Practicing What You Have Not Learned?

I discovered a delightful show on YouTube during lockdown.  I say "discovered;" it had already been on for fourteen years before I found it.  It's called Would I Lie to You?, and I'm honestly not sure I would have gotten through the hybrid year without it. I'd come home at the end of the day a puddle of exhaustion and eat dinner watching Colbert, after which I would watch a couple of episodes of WILTY and laugh until I cried.

Last week, a more recent episode featured a story in which one of the participants claimed to have made a sculpture of a girl he liked (like the girl in the Lionel Richie "Hello" video).  Spoiler alert in case you plan to watch the show:  This story turned out not to be true.  But, as he was selling his tale, one of the questions that was asked was, "Do you have experience with sculpting."  His answer was, "No, but I figured you learn by practice."

This could just be the education nerd in me or a reflection of the age of the young man telling the story, but all I could think was, "Well, there's someone who has been exposed to too much "discovery learning."  Here he was thinking that the highly specialized skill of representative sculpture (not an abstract, but the face of a girl he was trying to impress) was something he could figure out on his own by trial and error.  It's a good thing this story wasn't true because I don't think he would have won the affections of this girl with a "learn by practice" sculpture.

I think the reason this stuck with me was the word "practice."  There are two parts to learning.  Encoding and practice.  

Whether knowledge or skill, encoding must come first.  I'm not saying it has to be learned from a professional teacher, but no one is truly self-taught.  They get their initial knowledge or skill from somewhere.  Whether it is from reading, direct instruction, modeling, or TikTok video - something must first be input and encoded.  Practice, by definition, is the repetition of something already learned.  Practice is important as it myelinates the nerve cells and solidifies the skill or knowledge, but it cannot come first.

As the great Tom Sherrington put it in one of his recent blog posts, "You need to make some initial pathways in your brain (some actual physical connections) before we can worry about strengthening them through application and practice."

We have underemphasized this in recent years with the talk of retrieval practice at every conference.  I'm downplaying retrieval.  We must have both to make learning stay in long term memory.  But let's talk more about good methods of encoding.

I'm going to attempt to do my part by making the next few posts about methods of encoding.  So stay tuned this summer.