Predicting Greatness & Matery: On Great Teachers and the Remarkable Life: A Deliberate Practice Case Study

If you liked the book outliers and/or are trying to master something, I highly recommend reading this article.

H/T Enoch

Click Here To Read: Predicting Greatness & Matery: On Great Teachers and the Remarkable Life: A Deliberate Practice Case Study

Very Important Excerpts (Via StudyHacks)

I’m fascinated by Teach For America for a simple reason: the traits they discovered at the core of great teaching are unmistakably a variant of deliberate practice — not the pure, coach-driven practice of professional athletes and chess grandmasters, but a hearty, adaptable strain that’s applicable to almost any field.

Put another way, these outstanding teachers may have unwittingly cracked the code for generating a remarkable life…

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:

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 I have to warn you — I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure…because I think it’s not working as well as it could.” )
2. They’re obsessed about focusing every minute of classroom time toward student learning.
3. They plan exhaustively and purposefully, “working backward from the desired outcome.”
4. They work “relentlessly”…”refusing to surrender.”
5. They keep students and their families involved in the process

Freestyle 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. Expend hard focus toward this goal every day.
4. Ruthlessly evaluate and modify your approach to remove what doesn’t work and improve what does.

1. Click Here To Read: Predicting Greatness & Matery: On Great Teachers and the Remarkable Life: A Deliberate Practice Case Study