Deliberate practice using SoTL

There is a difference between expert knowledge and expert performance. Having expert knowledge of your discipline does not necessarily mean you will be an expert at helping others gain that same expert knowledge. To progress from being a subject expert to what Kreber (2002) would call an expert teacher, it is necessary to gain additional types of knowledge (Shulman, 1986):

Subject expert
Content knowledge – what you know about your discipline

Expert teacher
Content knowledge and
Pedagogical content knowledge – what you know about teaching your discipline
Pedagogical knowledge – what you know about teaching in general

Importantly, developing pedagogical content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge require performative practice. The path to reliable and reproducible excellence depends on developing expertise.

SoTL offers a useful framework for systematically developing your academic teaching practice. The concept of deliberate practice (Ericsson, 2008) is useful in understanding how this can work. 

 

 

SoTL and deliberate practice slides for download.pdf

 

Deliberate practice is a sort of practice that is intentionally designed to improve performance. It goes beyond simply gaining experience through repetition and focuses specifically on systematically developing skills and correcting mistakes in order to reach the highest possible level of performance. Practice that is consistently associated with improved performance has four key attributes:

    1. It involves a task with a well-defined goal
    2. The individual practicing is motivated to succeed
    3. It includes access to feedback
    4. It offers plenty of chances for repeating and gradually refining performance

Improvement comes from concentrating fully, solving problems, and adopting better methods of performing tasks. For world-class experts, the motivation comes from within, while the task, goal, feedback, and refinement through repetition are supported by a coach. Not many academic teachers have access to a teaching coach, so we need to find a way of creating a surrogate coach for ourselves that can help us.

One way of doing this is by engaging in self-regulated learning (Zimmerman, 2002). This is a form of proactive and systematic learning that involves transforming your mental abilities into actual skills. There are three main phases in self-regulated learning, each with a series of associated suprocesses:

A diagram showing the three stages of self-regulated learning

Importantly, self-regulated learning is not only concerned with specific outcomes, but also with the process itself. It is iterative, with each completed loop yielding both concrete learning outcomes and an improved ability to work through the three phases of the process.

You can use the process of self-regulated learning to do deliberate practice in your academic teaching, and SoTL can provide a scaffold to help you do this. The relationship between the four key attributes of effective deliberate practice listed above and the main steps in SoTL (asking a question, gathering and analyzing evidence to answer the question, and going public with your findings) looks like this:

An image of the relationship between deliberate practice and SoTL

As you can see, the goal and motivation in deliberate practice can help you formulate a question for SoTL, feedback comes from going public with the answer you formulate to your question, and refining your performance comes from applying that feedback to new cycles of SoTL. 

 

Further reading:

Ericsson, K. A. (2008). Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance: A General Overview. Academic Emergency Medicine, 15(11), 988–994. 
Open access: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1553-2712.2008.00227.x

Ericsson, K. A. (2008). Attaining Excellence Through Deliberate Practice: Insights from the Study of Expert Performance. In C. Desforges and R. Fox (Eds.), Teaching and Learning: The Essential Readings. Blackwell Publishers Ltd.: Oxford. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470690048.ch1

Kreber, C. (2002). Teaching Excellence, Teaching Expertise, and the Scholarship of Teaching. Innovative Higher Education, 27(1), 5–23. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020464222360

Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those Who Understand: Knowledge Growth in Teaching. Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4–14. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X015002004

Zimmerman, B. J. (1990). Self-Regulated Learning and Academic Achievement: An Overview. Educational Psychologist, 25(1), 3–17. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep2501_2

Zimmerman, B. J. (2002). Becoming a Self-Regulated Learner: An Overview. Theory Into Practice, 41(2), 64–70. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_2