Deliberate Practice Rubrics (DPRs)

Deliberate Practice

I've spent almost two decades full-time studying and designing ways for people to learn and improve skills. My biggest take away over these years has been the work of K Anders Ericsson and his concept of deliberate practice.

I believe deliberate practice is one of the most often misunderstood concepts in all of adult education. It’s not as simple as doing an activity for 10,000 hours (this is a common misnomer). Rather, deliberate practice relies on developing and using mental representations through numerous cycles of very specific goal setting, intensely focused practice, and expert feedback. The length of time to reach world class expertise has been shown to depend upon with the skill.

Deliberate practice is the most effective and productive method to improve performance in any industry. All other methods that claim to generate personal growth are merely dead-ending, slow side roads and meandering trails compared to the superhighway of deliberate practice.

Why We Need DPRs

Lots of people want to “get better” at something. In the learning world, that something translates roughly to the word “skill.” Athletes want to get better at running, jumping, swimming, cycling, throwing, skiing, etc.. A friend of mine is working on her masters degree, so she wants to get better at writing papers. Recently, I worked on the skill of curiosity.

In order to improve a skill it’s best to first pull it apart into smaller skills. For example: If I want to get better at soccer, I should probably pick an area of opportunity, such as stealing, dribbling, or blocking shots at the goal. Each of those can then be broken into many smaller goals (such as stealing the ball at high speed, stealing the ball as a goalie, stealing the ball off a header, stealing the ball from behind, and so on). Similarly, I decided that I wanted to work on leading with curiosity (and questions), rather than leading with opinions.

I tried to lead with curiosity for awhile. I think I was doing much better. Really, I had no idea. I’ve noticed that we humans tend think we are better at things than we really are. We think we are great drivers (although most of us are just good enough to avoid accidents). We think we are pretty good at not being judgmental (except for that guy who cut us off on the way to work). We think we are pretty good at making health decisions (and most of us are overweight — I was overweight for seven years and I didn’t realize it until the seventh year).

It’s hard to know how well we’re doing without a measuring stick, a standard, and the ability to hold ourselves to that measuring stick and compare against the standard. In fact executing the process solo is extremely difficult for most people to do effectively.

This is why we need a Deliberate Practice Rubric (DPR). Deliberate practice is where the learner develops mental representations through thoughtful, practices with focus, sets specific goals, receives actionable feedback from an expert coach, and applies it to the next cycle of practice (over and over again). Sadly, most of the time an expert coach is not available.

In the absence of an expert coach (expert coaches are often prohibitively expensive), eager individuals turn to books, articles, videos, and “courses” to improve their skill. They may even attend workshops where they talk about the skill in discussion groups (this can be cathartic and very satisfying). And from a human performance standpoint, most of this is of minimal use to actually improving the skill. This “learning” can raise awareness, and by itself is only minimally effective compared to deliberate practice.

A DPR can fill this void. It can help us know what to shoot for. It can help us evaluate each other’s performance at any skill. It can help us know whether or not we’re getting better, and how to change to improve our skills.

The DPR allows us to build mental representations of the activity that help us perform faster and more effectively. It helps us focus on one piece at a time, work at it, measure progress, and receive direction on what we need to do to improve.

Traditional learning attempts to fill our minds with everything we might need in any given situation (as if we could remember all of that, much less apply it — someday). In contrast, a DPR can be created in 15 minutes, can focus only on what I need to improve right now, and can give me immediate quantitative and qualitative data on my progress as well as exactly what I need to do to improve. Every learning process should have some form of DPR if it is to be applied.

How to Use A DPR

To use a DPR you need to find or create one. If you’re going to develop your own, it helps to have an expert involved. Finding an existing DPR for the exact skill you want to develop can be challenging, and is a very valuable resource.

Utilizing a DPR is a job for at least two people. You need one person to practice the skill, and another (the evaluator) to evaluate the performance. The evaluator does not need to be an expert, and should have a basic understanding of the main aspects of the skill. If the task involves more than one person (like a row team, poker, or a customer service experience), then of course you’ll need more people to be involved. Sometimes it is advantageous to use a DPR in the form of a survey, with responses from the evaluators (much like a simplified micro-360 feedback survey). It can be anonymous or focused on specific relationships.

The steps of how to use a Deliberate Practice Rubric (DPR) are few and simple:

1. The performer practices the skill.
2. The evaluator observes and fills out the DPR.
3. The performer reviews the DPR and plans how to adapt her performance.
4. Repeat

The first time or two through the process will help set a baseline score. After the baseline is determined, a goal is set by the performer. Then the steps of the cycle are repeated until the performer reaches the goal or loses interest. This cycle can be completed once a week, once a day, or —in the right circumstances — many times within an hour. For best results, only one DPR should be attempted at a time until it is mastered, before moving on to the next.

Since it is measuring only a small skill (really just a component of a skill), it should only take a few minutes, and ideally it should happen within the context of real life, so it doesn’t have to take much away from the daily routine. Alternatively, a simulation or role play can be set up if the real life context is impossible to evaluate.

What Is A DPR

A Deliberate Practice Rubric isolates a single, small skill and describes the one, two, or three most critical aspects of that skill. It allows a person to measurably improve a skill in as little as a few minutes. The DPR can be on paper, or digital (I prefer digital). It is always very short. It can be completed synchronously, or asynchronously (if the performance is recorded and shared). A DPR takes about a minute to fill out for the evaluator. They can be stressful, or they can be fun depending on the circumstances.

A DPR typically has a one sentence instructional note, followed by one, two, or three statements. The statements should speak to specific behaviors or attitudes, and be very simple. The evaluator reads each statement and gives a score for each (such as one to five stars, or a tally). There is also an optional last question that asks for specific advice. Some evaluators will not have enough expertise and/or time to fill this out. That is okay. The performer then gathers the feedback (either digital or on paper) and averages the total score. Over time this process is repeated and the trend is plotted to view progress.

Whether you’re borrowing a ready-made DPR or creating your own on the fly, the following are the three biggest factors of your success with this process:

• The design quality of your DPR (which may need revisions)
• The effort invested by the performer and the evaluator
• The number of thoughtful repetitions executed by the performer
• The performer's ability to adopt and leverage mental representations that help to cognitively parse the task and speed up decision making

Although DPRs may take many forms, a good DPR is brief and very fast to fill out (roughly 60 seconds once the evaluator is introduced to the process).

Examples of Deliberate Practice Rubrics (DPRs)

DPR#1: Leading With Curiosity (a curiosity skill)

The DPR I made to help myself become less opionated looked something like this:

I threw away the real one because it was so easy and quick to make and print off, and after just a few times of using it I was so satisfied with my improvement I moved on to the next DPR. By the way, I wrote about the next one here.

DPR#2: Voicing Agreement (a listening skill)

Instructions: Please rate Tyler’s performance with 1-5 stars, based on the following statements (1 represents “Strongly Disagree” and 5 represents “Strongly Agree”):

• Tyler periodically voiced agreement (often enough, not too often).
• When Tyler voiced agreement, it seemed authentic (i.e. natural, not fake).
• Optional: What specifically can Tyler do to improve his voicing of agreement?

DPR#3: Designing a Deliberate Practice Rubric (DPR) (a design skill)

Instructions: Please rate Tyler’s performance with 1-5 stars, based on the following statements (1 represents “Strongly Disagree” and 5 represents “Strongly Agree”):

• The DPR isolates (by name) one single component of a skill, and includes associated instructions.
• The DPR breaks down that skill component into 1, 2, or 3 clear, observable behaviors.
• The DPR offers the evaluator a scale or tally system, and the option to offer advice.
• Optional: How could this DPR be improved?

Summary

If you need to build a skill, especially if you need to demonstrate improvement in a skill or even if you’re just curious how you’re doing, you might benefit from using a Deliberate Practice Rubric (DPR).

DPRs can be used in workshops, classes, meetings, trainings, informal conversations, professional development experiences, coaching, homework assignments, and ad hoc personal development projects. They can be either formal or informal, digital, paper based, or even verbal if you’re in a pinch (not recommended).

DPRs can help you become a better communicator, free-throw shooter, speaker, writer, computer programmer, painter, or leader (article on using DPRs to improve leadership skills). You can use them to help you improve infrequent behaviors (by asking your evaluator(s) to keep an eye out for the behavior you’re trying to improve), or you can go to work on a behavior that’s easy to recreate on demand (like your tennis backhand swing or an outbound telephone call). You can use someone else’s DPR or make your own.

Points should be easy enough to calculate in your head or in a few seconds on a calculator (or better yet in an excel workbook which you’ll have auto-populated if you use a modern survey tool). You can track your own progress over the weeks or months. If you’re an educator you can track the progress of your students and demonstrate your superior value to stakeholders.

Many domains are inundated with modern Human Performance Improvement research such as sports, music, aviation, and medicine. And still, other areas are nearly untouched by these ideas. Opportunities abound for incorporating the deliberate practice into our efforts to develop skills, even when an expert coach is not affordable or available. Let’s bring in this simple little tool: the DPR to help us improve our skills.