Alternative grading and deliberate practice

A framework for feedback, and thoughts on using it

Photo by Scott Gruber on Unsplash

Everything important that you have ever learned, you learned by engaging with a feedback loop. Feedback loops are the “roof” of the Four Pillars framework and the backbone of every alternative grading system, no matter how it’s implemented. But getting students to engage productively and consistently with the feedback loops we set up in our systems can be a real struggle. It’s common to blame students for this, but it’s not their fault. In my experience, students are perfectly aware of the centrality of feedback loops, they know how to navigate them, and they even find the process meaningful and fun — if it’s in a non-academic context like music or sports. But when we apply the same principles in the classroom, there is a disconnect.

This issue seems like an important and hard problem in academia generally and for alternative grading specifically. I’ve always believed that navigating such problems involves taking small steps within coherent systems. So today I wanted to share some thoughts on this, namely the coherent system that seems to fit this problem and what small steps we might take to help students get the most out of our feedback loops.

The framework of deliberate practice

It’s helpful to start with what we hope to see from our students if they are engaging productively with a feedback loop. For you, and for your students, what would that “productive engagement” look like? Your list might look something like this:

• Students should have a clear idea of what specific elements of their work need improvement and focus.

• Students should have a means of targeting those elements, through exercises or other focused tasks, that address specific issues of performance.

• Those exercises should be easy to repeat, should be repeated, and should get immediate feedback (not necessarily from the instructor).

• They should also represent accumulating incremental steps that lead the student toward improvement on the main task.

• And while we don’t exactly desire this, we recognize that all of the above is hard work, sometimes exhausting, and not often fun. If it sounds or feels easy, we should get suspicious.

This kind of feedback loop engagement isn’t just for students. In fact, you’ll find the above blueprint among almost all “top performers” whether it’s in academics, music, sports, or even something as mundane as cooking or gaming. They are usually the best at what they do because they are the best at practicing what they do. And not just any kind of practice, but what is called deliberate practice.

Practice, in general, simply means repeated rehearsal of a behavior. Deliberate practice on the other hand is practice that is not just repetition, but which is purposeful and systematic. It is a concept that has existed for perhaps as long as mankind has, but which was first given a name by K. Anders Ericsson in 1993, in a study on expert performance. With his co-authors, he wrote:

We agree that expert performance is qualitatively different from normal performance and even that expert performers have characteristics and abilities that are qualitatively different from or at least outside the range of those of normal adults. However, we deny that these differences are immutable, that is, due to innate talent. … Instead, we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.

What Ericsson is saying in this study is that while there is such a thing as innate “God given” talent in certain domains, and while it makes a difference in performance, far more of a difference is made in the practice methods of the performer. Top performers aren’t the ones who are built differently; they are the ones who practice differently — who practice deliberately.

In his aptly-titled book Talent is Overrated, Geoff Colvin gives this description of deliberate practice (my emphases):

Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. It is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.

In my early years as an electric bassist, my “practice” often just consisted of playing along with my favorite albums or songs for an hour or so. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it lacks intentionality and purpose, and does not target specific areas of improvement. Trust me: You can improve with this sort of practice, but it’s slow and aimless. I didn’t start to really get better as a player until I started designing my practice sessions more purposefully and started falling in love with the boring stuff that is hard work and not much fun¹.

Research on the effectiveness of deliberate practice is both broad and deep. I’ve already mentioned the study by Ericsson et al. which found that differences between expert- and non-expert performance are better explained by deliberate practice than by innate talent; this is corroborated by meta-analyses such as this one that indicates that deliberate practice significantly correlates with musical achievement. Similar findings linking deliberate practice to successful acquisition of expert-level skill have been made across disciplines including medicine and nursing, counseling and psychotherapy, and even the attainment of expert skill in breakdancing and preparation for the National Spelling Bee².

Deliberate practice and alternative grading

What does this have to do with alternative grading, you ask? Well, consider why we might want to use an alternative grading system at all. In my view, the most compelling reason goes back to the opening statement of this article: Everything important that you ever learned, you learned by engaging with a feedback loop. If I think that the concepts in my courses are important (and I do), then I want to treat them like important things, which means I need to get students engaged with feedback loops to learn them. Traditional grading isn’t built for that. It is practically purpose-built to do the opposite. So I use an alternative structure.

Another way to say this, is that the purpose of alternative grading is to get students productively engaged with feedback loops as the core of their learning experience. And when you look at deliberate practice, it starts to look more and more like a synonym for “productive engagement with feedback loops”. Therefore, it’s fair to say that the purpose of alternative grading is to elicit deliberate practice from students. An alternative grading system is only as good as its ability to do this. If I have a grading system in my syllabus that looks cool and gets brownie points from other people, but does not lead my students to practice deliberately on a consistent basis, then it’s not a functioning system.

And like I said earlier, getting the system to function properly in this way is a huge challenge and a shared responsibility between instructors and students. We’re not going to solve that challenge in one blog post! But let’s think about small steps we can take within the larger framework.

How music teachers do it

Earlier I claimed that students know all about deliberate practice, but mostly in non-academic contexts and frequently have little to no experience applying it to their course studies. So how do we bridge this gap? It’s tempting to make it someone else’s problem (e.g. Let’s make students take a gen-ed course on deliberate practice!). But it seems clear to me that if we want to see deliberate practice from our students, then the shortest path to success goes through us: It has to become part of the “material” that we teach and part of the everyday vocabulary we use in dialogue with students.

This sounds like a lot of work³, but fortunately we have examples to study. Music educators, for example, have a lot of experience actually teaching people how to practice — in many ways, that’s their job. I’ve been fortunate to have known and worked with many great band, choir, and orchestra directors when I was in high school and college, as well as private instructors then and now, plus current bandmates and collaborators who are great teachers in their own ways. The best of them all have a few pedagogical approaches in common:

• They teach practice explicitly. That is, practice is discussed not as an abstraction that you “should do” but as a concrete event that is inseparable from the learning process. The discussion is not about the “benefits of practice” but the impossibility of success without it. And part of every lesson consists of specific things to do in practice and how to do them.

• They teach practice as strategic problem solving. For example, when you make a mistake, you are taught not to beat yourself up about it or ignore it, but identify the mistake; analyze and isolate the cause; break down complex tasks into smaller parts; and work on these iteratively, going slow and then building.

• They model good practice techniques in rehearsals/lessons. Practice is not just for “practice time” but can and should be modeled in group sessions or in lessons. If the band makes a mistake, it’s treated just like if an individual made it (see above). In particular, the best rehearsals I’ve experienced model the generation of feedback effectively: Often those rehearsals are being recorded and if there’s a janky section that takes place, we rewind the tape and listen to it — unfiltered, and without waiting for some third party to tell us what went wrong.

• They stress the importance of the quality of time spent practicing, not the quantity. The quantity should be greater than zero, but it doesn’t have to be several hours a day. Many expert musicians use chunking and interleaving to achieve great progress on difficult pieces in only 2-3 hours a day, split up into 20-40 minute sessions⁴.

• They talk about practice almost constantly. The best musicians I have worked with are never more than a few minutes away from referring to their practice experiences. It is part of the shared vocabulary of speaking with them and impossible to forget about.

How you and I might do it

For many of us, classes are starting soon, and now is the right time to think about how we might build systems in those classes to help students become experts at practicing our subjects. Having an alternative grading system installed is a good idea but is not sufficient⁵. Here are some other ideas that you might consider:

• Set the stage in week 1. You might consider taking an entire day, or a half day, from your schedule during the first week of classes to devote to teaching the concepts of deliberate practice explicitly. Consider using James Clear’s introductory article or this more extensive article from the Farnham Street blog as your source material — or, just draw from your own experience and that of your students using my growth-focused icebreaker as a starting point. If you are using the 12-Week Plan for your schedule then you have lots of time for this. In my view this is a better use of time than “covering material” in Week 1 because of the constant flux of students coming into and out of class rosters.

• Explicitly connect deliberate practice to your grading system. When students see an alternative grading system in a syllabus, they often find it weird, confusing, and a little threatening. One of the best things you can do early on, is to communicate the value of deliberate practice (see above) and explain that the grading system in the syllabus is there to promote and reward good practice. This may be a little extrinsically motivated (“Reward”?) but it’s not wrong to say it, and it’s something students can understand.

• Build an intentional common language around practice. For example, if you have an assessment called “Homework” then what if you called it “Practice” instead? If you have an active learning time built into class each time you meet, what if you called it “Practice Time” and called it out each day (“Alright everyone, it’s Practice Time”)? Or more radically, what if you rebranded “class meetings” as “rehearsals”? The language we use in class in and in syllabi can have a powerful effect on how students approach a class.

• Build “evidence of practice” into your grading system. You might also consider requiring evidence of deliberate practice as some part of the grading system itself. Some instructors, for example, require students to submit evidence that they’ve practiced a concept before allowing a reattempt on an assessment targeting that concept. This approach seems especially well suited for ungrading-type systems where the criteria for a course grade are not so rigidly defined. For example, you could state that in order to earn an A or a B, the student must demonstrate among other things a portfolio showing effective engagement with deliberate practice throughout the course (and then the two of you collaboratively decide what’s “good enough” on that).

I know many readers have significantly more experience actually teaching deliberate practice in their courses, so I would love to hear more about your experiences in the comments — and even if you don’t have the experience, share your thoughts.

1. Right now I am trying to master the two-octave arpeggios cellists learn, for example. Currently my practice regimen looks like: Warmups on two-octave scales and arpeggios; 30-45 minutes on right- and left-hand technique; 45-90 minutes preparing songs for upcoming rehearsals and gigs; and 30-40 minutes specifically practicing fretless bass to work on intonation and accuracy, both isolated with etudes and in a mix playing along with recordings. Most of this time I record myself with Garage Band and listen to playback to spot trouble areas, and keep a running log of all this in a special Obsidian vault. I am definitely not the best bass player in the world but I pride myself on being very good at learning, and at getting better.

2. Note the lead author of this study is Angela Duckworth of Grit fame. There is a significant overlap between alternative grading, deliberate practice, and the concept of “grit” that would be useful to explore, even if you’re like me and not totally sold on “grit”.

3. It is definitely a lot of work. So much so, that really the only way to accomplish it is to cut something else out of the class to make room for it. This may or may not be easy, or possible, for a lot of people but in this interim period before classes start, and many are making out syllabi, I would challenge each instructor to try to find one topic from each course that can be excised with minimal damage to student learning, to make room for teaching effective practice. I do this myself; most of the time there is something that can go that I previously thought was inviolable but once removed, I wondered why I spent so much time worrying about it.

4. I practice 2-3 hours a day, and recently started doing 90 minutes in the morning and 90 minutes in the afternoon. (This only works in the summer!) It greatly accelerated my progress, and cleared up some repetitive stress injury I was experiencing, because I was giving myself frequent rest breaks which both my brain and my hands needed. I think a lot of students, when we talk to them about “study habits”, would do well to consider this — and stop trying to “study” for 5-6 hours at a time, and take frequent planned breaks.

5. I am tempted to say an alternative grading system is “necessary but not sufficient” because that’s how mathematicians commonly speak about conditions. But to be honest, I don’t think alternative grading is necessary. I think you can do a good job teaching students deliberate practice within a traditional grading system. I’ve seen it done. But there are a lot of honest questions that come up, regarding whether the grading system is working with the lessons about practice or against them.