2817: [Part 2] On Great Teachers and the Remarkable Life: A Deliberate Practice Case Study by Cal Newport

The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road, that's the Volkswagen Tiguan. It's sleek exterior makes a first impression you can't ignore. Step inside to find available full leather seats and wood accents. Under the hood, the available 201 turbocharged horsepower engine gives it a fun-to-drive This is Optimal Living Daily episode 2817 on Great Teachers in the Remarkable Life, a deliberate practice case study, part 2, by Cal Newport of Cal Newport.com, and I'm Justin Molick, the guy that reads to you every single day of the year.

Now today's episode is part 2 of a longer post, if you didn't catch part 1 yesterday, I'd recommend listening to that first, but if you're all caught up, then let's get right to part 2 and continue optimizing your life. A deliberate practice case study, part 2, by Cal Newport of Cal Newport.com, what makes great teachers great? Strong teachers insist that effective teaching is neither mysterious nor magical, says Ripley. It is neither a function of dynamic personality nor dramatic performance.

Instead, Teach for America has identified the following traits as the most important for high-performing teachers, such as Taylor. Number 1, they set big goals for their students and are perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. In the Atlantic article, Teach for America's In-House Professor, Steve Farr noted that when he sets up visits with superstar teachers, they often say something like, You're welcome to come, but after warn you, I'm in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure because I think it's not working as well as it could. Number 2, they're obsessed about focusing every minute of classroom time towards student learning.

Number 3, they plant exhaustively and purposefully working backwards from the desired outcome. Number 4, they work relentlessly, refusing to surrender, and provide to keep students and their families involved in the process. An expert in the article summarized the findings, quote, At the end of the day, it's the mindset that teachers need, a kind of relentless approach to the problem end, end quote. The first four traits should sound familiar, setting big goals, working backwards from results to process, professionally trying to improve from relentless focus, they sound a lot like the traits of deliberate practice.

Indeed, when selecting teachers for their program, Teach for America's complex recruiting model identifies graduates who show evidence of having mastered this skill. Two effective predictors of a recruit's classroom success, for example, are improving a GPA from low to high and demonstrating meaningful leadership achievement. That is improving a 2.0 to a 4.0 is more important than maintaining a 4.0, and doubling a club's membership is more important than simply being elected president. Teach for America wants signs that you can take a difficult goal and then find a way to make it happen.

A different kind of deliberate practice. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal estimated that it takes around 500,000 hours of deliberate practice for an NFL team to make it through a season. To put that in perspective, it's about 32 hours of hard work for each foot, the ball moves down the field. This effort, of course, is carefully controlled and coached.

For example, the article quotes the Coles defense event, cute to Dawson, talking about the intense training needed to make split-second decisions based on subtle positioning of the head or foot of the opposing lineman. I thought college was grind, but this is a job, said Dawson. When we think about deliberate practice, we tend to think about examples like Dawson, or chess grandmasters, or piano virtuoso's being painstakingly coached through a difficult but well-established path to mastery. The examples of this process playing out in classrooms, however, have a different feel.

William Taylor doesn't have a coach or decades of well-established training methodology to draw on. His approach is more freeform. He started with a clear goal when he presented a concept he wanted every student to understand it, and then became obsessed with his achievement. His mental math exercises, his random selection of students to do problems at the board, the exit slips he collected at the end of the period, these activities evolved from a drive to constantly assess his class' comprehension.

Over time, the extraneous was excised from his classroom schedule. He developed hand signals for the students to use to indicate a need for the bathroom, a way to eliminate the wasted time and distraction of calling on them. He exhaustively plans his lessons, and then ruthlessly coals or modifies any piece that isn't effective. I found that the kids were not hard.

It was explaining the information to them that was hard. Taylor recalls about his first year. He kept working until he cracked that hard puzzle. Free-style deliberate practice.

Here are the main components of Taylor's approach to deliberate practice. 1. Build an obsession with a clear goal. 2.

Work backwards from the goal to plan your attack. 3. Expand hard focus toward this goal every day. 4.

Roostlessly evaluate and modify your approach to remove what doesn't work and improve what does. Let's call this approach freestyle deliberate practice to differentiate it from the more structured strain written about in the research literature. Here's my argument. For most fields, freestyle deliberate practice is the key to building a rare and valuable skill.

Most people fall short of this standard, even those who are highly motivated to get better. From my experience, two obstacles trap people at an acceptable plateau of performance. First, we're uncomfortable blowing up our assumptions and ruthlessly evaluating our approach. It's much easier to choose a plan that feels right and then follow it blindly.

Second, exhaustive focus on a daily basis is hard. It's not necessarily hard to do, we're only talking a couple hours out of the day, but in age of constant electronic distraction, many have lost their ability for hard focus. Freestyle deliberate practice is not a clearly structured system that you can plug into your schedule and follow mechanically toward results. It's demanding and personal, touching upon the deepest levels of your character.

It requires you to get down in the sweaty trenches of effort and attack short-term projects with an almost animalistic passion. You'll cry, good is not good enough. If I can't make this so excellent, you'll weep, then it's not worth even trying. Fortunately, this process also feels great.

Not the weak, squirt of dopamine from an interesting Twitter exchange type of pleasure, but the deep down, inner bones, capital Q, persigasc appreciation of quality experienced by master craftsmen throughout history. I'll end with a simple question. If you're interested in building a remarkable life, be it as a student or industry veteran, what would it mean to integrate freestyle deliberate practice into your life? This is a question I'll certainly be thinking and writing about in a week to follow.

You just listened to part two of the post titled, On Great Teachers and the Remarkable Life, A Deliberate Practice Case Study by Cal Newport of Cal Newport.com. Local news is in decline across Canada, and this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void, and it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. All my CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us, because local news is big news.

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Thank you again to Cal. I think it's true that it's difficult and very uncomfortable to blow up our assumptions and reevaluate our approach to something that we've done for years, or that we think we're already good at. And that's probably holding us back. It reminds me of this book that I bought sometime after college.

It's a math book, not like a textbook, but a sort of math hacks book that shares stuff we likely didn't learn in the classroom that can give us shortcuts and make us better at math, like doing large multiplication problems faster, things like that. But reading it, it was so against everything I learned in my math classes that I would really blow up all my assumptions and habits. It was easier to do what already felt right. It's really hard to dedicate time to learn this new method.

Even if I know that in the end, it would be better. It's a struggle. And the same is true for how I do this podcast. I've recorded thousands of episodes mostly in the same way.

But I feel like I've hit an acceptable plateau, maybe. This article is a good reminder that there's always room for improvement, and I think Cal brought up some solid points. So thank you to Cal. Thank you for being here.

Have a great rest of your day, and I'll see you actually in just a moment because our Sunday bonus episode is live right now. Wear your optimal life. Oh, wait.