INTRODUCTION

THE POWER OF PRACTICE

Everybody has the will to win; few people have the will to prepare to win.

—BOBBY KNIGHT

It’s a funny thing. The more I practice the luckier I get.

—ARNOLD PALMER

John Wooden is a legend. The coach of UCLA’s basketball team for 27 years, he was anointed “Greatest Coach of the 20th Century” by ESPN and the greatest coach ever—in any sport—by the Sporting News. Wooden led his teams to ten national championships in 12 years, won 88 consecutive games, and achieved the highest winning percentage (.813) of any coach in NCAA basketball history—all while building an enduring reputation for developing the character of his players at least as much as their skill. It’s not surprising that in the decades since Wooden retired, his influence has spread far beyond the basketball court. Books by and about Wooden apply his insights to life, learning, and business as much as to basketball.

Regardless of any interest in sports, people study Wooden’s methods for the alchemy that turns struggle into triumph. And yet the great majority of students of his work fail to replicate Wooden-like results. Why? Our answer, based on what we—Doug, Erica, and Katie—discovered in our efforts to help promising teachers become great teachers, is that most people fail to realize the power of the one thing that is arguably the secret of Wooden’s success: old-fashioned practice, efficiently run, well-planned, and intentionally executed.

If you were to ask Wooden what made his teams so successful, he would likely describe a series of unacknowledged moments in otherwise empty gymnasiums: his players practicing shooting without a basketball, say. Or perhaps he’d describe his evenings in his office scripting the next day’s practice, noting where the racks of basketballs should be placed so time was never wasted looking for a ball. John Wooden doted on practice to a degree that was legendary. He began—surely to much eye rolling—by practicing things that every other coach would have considered unworthy, if they’d have considered them at all: how to put on socks and sneakers, for example.1 He timed his practices to the minute, husbanding every second to ensure its precise and careful allocation. He kept a record of every practice on note cards, which he filed away for future reference: what worked; what didn’t; how to do it better next time. Unlike many coaches, he focused not on scrimmaging—playing in a way that replicated the game—but on drilling, that is playing in ways that intentionally distorted the game to emphasize and isolate specific concepts and skills. He followed a logical progression, often starting his instruction on topics like shooting by having players work without the ball and building to increasingly challenging applications. He repeated drills until his players achieved mastery and then automaticity, even if it meant not drilling on more sophisticated topics. At the point where other coaches might decide their teams had learned a skill, Wooden’s teams were just beginning their work. And he always insisted that his players practiced doing it—whatever “it” was—right.

Though we remember him for the championships, what ultimately made Wooden great was practice. Every iteration of teaching and explaining and executing again and again was a tiny bit better than anyone else’s. The culture in which those drills took place—what players were thinking as they stood in lines—was a little bit more humble, selfless, relentless. The compounded effect of these tiny differences was a dynasty.

Author and sportswriter Daniel Coyle’s book The Talent Code is just one of several recent efforts to understand the tradition of intentional practice that Wooden helped establish. In the book, Coyle describes how the compounded effect of better practice accounts for the rise of seemingly inexplicable “hot spots” of talent around the globe. What seems like talent, it turns out, is often better practice habits in disguise. How could it be, for example, that a single tennis club in a freezing climate—a club Coyle describes as “rundown” and with just one indoor court—has, since its founding, produced more top-20 women players than all of the tennis clubs in the United States put together?

The answer is Larisa Preobrazhenskaya, the gray-haired, track-suit-wearing majordomo whose players follow the adage that practice makes permanent—that if practice drives actions into muscle memory, it’s better to do it slow and right than fast and not quite right. Like John Wooden, she practices fewer things better, and with diligence. She is unapologetic about asking her athletes to imitate others, an approach that many coaches too often dismiss as demeaning. Via these simple obsessions, Coyle tells us, Preobrazhenskaya has almost single-handedly changed Russia’s perception of itself. The initial success of her players caused an explosion of interest in tennis in Russia that fed the practice mill with aspiring players and produced success on such a massive scale that it appeared to be a statistical impossibility. Today Russia sees itself as a tennis nation made of players who believe they can do just about anything.

Again and again Coyle shows that the aggregation of seemingly trivial improvements in practice can create otherwise inexplicable densities of talent sufficient to change a society and its conception of what is possible. Brazil’s passion for soccer makes it an international power, but its passion for futsal, a soccer derivative featuring small-sided games in an enclosed space using a less elastic ball, yields as many as six times the touches per hour for a developing Brazilian player, Coyle points out, than for a similar player in some other nation. The game’s space limitations reward skills learned to speedy automaticity. “Commentators love to talk about how ‘creative’ Brazilian players are—but that’s not quite right. The truth is, they’ve been practicing that creativity for their entire lives,” writes Coyle. The humble details of their practice separate Brazil from every other soccer-obsessed nation on Earth.

For its part, the United States remains a competition-loving culture. We love the heroic upset, the last hurrah of the aging veteran, the final ticking seconds as the game comes down to the wire. We watch games and follow teams and players, sometimes to the point of obsession (especially if our kids are playing), but if we really wanted to see greatness—to cheer for it and understand what made it happen—we’d spend our time watching practices instead. We would pay a lot more attention to how drills were designed, to a culture of humility and perseverance among the players, to whether there was enough practice, or indeed—as we will soon discover—whether there was any practicing at all.

Imagine for a moment what it would be like if we could manufacture “hot spots” like the one Coyle describes among Russian tennis players. Imagine if we could cause a spike in performance sufficient to change a society’s perception of what it is possible to achieve by and for its people. Imagine if we could apply it not just to our own soccer and tennis programs but also to things far more important than sports: to running better hospitals and schools, to a thousand endeavors across the economy where entrepreneurs and managers create value for the people who rely on and benefit from their products and services.

This book is not really about sports, then, though we are confident that you will be able to apply its conclusions in that setting if you are all about basketball or soccer or skiing. Our purpose in writing this book is to engage the dream of “better,” both in fields where participants know they should practice, but could do it more effectively, and also in endeavors where most people do not yet recognize the transformative power of practice. Deliberately engineered and designed, practice can revolutionize our most important endeavors; in that, we speak from at least a bit of experience.

Our own journey to understanding the power of practice began with an ad hoc study of great teachers in our nation’s high-poverty public schools: work outlined in Doug’s book Teach Like a Champion. This study revealed that positive outliers—teachers who were anomalously and sometimes breathtakingly successful in the face of adversity—were a lot like John Wooden. They were the most likely to focus on small and seemingly mundane aspects of their daily work.

Great teachers obsessed on things like how efficiently they used time in the classroom. They fought a running battle for seconds and minutes by paying careful attention to how (and how quickly) their students lined up or passed out papers. They perseverated on the words they used to explain a concept. This struck us as ironic. The teachers whose students had best mastered the higher order, the abstract, and the rigorous—a deep reading of symbolism in Lord of the Flies, or reliably solving equations with two unknowns—were those teachers most likely to obsess on things that others thought unworthy of attention. There was more to it than that, obviously. Great teachers did more than obsess on the efficiency of their classroom—their questions were artful; their assignments, demanding—but there was a clear tendency among positive outliers to see the power of the humdrum, the everyday. Think here of John Wooden on the first day of practice, teaching his players to put their socks on correctly. So many of the great teachers, we realized, also had a socks-first mentality. We glimpsed their excellence and wanted to help everyone get a piece of it. So we set out to show teachers in our schools how to get better by studying the ways great teachers taught. In the process, we learned a lot about practice, what makes it work and what makes it not work very well. One of the first things we noticed was something we now call the “get it/do it gap.”

During our first workshops we would show teachers one short video clip after another of superstar colleagues demonstrating a particular technique. We would analyze and discuss, and then, once our audience understood the technique in all of its nuance and variation, we went on to the next technique. Evaluations were outstanding. Participants told us they had learned useful and valuable methods to apply. But then we noticed something alarming. If we surveyed the same participants three months later, they were not quite as upbeat. They still knew what they wanted their classes to be like, but they were unable to reliably do what it took to get there. When they tried to fix one thing, something else went wrong. It was difficult to concentrate on a technique with so much else going on. Just knowing what they should be doing was not enough to make them successful.

We realized that our workshop participants, on returning to their classrooms, were trying to do the equivalent of walking onto center court at Wimbledon and learning a new style of backhand in the midst of a match. Of course they weren’t winning. Tennis players know that refining your backhand means hitting hundreds or thousands of strokes before a match begins. They know that there is no way to make the thing you need in order to get better—hundreds of balls hit to your backhand at just the right height with an increasing level of difficulty—happen predictably in a match. In the match there is no way to ensure that when opportunities to apply the skill come you will have enough brain power available to think about it. Instead, you might find yourself scrambling left to right across the baseline and trying to read your opponent’s reaction—the backhand itself practically an afterthought.

We realized we would have to do two things. First we would have to approach teaching like tennis. We would have to practice, right then and there in the workshops, even if it meant cutting the number of techniques we taught. Like Wooden, we’d have to do fewer things better. And we would have to shift from training teachers directly to training their coaches: principals and mentor teachers who had the power to build and orchestrate practice on a regular basis. We had to make the design of our practice an explicit part of our training. So our workshops went from being about what the techniques were to how to practice them. A single workshop, we realized, wouldn’t really make people better unless it caused them to practice key skills multiple times—or to learn to practice and be able to begin a yearlong cycle of practice.

It’s worth pausing for a moment here to reflect on just how strange it was to build workshops for teachers around the idea of practicing. Even though teachers, like other professionals such as doctors or lawyers, are required to continually engage in professional development, they do not engage in what people in other performance professions might call “active practice.” By “performance profession” we mean any work, like sports or music or surgery, that happens in real time. If a teacher’s performance during a given class is less than what she wanted, she cannot get it back. She cannot, as say a lawyer working on a contract might do, stop in the middle of her work and call someone to ask for advice. She can’t give it her best shot and then, as we are doing as we write, go back and tinker and revise and have the luxury of being held accountable for a final product that reflects actions taken and reconsidered over an extended period. Teachers “go live” four or five times a day. And yet unlike other performance professionals, they don’t call what they do to prepare “practice”; they call it “professional development.” If we asked a roomful of teachers how often they practiced for what they did in their “game”—how often they rehearsed the questions they ask students, or the way they start class—most would look at us funny. Teachers listen, reflect, discuss, and debate, but they do not practice.

What is the effect of all this listening, reflecting, and debating? Our education system makes huge investments in helping teachers improve their knowledge and skills. A recent policy brief by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education estimated that between 3 and 6 percent of total school spending was allocated to professional development, for example.2 Assuming the annual budget figure for public elementary and secondary schools alone is $500 billion per year, this comes out to $20–$30 billion every year. It is an investment that yields questionable results. “Teachers typically spend a few hours listening and, at best, leave with some practical tips or some useful materials. There is seldom any follow-up to the experience and subsequent in-services may address entirely different sets of topics,” notes the policy brief. “On the whole, most researchers agree that local professional development programs typically have weak effects on practice because they lack focus, intensity, follow-up, and continuity.” In other words, what we do to train teachers fails to make them better teachers.

Then as now, this fact was a cause for intense reflection for us. The organization where we work, a nonprofit called Uncommon Schools, runs inner-city public schools that have closed the achievement gap for poor and minority students, preparing them for college at a rate far in excess of what’s previously been accomplished. While we set out to help run a system of schools that would set the standard for high performance, particularly with kids who were otherwise cut off from opportunity, we were keenly aware of the words of former British prime minister Tony Blair’s chief education adviser, Sir Michael Barber, and his colleagues in their report for McKinsey on the world’s best school systems: “The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.” While the endeavor to make schools better remains something of a national drama, it has resulted in invective, blame, and tension but little evidence of large-scale improvement. If we can’t make our schools better, it must be somebody’s fault: teachers, parents, some group of politicians or intriguers, perhaps even the students themselves.

Our nation’s schools, having more than doubled their annual per pupil expenditures since 1970, have achieved precious little improvement against previous performances—a reduction in outcomes, in fact, if you ask the makers of the SAT. We Americans confront results that place us far below nations with the best school systems, and we wring our hands; but we can’t seem to do much about it. Teachers, in your three authors’ experience, are for the most part eager to learn and develop throughout their careers, but the plain fact is that we don’t help them to do so. The cost, in lost opportunity, is immense.

In this sense, our work as educators is perhaps not that different from yours: you seek to execute a plan that can transform some aspect of daily life and bring immense value to you, your family, your community, and society. You seek to make a positive outlier out of your local youth soccer program, or the quality of care in your city hospital, or the way your managers develop people. If you seek to do something great, you most likely live a battle for talent—for smart and capable people who can do great things at scale.

In education, as in so many fields, the long-run battle for talent is more about growing it than attracting it. The broader struggle to change educational outcomes isn’t, for the three of us, about whether we can get a limited number of game-changing teachers to teach 30 kids in our organization rather than some other organization, but about whether we can help more and more teachers perform like their game-changing peers—and reach thousands more kids. Winning is less about attracting the best parts of the talent pie than about growing the pie. The degree to which we can improve people at every skill level quickly and reliably is the measure of our success at closing the achievement gap or any of a thousand other worthy objectives.

Over time, we have been able to engineer and reengineer our training activities to improve the quality of practice within them. We are lucky in this regard in that we run workshops where we invite the best school leaders and teachers from top-performing schools to join us. These workshops are a hot house for improving the quality of our own coaching and training. The game plan is to stand up in front of a room full of a hundred or so top teachers and try to teach them about teaching. Imagine being hired to play pickup basketball in front of the LA Lakers to show them a few things that might take their game up a few notches. It had the tendency to focus our minds on every action and decision and whether it really worked. Between the mission and the setting we felt the pressure to make every minute outstanding.

Our workshops and our schools were full of people who wanted to be better teachers and were willing to work for that. We had things to teach them that could make them better. But too often we failed to do so. Here’s an example: one technique that differentiated great teachers from the merely good was the way they used nonverbal interventions to correct behavior during their teaching. The idea was that using words to correct students who were in danger of becoming off task required teachers to interrupt the thread of instruction in their classroom. A teacher stopped to correct one student, and two others became distracted—a death spiral. Champion teachers solved this dilemma by using nonverbal correction. Colleen Driggs, a legendary teacher at our school in Rochester, New York, taught her students nonverbal signals to correct the three or four behaviors most likely to occur when their attention was slipping. When Colleen pointed to her eyes, it meant that students should “track the speaker”—look at the student who was talking so they would stay engaged in the conversation. When Colleen clasped her hands in front of her, it was a reminder to sit up straight. If Colleen made a brief hands-down gesture, it was a reminder for students to put their hands down while another student was talking, the idea being that if your hand remains up you are thinking about what you want to say and not really listening to your peer.

Teachers loved the video of Colleen teaching and correcting nonverbally. It seemed brilliant and obvious at the same time, and teachers were excited to try it themselves. Back at our offices we set up a sort of teaching lab to try out different practice activities. Several of us played students. We misbehaved. And while we did so, we sent a brave teacher I’ll call “Jen” to the front of the room to try to teach a lesson. She did some good work, but we learned that practicing successfully was much harder than it looked. It was hard to remember to make nonverbal interventions in the moment. Jen went back to old habits under duress. Plus, we hadn’t let her think through in advance how she’d handle the behaviors. Trying to decide what to do in the moment distracted her and caused her to make other mistakes. Our misbehaviors were either too frequent or too soon so that Jen never really got to the heart of her lesson. We were having such a great time channeling misbehaving students that when corrected we’d keep ratcheting things up so that there was always another thing for Jen to try to fix. She’d struggle through an interaction, think of a better response, and repeat the role play, but this time we’d model different behaviors. She never got to practice her fix. Control was always just beyond her grasp.

In the debrief Katie nailed the issue. “What Jen just did was practice failing,” she said. “She practiced but she didn’t really glimpse what success feels like. She’s just ingrained failure even more deeply.” We quickly realized one of our first rules of practice—one of the most violated yet important—which we’ll discuss in the first chapter: practice should involve people practicing success, even if it means, as it did in this case, simplifying the activity. We began simplifying by making the off-task behavior predictable. Only two people were allowed to be off task. And we told Jen who they were. Now she could allocate her energy to making effective corrections. Then we realized that we needed to let Jen plan not just any response but the right response. After all, Colleen had done that in her video: she had identified the three most common behaviors beforehand and planned a gesture to correct each. So we added a preliminary activity in which the teacher got a list of typical off-task behaviors (for example, a student staring out the window; a student with her head down on the desk). Jen first had to plan what gesture she’d use to correct the student. Then she practiced making the gesture a few times. Next, she faced the class, but with the students doing the exact behaviors she’d just prepared for in a predictable order. She practiced using what she’d learned, and we made the practice more “realistic” (complex and difficult) only when she was ready for more. Eventually we added other pieces: a coach to give feedback; the requirement that Jen practice using the feedback right away by redoing the activity. We also added variables we could adapt if teachers found this activity too hard or if they were successful right away.

As we began to use this activity in workshops, we could instantly see the difference: not only in people’s reactions to the workshops but in their classrooms. Teachers not only successfully implemented the techniques (we could see it clearly when we videotaped them), but they began to adapt the techniques in new and even more effective ways, which we in turn learned from and added to the trainings we offered.

Over the course of that first afternoon, the next months, and finally over several years, we honed our practice activities into tools that could help make teachers better, at scale. Somewhat unexpectedly, this made teachers happy. At first they were a bit skeptical about practicing—some of them were a lot skeptical. After all, it’s awkward and makes you a bit self-conscious at first. But after a few rounds teachers could see themselves improving, both in the practice and in their classroom afterwards, and this had a powerful psychological effect. They realized that the things that happened in their classroom were within their control, that they owned what happened. Success had taught them that they could fix things, step by step. And they wanted more. Further, they enjoyed getting to work with peers in a collegial setting. Practicing together made teaching a team sport.

In the end, success and camaraderie overwhelmed any initial reluctance and embarrassment. Most teachers came to like practice and in many cases started to invent their own ways to practice. Two of our best reading teachers, Maggie Johnson and Nikki Frame, decided to get together for ten minutes a day to practice how to handle one of teaching’s great problems: what to say when a student gives you an unexpected wrong answer to your question during class discussion. The solution was simple: Maggie would read questions from her lesson plan to Nikki. Nikki would give her best estimation of a wrong student answer, and Maggie would have to respond on the spot. Then they’d switch roles. At first it was hard, but they laughed and brainstormed better responses and then took it again from the top. Ten minutes a day for three, four, five weeks: at this point the difference was overwhelmingly obvious. They not only had become good at handling unexpected responses in their classes; they were confident and poised both before and after. They could relax and concentrate on the nuances of student answers and the subtleties of the text. Practice at one skill—handling the unexpected answer—had helped them to make room for improvements on a more advanced skill.

Over the years we have distilled what we’ve learned from dozens of situations like these—often by error, occasionally by success, almost always with the wisdom and acuity of the wise and insightful teachers in our schools and our workshops—into a set of rules, which we share in this book.

While Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code shows how practice has the power to transform individual performance and that individual performance in turn has the power to transform institutions, another recent book reveals how the power to transform can be applied to seemingly intractable or hopelessly complex social problems. In Switch, Dan and Chip Heath, a team of two brothers, one a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford, the other a senior fellow studying entrepreneurship at Duke, set out to reveal how, over and again, massive complex problems don’t always require massive complex solutions. In fact identifying simple, repeatable actions that can be quickly mastered (like getting mothers to buy skim milk instead of whole) can turn the tide on seemingly resistant social phenomena (the rise of obesity). And this creates an opportunity. Many of these simple behaviors are a matter of habit. You pick up the milk you choose because it’s the milk you choose. A tiny bit of practice choosing different milk leads to a massive and lasting change.

Perhaps the most compelling story in the book is of an effort to eliminate chronic malnutrition among the poorest people in Vietnam. The effort began by studying what the Heath brothers call “bright spots”: the things that despite all the barriers and problems still work. They note that while many poor children grow up malnourished, many do not; so volunteers were sent to study what poor families with healthy children fed them. Turns out they ate tiny shrimp and wild field greens their mothers gathered, even though others scorned the food or walked by without knowing its value. At first other families were reluctant to follow their lead—they didn’t know where to find the ingredients; they had never cooked with them before. Their habits were a barrier. But when case workers caused families to practice cooking with those ingredients, not just once but until they were familiar with it, the results were astounding. A simple change had been enough to tip the nutritional balance in the favor of thousands of families. Practiced intentionally, very simple actions could solve a massive problem and unleash a wholly unexpected power to achieve great things.

This raises an important question, which we address explicitly: Whom is practice for? Our initial response is, simply, everyone. Everyone should practice. And it is worth looking at this notion “everyone” a lot more closely. We often start workshops with a photo of Lionel Messi—by universal acclaim the best soccer player in the world—engaged in a drill during practice.

It should be obvious that a professional soccer player practices. But in most professions outside the hypercompetitive world of professional sports and perhaps a few others—music comes to mind—we assume that practice is something that stops when you get good. Practice implies a judgment. It assumes a lack of competence. But of course this isn’t true. Lionel Messi, whose work ethic is remarked on constantly, assumes that practice is a driver of his success and a key ingredient in continuing it. But there’s more to the picture than the not-surprising surprise that the best still practice. It’s what Messi is practicing that matters too. Perhaps we assume that for Messi practice means playing games of soccer over and over—scrimmaging, in short—so that he applies his prodigious skill to anticipate the game in all of its complexity; yet, in this photo, it is a drill he is working on, one that isolates some small aspect of his game so he can intentionally improve it. The difference between drill and scrimmage is important; it’s one of the rules we discuss in the first chapter. A scrimmage replicates the game, and a drill distorts it for a purpose. Most people assume that the higher you go on the competency scale, the less drilling you need to do and the more scrimmaging. In fact, we argue, the opposite is true.

Consider the experience of surgeon and author Atul Gawande, who recently undertook a personal project, which he documents in a recent New Yorker article, to see how much he could improve as a surgeon. “I’ve been a surgeon for eight years,” writes Gawande. “For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. I’d like to think it’s a good thing—I’ve arrived at my professional peak. But mainly it seems as if I’ve just stopped getting better.” His logical response was to hire a coach to observe him and give him feedback. “Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be,” he explains, “but doctors don’t. I’d paid to have a kid just out of college look at my [tennis] serve. So why did I find it inconceivable to pay someone to come into my operating room and coach me on my surgical technique?” But Gawande’s decision meets with a level of skepticism and concern that reveals our collective prejudice that practice is only for the novice or the struggling practitioner. Patients and peers see the coach standing in the back of the operating theater and assume something must be amiss. Otherwise why would he be there?

In fact, using a coach to review and refine his work boosted Gawande’s performance dramatically. Let’s look at one small area that Gawande’s coach, Dr. Osteen, zeroed in on:

Osteen also asked me to pay more attention to my elbows. At various points during the operation, he observed, my right elbow rose to the level of my shoulder, on occasion higher. “You cannot achieve precision with your elbow in the air,” he said. A surgeon’s elbows should be loose and down by his sides. “When you are tempted to raise your elbow, that means you need to either move your feet”—because you’re standing in the wrong position—“or choose a different instrument.”

The advice was helpful, but for Gawande to use it to maximum benefit, he’d have to remember it in the midst of a complex procedure—perhaps breaking the thread of his concentration—and make the change there in the game. His first efforts to work with lowered elbows may well have corresponded to an implementation dip, the idea that as you try to incorporate a new technique your performance goes down slightly until you get good at it. Was it risky to endure that dip during surgery on a real patient?

What if Gawande and his coach had set up a drill where Gawande simulated procedures and executed them with his elbows down? Just an hour or so might have built muscle memory that could have implemented the advice of his coach effectively and at lower risk. Despite Gawande’s fairly exceptional humility and desire to improve, the potential of using practice to maximize his coach’s advice goes unconsidered.

Now consider how many more professions and activities are like teaching or surgery, where practice, with its potential to drive improvement—to create a culture of constant improvement—goes unharnessed. Imagine observing a meeting between a colleague who reports to you—a fellow lawyer perhaps—and a client. As you observe, you (like Gawande’s coach) see some good things and some areas for improvement. What if you were working in an organization that supported coaching, feedback, and practice? What if you could give your colleague feedback after the meeting? Perhaps you’d say, “Try asking more questions. A lot more. That will help you understand the specifics of the case”—she should ask more questions so she understands the specifics of the case, for example. You engage your colleague in a discussion where she might recall the exact moments in which she could have done so. She might remember to do so on her next meeting, which would be an improvement. But she might not. And what if the meeting is critical or urgent, and she can’t risk a mistake? How much better would the outcome be if you first role-played to diagnose her strengths and weaknesses and then had her practice asking more questions, until she was asking not only more but better questions to draw out the best information from the client and make the client feel supported? Finally, if you had conducted the “client meeting” practice session with not only one lawyer but several, they might have learned from each other and developed their skills at the same cost in resources and time as developing one employee. And they probably would have improved more by watching each other, learning from each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

If you were able to do these things and, over time, do them outstandingly well, you would have an efficient way to develop people for the most important tasks across your organization, your team, your school, wherever you want to help yourself and others get better. You would have an advantage that might allow you to achieve—as many of the organizations that have attended our workshops have begun to do—positive, even exceptional results. You might even end up like one of the 32 franchises in the National Football League. In that hypercompetitive sector of the economy, where talent is so valuable that its allocation is regulated by a complex array of protocols—a draft, a salary cap, restricted free-agency, to name a few—coaches watch practice film at least as intently as they do game film. Consider this description from a recent Washington Post article profiling the approach used by Redskins head coach Mike Shanahan, an NFL legend:

By the time [quarterback] Rex Grossman lined up . . . three video cameras manned by three cameramen rose 60 feet in the air on three massive orange lifts. . . . The play . . . appeared on a white sheet of paper with burgundy headings that listed every play to be practiced that day. Anders Beutel, the assistant equipment manager and Grossman’s de facto center in such drills, held a copy of the practice script. High above the field . . . the team’s video director held another copy of the script, because every play of every practice is recorded from multiple angles.

Organizations that operate in the most intense competitive settings have come to realize that practice time is the most valuable time they have, and logically this shows up in how they use video. As video has gotten exponentially easier and cheaper to produce, its use has exploded, but changes in its use are telling. In its first iteration people videotaped games in order to understand performance; in the second generation they film practices instead. The latter, they find, are more important in driving results.

In the following chapters you will find 42 rules for making your own practices the most valuable endeavors they can be. These rules were hard won: they are based not only on our years of working with teachers but on our readings and research, our own experiences and those of our children as they have strived to grow and learn, and on constant discussions about how to help people do things better. We believe in the power of small things, so you will notice that the rules sometimes go into technical detail; but we are convinced that paying attention to such detail will yield the same outstanding results for you that it has for us—perhaps even better.

In the first chapter we’ll look at common assumptions about practice and as a starting point ask you to reconsider them. The second chapter will focus on design principles for running effective practices. The third looks at the role modeling can play in increasing the effectiveness of practice sessions, and the fourth explores the important role of feedback. The fifth chapter considers practice as a social activity and therefore one that both expresses and relies on a culture of openness, transparency, and humility. What comes after practice, and how decisions about hiring, evaluation, and implementation make the work you do more effective, is the focus of the sixth chapter, and in the final chapter we reflect more extensively on the application and importance of practice in achieving better results in professional endeavors.

Notes

1. We’re not making this up. Wooden believed that haphazardly worn socks and poorly tied shoes were an epidemic that led to blisters, which in turn led to players—even players like Alcindor and Walton—missing games. So they started with socks.

2. This number excludes the portion of paid time at work—and therefore teacher salaries—spent in professional development.