Mind-full Repetition
When I think of drill, the first thing that comes to mind is military marching in the style of the Russian army in their annual Victory Parade. The tightly choreographed marching units are the result of mind-numbing repetitious drill. There is little to no thinking involved. Just stay in formation—or else!
By way of contrast, marching bands also practice tight straight-line formations but also elaborately choreographed transitions into crowd pleasing alignments as here for the University of Michigan. They do this using the Cartesian Coordinate System and they have to pay attention to that while playing their individual musical parts, usually at the same time while moving. My wife and now one of my granddaughters participated in such bands including in an NFL game half-time (my wife) and next year in a college football bowl game half-time (my granddaughter). Both play the french horn, a notoriously difficult instrument.
I submit that the added complexities of marching bands require great concentration and thoughtful execution. Their routine cannot be successful unless practices are characterized by Mind-full repetition. Mindless drill may suffice for the Russian army, but band members need to use their heads!
Practice is a necessity for any kind of learning, but practice can be a grind, or a stimulating challenge.
What follows is an approximate transcript of the podcast “Mind-full Repetition.”
Intro:
This season of podcasts is designed to assist parents in helping their children love learning. That’s much easier if you are personally a lover of learning. My five children are very different from each other, but each loved learning from K-12 and beyond and they still love it. It’s no stretch to say each one is passionate about learning.
My kids grew up before home schooling was a thing. I didn’t control the curriculum they were accountable to. Frequently I was at odds with the fact orientation of their schools. Over the years my wife and I found ways to fan sparks of curiosity even when the kids returned from school with their enthusiasm dampened. I want to share in practical actionable ways how that happened and how it is still happening with our grandchildren.
Podcast:
Today we’ll think through cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham’s 5th principle of cognition: “It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice.” (p. 119)
Extended practice is not just a euphemism for drill. Willingham observes,
The phrase “drill and kill” has been used as a criticism of some types of instruction; the teacher drills the students, which is said to kill their innate motivation to learn. . . . Few teachers would argue that drilling boosts students’ motivation and sense of fun. (p. 119)
Killing the motivation to learn is not something to whitewash. I think most educational systems are guilty as charged and that’s serious. We all live in a beautiful though sin cursed world. It is not just the heavens that declare the glory of God. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning memorably wrote:
Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.
I hope you’re raising your kids to take off their shoes as it were and look expectantly at the divinely complex world around them. Seeking to understand and appreciate God’s creation is a way of giving Him the glory that He is due.
Learning can’t always be fun, but there is no reason it can’t always pique curiosity and thereby kindle a motivation to learn. Understanding ideas and using them to solve problems is also enormously rewarding. Such learning satisfies.
In the previous podcast we explored memory and concluded that lasting memory is the product of thinking. Drilling is not a type of thinking. It is closer to a type of conditioning. The repetition is boring and can be dispiriting. It can also be extremely irritating if you’ve already mastered what the drill is grinding into the mind of even the most reluctant student.
A sense of mastery as perceived by a student is often misplaced, of course, but drilling is not the way to address that gap. Memory drills are stimulus and response. “Knowing” a vocabulary word is reached in most systems when you can recite the definition on command. The reality is that the vocabulary term is merely a label for an idea, and you haven’t mastered the idea by reciting the definition. Mortimer Adler calls this the “vice of verbalism” since the idea remains invisible to the student. This counterfeit is rampant in fact-oriented classrooms.
You may recall from a previous podcast that the sensory paths into the brain can easily overload our cognitive circuits. To prevent sensory overload the brain goes to screensaver if nothing changes within a minute or two. The information that might have been delivered by that channel has been blocked. Repetitious drill puts your brain in sleep mode.
All this means that drill is not an effective strategy for learning. Willingham is trying to make the case in chapter 5 for something different which he calls “extended practice.” Everyone knows the slogan “practice makes perfect.” In our experience, however, this truism was a call to keep going when we wanted to quit and there were reasons quitting was attractive.
All my five children were required to take piano through elementary and middle school and even into high school until they could demonstrate proficiency defined as being able to play most hymns in our hymnbook. None of my kids loved it and in retrospect we could have done a better job of creating motivation. We had a real piano, not an electronic one that could be played with headphones on. Seared into my memory are pieces of varying sophistication being hammered out until a mistake was made followed by starting over attempting to avoid the mistake on the next go around. Only the same mistake was made over and over again. Progress was agonizingly slow (for both me and my child). This kind of drill is not helpful for many reasons, primarily because the illogic behind the mistake was not often addressed cognitively. Were they reading the music wrong? Were their finger positions inappropriate?
One of my sons showed some flashes of ability although he was not a fan of the piano. In an effort to motivate him, his teacher chose a recital piece that was more demanding by far than anything he had previously attempted. She thought the beauty of the piece would be its own reward. He procrastinated until my wife and I insisted he begin to work on the piece. He started. It was bad. After numerous mistakes in a few sessions, he declared the piece was too difficult and he was going to abandon further efforts.
This was in the late 1980’s a couple of years after the music composition software Finale first came out. Through my educational contacts I had acquired a copy to play around with on my Mac. The software was interesting to my son, the piano derelict. We made a deal. He would key in his recital piece and get the software to play it. This proved to be tedious since we had no MIDI keyboard. He would put a few chords in and then play it back. If it didn’t sound right, he would look for the mistake. He became immersed in the logic of the piece. When he finished after a week or two, he proudly had Finale play it. By the computer audio standards of the time, it was beautiful, and he was pleased that he did it. I suggested he play the piece on the piano to compare. In just a few sessions he was able to play it well—because he understood the logic of the piece.
This example illustrates what extended practice can look like. It is not mindless drill. It is mind-full. It recognizes cognitive dissonance and works toward resolution. It takes place over time, but there is measurable progress toward the goal (chord by chord in my son’s case).
Willingham observes,
Our understanding of new ideas is initially shallow because deep understanding requires more connections among the components of the idea; . . .Once we’ve worked with the same idea in different guises, we can appreciate its deep structure –the functional relationships among the components of the idea. (p. 112)
In contrast to a simplistic mastery orientation, intellectual humility acknowledges there are many levels of comprehension, and it is open to the possibility that a new encounter with an idea may deepen my understanding. This is certainly the disposition we need to bring to scriptures we’ve encountered dozens or even hundreds of times before.
In one episode in the past season of my podcast, I took exception to the emphasis on coverage in reading multiple chapters of the Bible daily. This is the goal of a reading plan that takes you through the Bible in a year. Breadth means little if you haven’t grappled seriously with meaning. Put another way “mile wide and inch deep” won’t take you very far in your sanctification journey. This kind of breadth is almost guaranteed to make you “a forgetful hearer.” IF you have hours to invest you can alternate reading with actual study and both “cover” and probe. In the typical 15–30-minute devotional slot however, most opt for coverage over depth.
Joshua 1:8 and Psalm 1:2 both emphasize meditation as key to Christian growth. Ps. 1:2 (ESV) says of the righteous person, “his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” Delight says motivation is not an issue and meditation on what he has read seems to be continual (day and night). What is biblical meditation but turning over a truth repeatedly looking for new insights? As you meditate you are looking for connection to other truths as well as for logical dependencies and practical applications.
Meditation is not mindless repetition of a mantra. Effective meditation is a quest for understanding and insight. Proverbs 2:3-5 (ESV) captures this orientation,
3 if you call out for insight
and raise your voice for understanding,
4 if you seek it like silver
and search for it as for hidden treasures,
5 then you will understand the fear of the Lord
and find the knowledge of God.
Since all truth is God’s truth, this quest should not be restricted to God’s written revelation but extends to everything He has made.
Willingham is really talking about meditation when he observes,
Understanding new ideas is mostly a matter of getting the right old ideas into working memory and then rearranging them - making comparisons we hadn’t made before or thinking about a feature we had previously ignored. (p. 99)
Working memory is where conscious thought is going on. It isn’t enough that an idea is in your long-term memory. You must access it and scrutinize it looking to clarify or extend the idea or to connect it to another idea. The adage “if you don’t use it, you lose it” applies here. The brain is ruthless in pruning what you don’t use.
Willingham is realistic when he says,
No one can pour new ideas into a student’s head directly. Every new idea must build on ideas the student already knows. To get a student to understand, a teacher [or a parent] must ensure that the right ideas from the student’s long-term memory are pulled up and put into working memory. In addition, the right features of these memories must be attended to, that is, compared or combined or somehow manipulated. (p. 100)
Let’s examine Willingham’s Cognitive Principle #5:” It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice.” (p. 119)
As it stands this is an assertion, not a principle. It is a proposition, and I think it is true, but it lacks a real mechanism. It’s also very vague regarding the nature of the mental task. On this latter point indeed Willingham would include attempting to load facts into the brain as well as learning procedural skills involving motor learning. Learning how to tie your shoes and drive a car are in the latter category and that’s a far cry from cognitive learning involving concept formation, clarification, and interconnection.
To make it a true principle by my definition and to address my criticisms, I would reword it as:
Increasingly deep understanding of an idea occurs only through repeated wrestling with a wide variety of concrete examples and related ideas.
The same principle is found in Hebrews 5:13-14 (ESV)
13 for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. 14 But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.
There it is—constant practice, but not on a static target. Rather discernment is the fruit of dealing thoughtfully with the multiplicity of life’s ethical challenges as they come at us. I would maintain that facts normally exist in memory only as part of bundles of related specifics tied up with an explanation. That’s what I called an idea (or a concept) in the previous podcast. Facts are often concrete instances of the pattern that the idea encapsulates.
The mechanism by which extended practice works to create durable memory is through repeated wrestling as I stated it in my revised principle. That references the mental workout required. I think we can be even more specific in seeking a mechanism.
Willingham rightly points out that the wrestling mat is the working memory and its size is limiting. How can you work with increasingly complex ideas in the same small space you used when your understanding was shallow? He says,
Though you can’t increase working memory capacity, you can cheat this limitation. . . .In a process called chunking, you treat several separate things as a single unit. (p. 122)
The purpose of wrestling in the mind is to create increasingly complex chunks. Chunks are the product of the wrestling. Wrestling grows chunks and chunks allow deeper understanding. This isn’t a new cognitive skill to acquire. You’ve been chunking all your life. Let’s walk through your journey. Letters are units (chunks) to preschool children; words are units when you gain proficiency with decoding—then sentences can be a unit. Eventually high-level concepts and principles can be a unit—a chunk to bring into your constrained working memory. You get better at high-level chunking when you are aware of what you are attempting to do.
An idea is a chunk, but the chunk can get bigger and still fit in working memory. Like the 10 items or less express lane at Walmart, chunks can vary in size and still be permitted in the brain. A single item at Walmart might be a pack of gum or it might be 12 bottles of water shrink-wrapped as a unit.
The old song says, “love is a many splendored thing.” Love as a concept is modified and grows in sophistication over time through concrete experiences. Love may be taken for granted by a young child in a stable home. Young adults looking for “the one” usually wonder whether they will recognize love on this new level when they find it. Marriage itself takes love to another level followed in God’s providence by even deeper perspectives as parents and finally as grandparents. The infinitely enriched concept of love grows over a lifetime of experiences that vary enormously. And then there’s the experience of God’s love for you as an individual that I fondly wish for each of my listeners.
As chapter 5 closes Willingham says, “Practice yields three benefits.” I’m going to modify his list to fit what I’ve made the case for in this podcast: (i) it can clarify ideas so they serve as a suitable foundation for further learning; (ii) the utility of the ideas makes memory long lasting; and (iii) it increases the likelihood that understanding will suggest application to new situations
To close let me circle back around to address how to keep extended practice fresh and motivate the needed persistence. This is not a simple matter. As a parent you need to think about ideas that are related to what your child is studying to enable them to encounter new perspectives. I stumbled on one when my son balked at his piano recital piece and I used his fascination with the computer music software, Finale, to help him grapple with what made the piece beautiful.
J.S. Bach(one of my heroes) did something similar with his wife and children to help them think like musicians. He turned his creativity loose to produce fascinating practice exercises which still stand as beautiful music on their own. Most people would never guess these works of art were once practice exercises.
Examples include:
The Anna Magdalena Notebook written for his second wife and their children. It taught basic keyboard technique but contains works like Minuet in G major (BWV Anh. 114)
The Clavier-Büchlein created for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, consists of scales and exercises to teach harmony.
It was later expanded to become The Well-Tempered Clavier which takes musicians through all the major and minor keys. it consists of two books, each with 24 preludes and fugues (BWV 846–869 and BWV 870–893).
Bach wrote 15 two-part inventions (BWV 772–786) and 15 three-part sinfonias (BWV 787–801) that he designed to teach musicianship and the art of playing in multiple voices.
The Orgelbüchlein (Little Organ Book) was created to help students master organ playing and learn about chorale composition. It consists of 45 short pieces based on chorale melodies (BWV 599–644).
The fact that Bach was able to take what most would have considered drudgery and elevate it to art should inspire our efforts at creating stimulating learning environments. Learn to think in terms of theme and intriguing variations. I would underscore that all the Bach study aids listed (and I could have listed more) were teaching the logic of music, i.e. enabling students to think like musicians.
Outro:
In two weeks, we’ll consider Willingham’s Principle #6, “Cognition is fundamentally different early and late in training.”
Once again Willingham and I are in fundamental disagreement. My teaching aims to help students play a junior version of the real cognitive game adult experts engage in. I teach my students how to think like scientists and I believe that should be the goal of science teaching at all levels. The same is true for every academic discipline.
Fasten your seatbelts for a stimulating discussion on the next podcast!