understanding, making mistake after mistake in difficult circumstances, correcting mistakes, moving on and making more mistakes—constantly pushing themselves with difficult material.
Coyle starts his book with an interesting story of learning. He describes the case of a thirteen-year-old girl he calls Clarissa, who is learning the clarinet. Clarissa, he says, has no musical “gifts,” lacks a “good ear,” and has only an average sense of rhythm and subpar motivation—yet she became famous in music circles, because she managed to accelerate her learning by ten times, according to the calculations of music psychologists. This amazing learning feat was captured on video and has been studied by music experts. Coyle describes watching the video of Clarissa practicing and suggests that the video be given a title of “The Girl Who Did a Month’s Worth of Practice in Six Minutes.” He describes the practice session this way:
Clarissa draws a breath and plays two notes. Then she stops. She pulls the clarinet from her lips and stares at the paper. Her eyes narrow. She plays seven notes, the song’s opening phrase. She misses the last note and immediately stops, fairly jerking the clarinet from her lips. … She starts over and plays the riff from the beginning, making it a few notes farther into the song this time, missing the last note, backtracking, patching in the fix. The opening is beginning to snap together—the notes have verve and feeling. When she’s finished with this phrase, she stops again for six long seconds, seeming to replay it in her mind, fingering the clarinet as she thinks. She leans forward, takes a breath, and starts again.
It sounds pretty bad. It’s not music; it’s a broken-up, fitful, slow-motion batch of notes riddled with stops and misses. Common sense would lead us to believe that Clarissa is failing. But in this case common sense would be dead wrong.5
A music expert watching the video commented on Clarissa’s practice, saying it was “amazing” and, “If somebody could bottle this, it’d be worth millions.” Coyle points out: “This is not ordinary practice. This is something else: a highly targeted, error-focused process. Something is growing, being built. The song begins to emerge, and with it, a new quality within Clarissa.”6
In each of the learning cases Coyle reviews, he says that the learner has “tapped into a neurological mechanism in which certain patterns of targeted practice build skill. Without realizing it, they have entered a zone of accelerated learning that, while it can’t quite be bottled, can be accessed by those who know how. In short, they’ve cracked the talent code.”7
One of the significant characteristics of the highly effective learning described is the presence of mistakes and the role of struggle and error in transforming people from beginners into experts. This is consistent with the brain research showing increased brain activity when people struggle and make mistakes and decreased activity when they get work correct.8 Unfortunately, most learners think they should always be getting work correct, and many feel that if they make mistakes or struggle, they are not good learners—when this is the very best thing they can be doing.
Practice is important for the development of any knowledge or skill. Anders Ericsson helped the world understand the nature of expert performance and found that most world-class experts—pianists, chess players, novelists, athletes—practiced for around ten thousand hours over twenty years. He also found that their success was not related to tests of intelligence but to the amount of “deliberate practice” they undertook.9 Importantly, although people succeed because they are trying hard, the people who become experts are trying hard in the right way. A range of different researchers describe effective practice in the same way—people pushing at the edge of their understanding, making mistakes, correcting them, and making more.
A Different View of Struggle
Every four years an international test of mathematics and science called TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) is conducted in fifty-seven countries. In the last round of testing, Singapore was the highest-performing country in mathematics. The information from such tests is not very useful if we do not know what approach countries use to bring about their results. Accordingly, a group of researchers studied the nature of math teaching by going into classrooms and recording a representative sample of the teaching in seven countries. This teaching study uncovered a number of noteworthy outcomes.10 One finding was that the mathematics curriculum in the US is “a mile wide and an inch deep” compared to the curriculum in more successful countries.
Japan has always scored well in mathematics—it has always finished in one of the top-five TIMSS positions—and was one of the countries visited in the study. The researchers found that Japanese students spent 44 percent of their time “inventing, thinking, and struggling with underlying concepts,” whereas students in the US engaged in this kind of behavior less than 1 percent of the time.
Jim Stigler, one of the authors of the study, writes that the Japanese teachers want the students to struggle—and recalls the times when they would purposely give the wrong answer so that students would go back and work with foundational concepts. In my thousands of observations of classrooms over many years in the US and the UK, I have never seen this kind of practice; more typically I have seen teachers who seem to want to save students from struggle. Many times I have observed students asking for help and teachers structuring the work for students, breaking down questions and converting them into small easy steps. In doing so they empty the work of challenge and opportunities for struggle. Students complete the work and feel good, but often learn little.
I saw a very similar teaching approach, focused on struggle, in a visit to classrooms in China, another country that scores highly in mathematics. I had been asked to visit China to give a talk at a conference and managed, as I like to do, to sneak away and visit some classrooms. In a number of high-school math classrooms, lessons were approximately one hour long, but at no time did I see students working on more than three questions in one hour. This contrasts strongly with a typical US high-school math classroom, where students chug through about thirty questions in an hour—about ten times more. The questions worked on in Chinese classrooms were deeper and more involved than the ones in US classrooms. Teachers would ask provocative questions, deliberately making incorrect statements that students would be challenged to argue against.
One of the lessons I watched was on a topic that is often uninspiring in US classrooms—complementary and supplementary angles. The teacher in China asked the students to define a complementary angle, and the students gave their own ideas for a definition. Often the teacher would push the students’ definition to a place that made it incorrect and playfully ask, “Is this right, then?” The students would groan and try to make the definition more correct. The teacher bantered with the students, playfully extending and sometimes twisting their ideas to push the students to deeper thinking. The students probed, extended, clarified, and justified for a long time, reaching depths that were impressive.
Contrast this with the standard US lesson on the same topic. Teachers often give definitions of complementary and supplementary angles to students, who then practice with thirty short questions. The defining characteristic of the lesson in China was struggle—the teacher deliberately put the students in situations where they became stuck and had to think hard. The lesson was entirely consistent with researchers’ description of targeted, mistake-focused practice. As Coyle says, the best way to build a highly effective circuit is to “fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again.” This is what the teachers in China were enabling their students to do.
Elizabeth and Robert Bjork are scientists at UCLA who have studied learning for decades. They point out that a lot of learning that happens is very unproductive, as the most important learning events often go against intuition and deviate from standard practices in schools. They highlight the importance of “desirable difficulties,” again suggesting that the brain needs to be pushed to do things that are difficult. They particularly highlight the act of retrieving information from the brain, as every time we retrieve something,
