Deliberate Practice and Learning Cohorts as an accelerating learning tool for teams

Learning together as a cohort, and employing Deliberate Practice techniques is a useful way to quickly build knowledge within a team of complex tasks and problems.

Takeaways

Deliberate Practice is an effective way to help individuals and teams learn and improve their skills. It is a method that involves breaking down complex tasks into smaller, manageable components and then practising them with intention, focus, and feedback. 

The Deliberate Practice process is broken down into the following steps:

1. Set clear goals and expectations

2. Break down complex tasks into smaller components

3. Practice with intention and focus

4. Provide feedback and support

5. Monitor progress and adjust goals

Supporting your teams to start as a cohort

The cohort must understand the fundamentals of a particular skill or process before they practise it. Provide pre-reading or videos to help them understand the context of the skill or process. 

Ensure that you help them prepare for the session by all necessary tools installed and ready so they can all start together as a group.

For technical skills practice, using containers is an excellent way to ensure everyone has everything they need to start the session. 

Good Learning Habits for deliberate practice 

Picture Credit: Kathy Sierra - Badass - How to make users awesome 

Learning has to “hurt” ie. The best learning zone is where you are slightly ahead of your current knowledge, but not too far ahead of your knowledge that you will give up . 

Focus on providing good examples of a particular skill or process. This helps build the mental models/patterns of the skills. When showing a negative outcome or anti-pattern, ensure that the context exaggerates the negative pattern; this helps cement the anti-pattern in their memory.

Reading source code or approved documentation is a great way to showcase good patterns. It provides opportunities for your team to explain the in-depth context of the techniques and approaches of your organisation.

Shared support

Allocate buddies for each cohort member to discuss and review problems together. The simple act of explaining an issue can often trigger insights. It also helps build trust and enables individuals to share their insights and reflection to reinforce their learning. 

Successful learning cohorts are everywhere

We've seen effective learning cohorts at big organisations such as Xero called "Breakfast Club". At the Breakfast Club, individuals joined a cohort that practised specific coding skills every fortnight to boost their fundamental skills. At Summer of Tech, we are learning as a cohort to support our journey to learn Te Ao Maori. 

Further reading and Resources

Books

• Kathy Sierra - Badass - How to make users awesome 

• Anders Ericsson - Peak - The original book on how to become the best in the world at anything. (Anders research is where Malcolm Gladwell found his 10,000 hours)

• Josh Kaufman - The first 20 hours: How to learn anything fast - Deliberate practice in action. Josh shows how to do deliberate practice with examples.

Video

• How to learn anything in 20 hours - Josh Kaufman’s famous Tedx Talk on how to learn fast and a nice rendition of “Axis of Awesome”.

Web

• https://jamesclear.com/deliberate-practice-theory - Mr Atomic Habits walks through how to use deliberate practice.

Code Deliberate practice tools

• Code kata - Exercises to practice coding techniques.

• Exercism.io - Practice code fundamentals in any coding language. Just download a problem, work on a solution, submit for review, volunteers review and provide feedback.