training revolve around the weekly cycle of one Saturday game to the next. In that short period there’s a lot to learn: studying the opposition’s type of game in the classroom, discussing offensive and defensive strategies for opposing it, taking the discussion onto the playing fi eld, breaking the strategies down to the movements of individual positions and trying them out, knitting the parts into a whole, and then repeating the moves until they run like clockwork.
While all this is going on, the players must also keep their fundamental skills in top form: blocking, tackling, catching the ball, bringing the ball in, carry ing the ball. Dooley believes that (1) you have to keep practicing the fundamentals from time to time, forever, so you keep them sharp, otherwise you’re cooked, but (2) you need to change it up in practice because too much repetition is boring. The position coaches work with players individually on specifi c skills and then on how they’re playing their positions during team practice.
What else? There’s practicing the kicking game. There’s the matter of each player’s mastery of the playbook. And there are the special plays from the team’s repertoire that often make the difference between winning and losing. In Dooley’s narrative, the special plays stand as exemplars of spaced learning: they’re practiced only on Thursdays, so there’s always a week between sessions, and the plays are run in a varied sequence.
With all this to be done, it’s not surprising that a critical aspect of the team’s success is a very specifi c daily and weekly schedule that interleaves the elements of individual and team practice. The start of every day’s practice is strictly focused on the fundamentals of each player’s position. Next, players practice in small groups, working on maneuvers involving several positions. These parts are gradually brought together and run
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as a team. Play is speeded up and slowed down, rehearsed mentally as well as physically. By midweek the team is running the plays in real time, full speed.
“You’re coming at it fast, and you’ve got to react fast,”
Dooley said. “But as you get closer to game time, you slow it down again. Now it’s a kind of rehearsal without physical contact. The play basically starts out the same each time, but then what the opponent does changes it. So you’ve got to be able to adjust to that. You start into the motion and say, ‘If they react like this, then this is what you would do.’ You practice adjustments. If you do it enough times in different situations, then you’re able to do it pretty well in what ever comes up on the fi eld.”11
How does a player get on top of his playbook? He takes it home and goes over the plays in his mind. He may walk through them. Everything in practice can’t be physically stren-uous, Dooley said, or you’d wear yourself out, “so if the play calls for you to step this way and then go the other way, you can rehearse that in your mind, maybe just lean your body as if to go that way. And then if something happens where you have to adjust, you can do that mentally. By reading the playbook, rehearsing it in your mind, maybe taking a step or two to walk through it, you simulate something happening. So that kind of rehearsal is added to what you get in the classroom and on the fi eld.”
The fi nal quarterback meetings are held on Saturday morning, reviewing the game plan and running through it mentally.
The offensive coaches can make all the plans they want to about the hypothetical game, but once play gets under way, the execution rests in the hands of the quarterback.
For Coach Dooley’s team, it’s all there: retrieval, spacing, interleaving, variation, refl ection, and elaboration. The seasoned quarterback going into Saturday’s game— mentally run-
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ning through the plays, the reactions, the adjustments— is doing the same thing as the seasoned neurosurgeon who’s rehearsing what’s about to unfold in the operating room.
The Takeaway
Here’s a quick rundown of what we know today about massed practice and its alternatives. Scientists will continue to deepen our understanding.
We harbor deep convictions that we learn better through single- minded focus and dogged repetition, and these beliefs are validated time and again by the visible improvement that comes during “practice- practice- practice.” But scientists call this heightened per for mance during the acquisition phase of a skill “momentary strength” and distinguish it from “underlying habit strength.” The very techniques that build habit strength, like spacing, interleaving, and variation, slow visible acquisition and fail to deliver the improvement during practice that helps to motivate and reinforce our efforts.12
Cramming, a form of massed practice, has been likened to binge- and- purge eating. A lot goes in, but most of it comes right back out in short order. The simple act of spacing out study and practice in installments and allowing time to elapse between them makes both the learning and the memory stronger, in effect building habit strength.
How big an interval, you ask? The simple answer: enough so that practice doesn’t become a mindless repetition. At a minimum, enough time so that a little forgetting has set in. A little forgetting between practice sessions can be a good thing, if it leads to more effort in practice, but you do not want so much forgetting that retrieval essentially involves relearning the material. The time periods between sessions of practice let memories consolidate. Sleep seems to play a large role in
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memory consolidation, so practice with at least a day in between sessions is good.
Something as simple as a deck of fl ashcards can provide an example of spacing. Between repetitions of any individual card, you work through many others. The German scientist Sebastian Leitner developed his own system for spaced practice of fl ashcards, known as the Leitner box. Think of it as a series of four fi le- card boxes. In the fi rst are the study materials (be they musical scores, hockey moves, or Spanish vocabulary fl ashcards) that must be practiced frequently because you often make mistakes in them. In the second box are the cards you’re pretty good at, and that box gets practiced less often than the fi rst, perhaps by a half. The cards in the third box are practiced less often than those in the second, and so on. If you miss a question, make mistakes in the music, fl ub the one-touch pass, you move it up a box so you will practice it more often. The underlying idea is simply that the better your mastery, the less frequent the practice, but if it’s important to retain, it will never disappear completely from your set of practice boxes.
Beware of the familiarity trap: the feeling that you know something and no longer need to practice it. This familiarity can hurt you during self- quizzing if you take shortcuts. Doug Larsen says, “You have to be disciplined to say, ‘All right, I’m going to make myself recall all of this and if I don’t, what did I miss, how did I not know that?’ Whereas if you have an instructor- generated test or quiz, suddenly you have to do it, there’s an expectation, you can’t cheat, you can’t take mental shortcuts around it, you simply have to do that.”
The nine quizzes Andy Sobel administers over the twenty-six meetings of his po liti cal economics course are a simple example of spaced retrieval practice, and of interleaving—
because he rolls forward into each successive quiz questions pertaining to work from the beginning of the semester.
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Interleaving two or more subjects during practice also provides a form of spacing. Interleaving can also help you develop your ability to discriminate later between different kinds of problems and select the right tool from your growing toolkit of solutions.
In interleaving, you don’t move from a complete practice set of one topic to go to another. You switch before each practice is complete. A friend of ours describes his own experience with this: “I go to a hockey class and we’re learning skating skills, puck handling, shooting, and I notice that I get frustrated because we do a little bit of skating and just when I think I’m getting it, we go to stick handling, and I go home frustrated, saying, ‘Why doesn’t this guy keep letting us do these things until we get it?’ ” This is actually the rare coach who understands that it’s more effective to distribute practice across these different skills than polish each one in turn. The athlete gets frustrated because the learning’s not proceeding quickly, but the next week he will be better at all aspects, the skating, the stick handling, and so on, than if he’d dedicated each session to polishing one skill.
Like interleaving, varied practice helps learners build a broad schema, an ability to assess changing conditions and adjust responses to fi t. Arguably, interleaving and variation help learners reach beyond memorization to higher levels of conceptual learning and application, building more rounded, deep, and durable learning, what in motor skills shows up as underlying habit strength.
Something the researchers call “blocked practice” is easily mistaken for varied practice. It’s like the old LP rec ords that could only play their songs in the same sequence. In blocked practice, which is commonly (but not only) found in sports, a drill is run over and over. The player moves from one station to the next, performing a different maneuver at each station.
That’s how the LA Kings were practicing their one- touch pass
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before they got religion and started changing it up. It would be like always practicing fl ashcards in the same order. You need to shuffl e your fl ashcards. If you always practice the same skill in the same way, from the same place on the ice or fi eld, in the same set of math problems, or during the same sequence in a fl ight simulator, you’re starving your learning on short rations of variety.
Spacing, interleaving, and variability are natural features of how we conduct our lives. Every patient visit or football game is a test and an exercise in retrieval practice. Every routine traffi c stop is a test for a cop. And every traffi c stop is different, adding to a cop’s explicit and implicit memory and, if she pays attention, making her more effective in the future. The common term is “learning from experience.” Some people never seem to learn. One difference, perhaps, between those who do and don’t is whether they have cultivated the habit of re-fl ection. Refl ection is a form of retrieval practice (What happened? What did I do? How did it work out?), enhanced with elaboration (What would I do differently next time?).
As Doug Larsen reminds us, the connections between the neurons in the brain are very plastic. “Making the brain work is actually what seems to make a difference— bringing in more complex networks, then using those circuits repeatedly, which makes them more robust.”
4
Embrace Diffi
culties
When Mia Blundetto, age twenty- three, fi rst lieutenant, U.S. Marine Corps, was billeted to logistics in Okinawa, she had to get her ticket punched at jump school.
Describing that moment two years later, she said, “I hate falling, that feeling in your chest. There’s not a day in my life I wanted to jump out of an airplane. I wouldn’t even go down a water slide until I was in middle school. But I was in charge of a platoon of Marines who rigged parachutes and jumped out of airplanes and dropped cargo. It’s one of the most sought-out billets as a logistics offi cer, very hard to get. My command-ing offi cer said, you know, ‘You will be air delivery platoon commander. If you don’t want to do that, I’ll put you somewhere else and we’ll let the next guy have that job.’ There’s no way I could let somebody else have this job that everybody wanted. So I looked him straight in the face and said, ‘Yes, sir, I’ll jump out of planes.’ ”1
