considered unworthy of deep, sustained reflection and precise engineering.

We had each separately been working for years on how to help people get better at teaching: Doug as a teacher and school leader, who later delved into his study of champion teachers that would become the highly successful and instructive text, Teach Like a Champion; Erica as a teacher, grade team chair, and then founding dean of students, who came to the techniques in Teach Like a Champion as a young school leader hungry for a common language to use with developing teachers; and Katie, who came to the team having spent 15 years as a teacher, principal, and consultant to charter schools. She found the collection of techniques in the “Taxonomy” (as it was known before the book’s publication) a revelation: it made outstanding teaching replicable. In the fall of 2008 Erica and Katie joined Doug’s team to develop ways to train other school leaders in these techniques. The techniques in Teach Like a Champion were aimed at transforming the lives of all teachers and students, whether they were in district schools, private schools, or charter schools. But what was surprising was how many people—coaches, parents, tutors, medical faculty, and professors of higher education—saw other applications. So when we looked closer at practice, we looked for broader applications and drew from fields that were much more developed on the topic of practice than teaching.

Along the way, at the recommendation of our colleague Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, we read Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code about various hotbeds of talent throughout the world that have shown us the key elements that lead to talent development. We took away many useful lessons from this book, not the least of which was the central role of practice in the development of talent. We read Gladwell, Gawande, Dweck, and Willingham, trying to better understand how we could take the techniques of champion teachers and develop them in others. We were completely convinced by, and perhaps obsessed with, practice, but we lacked a practice manual. So we revised our practice activities, going on instinct and searching for what worked. Our conversations always came back to practice: What does effective practice look like? What separates true practice from repetition or performance? And what were the key design principles to ensure that practice truly made performance better? And so we arrived at the work before you: a collection of 42 rules to shape and improve how you use practice to get better.

We begin these rules by asking you to rethink your preconceived notions about practice. We address this first because these notions lay the foundation for practice. In the next three chapters we present practical rules for how to set up practice and use the power of modeling and feedback. In the fifth and sixth chapters we look at how to build and maintain a team that embraces practice and leverages its power. Success—for individuals, for organizations, for communities, even for nations—is the struggle for talent. More specifically, it is the struggle to attract talent and the struggle to develop talent, to make people better. Though this has perhaps always been true, the lines of this struggle have never been as starkly drawn as they are today, when local competition is global, when talent is more urgently required throughout every seat in an organization, and where specialization yields higher standards for individual effectiveness. The rules in this book will assist you in developing talent in a highly competitive world, and help you get better at getting better—one practice at a time.