The other day I mentioned that my golf swing was not very good. One of my students reminded me that it was not good yet. Thanks to this reminder of Carol Dweck, I went to the driving range with a growth mindset.
While I was on the range warming up I noticed that I was hitting the ball better than usual. I was warming up with my eight iron which is my favorite club to hit. It occurred to me that I needed some deliberate practice, which is to work at a specific skill, that needs improvement. After, thanking Anders Erickson for this concept, I took my driver out of my bag.
Here is where the frustration came into play. I was hitting my drivers 20 yards longer than my eight iron. For those of you who do not golf your driver should go about 80 yards longer than your eight iron. Every once in a while I would take out my eight iron to see how my swing was with that club. Each time my eight iron shot went about the same distance with good accuracy. As I continued to hit my driver my frustration grew but I remembered GRIT. So I continued.
As luck would have it, a person walked by me, and gave me some feedback on my swing. Once I put this feedback into play I noticed that my driver was now going 80 yards longer than my eight iron which also improved with this tip. Practice is great but one of the most important parts of deliberate practice is feedback. Too often we continue to practice the wrong way which only brings about bad habits.
Now that I felt confident in my swing with the driver I started changing clubs every swing. This change in swings is called interleaving. When I wore a younger man's clothes, a golfer or anyone would just practice the same thing over and over again until they perfected it. While this is good for short term results it is not good for the long term. Now research has shown that when you switch tasks you need to think about the change, which forces your brain to work harder and therefore your remember it better in the future.
Think about math for an example, how many times do you do problems that all have the same skill to which point you are not even thinking about how to solve the problem. Interleaving forces you to switch for example from adding to subtraction to multiplying to division. When you change the skills it that forces your brain to think about each action which allows you to remember it better in the long run.
When I was done with this hour and a half golf session I was excited about having another session to reinforce my learning. I will give myself a couple of days (spacing effect) to try to rehearse the same swings that I did on the range.
The last thought I had when driving home was that learning is fun. Did I have some frustration? Yes. Is this part of learning? Absolutely. Is their a time when you are just hitting shots at the range that it becomes boring? Yes. Does practicing have anything to do with real life application? No. I am never going to be a professional golfer.
What is really fun is the act of learning? How does this get lost in the educational process? Love to hear your thoughts?
I think one of the most satisfying things about learning is looking back and seeing just how far you've come. Sometimes I take time to think on things I have struggled with in the past and look at myself now, and I think recognizing one's own improvement is a very good feeling. Perhaps this feeling can be lost or overlooked as you get more competitive and start comparing yourself to others. You may look at others and see how far you have yet to go, but may also miss how far you've come. Also, I feel there is so much content we have to cover that there is little time for review. All of our AP learning is structured around the exams, so often we see little application in our learning other than to do well on some exam given by some non profit company. I really do like when teachers throw in review questions from way before, as it forces me to reflect on past problems I've overcome, while also keeping me on my toes.
ReplyDelete