Teachers and parents at Summers-Knoll School are meeting for their 2nd quarter parent-teacher conferences this week. With quarterly assessments and conferences, teachers and parents regularly communicate about each child’s academic progress and social-emotional development. In my blog on October 12th (scroll down), I discussed the purposes of various types of assessments, and it’s worth revisiting and reminding ourselves: teachers are constantly assessing students, and they rely upon these assessments and conferences to inform their instruction.

An assessment is just a snapshot of what a learner can do at a particular point in time. Some skills are fixed constructs (e.g., learning the alphabet, memorizing multiplication facts); once you have learned it, you know it. Other skills are growth constructs (e.g., reading comprehension, learning a new language) – you can always get better at growth constructs over time because their difficulty varies depending on content and context. Overall growth and development are not a fixed constructs; they are dynamic.

Therefore, when parents, caregivers and teachers are in communication, they can all work on providing opportunities that are enriching and supportive of the child’s ongoing, holistic development. Identifying areas for growth enable targeted instruction, and targeted instruction inevitably involves regular practice – perhaps even regular deliberate practice.

What is deliberate practice?

Think of something you know how to do well (e.g., baking bread, performing a surgical procedure, playing a musical instrument, skateboarding). How did you learn how to do it?

I’ve asked many groups of learners this question and the answers are always similar:

I observed someone else who was really good at it. A teacher (or coach) walked me through it step by step and gave me feedback as I worked on it over time. I have had mastery experiences (e.g., “I won an award for the best sourdough loaf at the county fair.”) I practiced a lot…

…but people who develop expertise in something don’t just practice for the sake of mere repetition. They engage in deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is both improving the skills you already have and consciously choosing to work on skills that you have not mastered, working on things you are not yet good at, and doing so with focus over a sustained period of time. “Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become” (Ericsson, Prietula, & Cokely, 2007). Developing expertise takes years, 10 years (or 10,000 hours) of intense training (Ericsson et al., 2007).

So, join me in a thought experiment: Imagine a child begins playing piano at age 5, and they practice for 30 minutes a day every day. How long will it take them for them to become an expert piano player? In one year, they will practice piano for a total of about 182 hours. At that rate, it will take them about 55 years to become an expert piano player and that would depend upon the quality of their practice, on whether or not it was deliberate. Granted, if they decided to pursue music professionally, they would practice much more than 30 minutes a day, and as such, they would most likely develop expertise much sooner.

The purpose of this thought experiment is to highlight the time it takes to become an “expert.” But maybe becoming an expert in some area isn’t even a reasonable goal. Let’s say becoming an expert is not the goal, but instead, becoming good at something is the goal. Maybe we don’t need 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, but it’s safe to say that we will need time.

Children need to time for their minds and bodies to develop, to build stamina, to go through the process of learning and continually expanding what they’re capable of along the way. They need meaningful, timely feedback as well as mastery experiences and opportunities to fail. They need adults to believe in them and encourage them to take risks. Assessments and parent-teacher conferences infuse specificity into the conversation about each child, and with this specificity, caregivers and teachers can keep nurturing each child’s growth.