As much as I want to believe in the value of practice, I’ve learned that it’s more complicated than I thought it was when I routinely gave out assignments to my students or asked about it as a parent.

In school we are always telling kids to practice. Practice hard. Practice makes perfect. And on and on. We advise parents over and over: “Your children will do better if only they practice.”

It’s not just in school where practice is praised. I do it well outside the school walls. When my daughter told me recently how shy her three-year-old son is with people he doesn’t already know, my standard answer jumped out: “Well, he needs more practice.”

And it’s not a bad answer. It’s often the right answer—but not all the time. It got me thinking. My grandson might reach out to meet new people and encounter hostile responses. He might encounter rebuffs. He might learn the wrong lesson: that being friendly is not the way to go.

Positive Practice
For my grandson, the practice that will make the positive difference for him is when he practices with people who give him positive feedback—so that he grows more confident. And when rejection does happen, such as “I don’t want to play with you,” he has someone nearby who can help him overcome this hurt.

In short, I still believe in practice but have come to realize that its success depends on two variables that may be taken too much for granted: first, constructive feedback about the trial and error of our practice attempts and second, coaching and mentoring from those who care about our success.

In the area of schooling and testing, these two critical determiners of achievement are almost uniformly ignored. We tell kids to practice, but many don’t know how to practice well.

What does good practice look like? The true example that follows is not for the squeamish—but it shows that practice works best when there’s a coach, and when it matters. It comes from an account in a New Yorker magazine by a surgeon in training, describing how he learned to put in the central line that is plunged into the chest to put medicine directly into the heart.

He learned through trial and error—lots of error. He would plunge in this big needle. It would have to go in a certain way and often it didn’t. And the patient on the table felt another plunge. How did the doctor learn to do it the right way?

He learned from a colleague, a mentor, who stood nearby and said now move to the left, now go the right, go deeper, keep going. It got to the point where the young surgeon thought he would never get it right but he was sent in to practice—over and over. He explains in these words: “I have now put in more than a hundred central lines. I am by no means infallible. Certainly, I have had my fair share of complications.”

“But other times everything unfolds effortlessly. You take the needle. You stick the chest. You feel the needle travel—a distinct glide through the fat, a slight catch in the dense muscle, then the subtle pop through the vein wall—and you’re in. At such moments, it is more than easy, it is beautiful.”

The Role of the Coach
How can we can help parents create an environment which makes it possible for children to believe that practice is worth it and that success may be down the road, if not around the corner?

In sports, without a coach we might be throwing the ball wrong from the start and keep on doing it wrong and never get better. In music, we might be holding the violin the wrong way and never elicit its beautiful sounds no matter how long we practice.

This holds true for schoolwork. It’s not enough to tell kids to go home and practice. They have to know how to practice well and receive the kind of homework that helps them move forward. They need encouragement from coaches—teachers in school and parents at home—who provide the environment where trial and error is encouraged, where mistakes are not total failures, where rejections are not fatal, where progress is achievable for lots of kids in lots of ways.

Today, as in past years, homework is important. There is no way that a school (even a good school) by itself can make sure that children learn all they have to learn. But piles of homework in themselves offer no guarantee that children are learning the lessons necessary for success. Skills needed for later life include problem solving and critical thinking, organization, self-discipline, personal motivation. These are the higher order skills—I call them “MegaSkills.”

The best homework assignments are those that can be done only at home—for example, reading aloud with family members and reporting back at school on what everyone liked best and why. Or a writing assignment that calls for interviewing relatives and neighbors about important people in their lives. Or a science assignment that calls for experiments in the kitchen or the bathtub. These assignments take advantages of the rich resources of home, and encourage adults to be involved and supportive.

A lot of the practice kids are called on to do these days is intended to improve their performance on achievement tests. We worry a lot about fine tuning the tests that children take. How about attention to the fine-tuning students need? They need to be optimistic. They need to see an encouraging vision before them. They need to feel “I can do it and I know how to do it.”

Who’s doing this for our students? We know how to find the Olympics coaches for our athletes. Where are those coaches for our students?

We need to stock our schools with learning coaches for students and for their parents. These are a new kind of tutor, specialists who connect school and home and community. These can be teachers—but they need new skills to do this work of coaching. We need to train them, pay them, and give them time to do their work. When we do that, we’re paying attention not just to the test questions, but to the children themselves and to their spirit, their heart, and their vision.

Resources:

• Connect for Kids offers resources on parental involvement in education.

Talk Back

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Dr. Dorothy Rich is the developer of MegaSkills Teacher Training Programs and author of MegaSkills: Building Children’s Achievement for the Information Age. She can be reached at www.MegaSkillsHSI.org.