30 Day Challenge!! 15 Minutes A Day Of "Deliberate Practice".

We are creating this as an event so we can post and update each other on our progress! We invite everyone in the school to participate in our 30 day challenge to have "Deliberate Practice" for 15 minutes a day-no matter what!! Read in the comments about various aspects of Deliberate Practice, but the basic premise is very simple. Strip away your entire practice time to one specific goal that you can work toward achieving in that practice session. Focus all your energy on that one specific goal. Turn off the phone. Turn off the internet. Don't let your brain take you away from working on the goal. It's only 15 minutes-easy right? right? ha! 1) Define the problem (what do I want this note/phrase to sound like?) 2) Analyze the problem (what is causing it to sound like this?) 3) Identify potential solutions (what can I tweak to make it sound more like I want?) 4) Test the potential solutions to select the most effective one (what tweaks seem to work best?) 5) Implement the best solution (make these changes permanent) 6) Monitor implementation (do these changes continue to produce the results I’m looking for?) Or simpler yet, check out this model from Daniel Coyle’s book The Talent Code. 1) Pick a target 2) Reach for it 3) Evaluate the gap between the target and the reach 4) Return to step one Deliberate practice: (From Wikipedia) Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of Psychology at Florida State University, has been a pioneer in researching deliberate practice and what it means. According to Ericsson: People believe that because expert performance is qualitatively different from normal performance the expert performer must be endowed with characteristics qualitatively different from those of normal adults. [...] We agree that expert performance is qualitatively different from normal performance and even that expert performers have characteristics and abilities that are qualitatively different from or at least outside the range of those of normal adults. However, we deny that these differences are immutable, that is, due to innate talent. Only a few exceptions, most notably height, are genetically prescribed. Instead, we argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain. One of Ericsson's core findings is that how expert one becomes at a skill has more to do with how one practices than with merely performing a skill a large number of times. An expert breaks down the skills that are required to be expert and focuses on improving those skill chunks during practice or day-to-day activities, often paired with immediate coaching feedback. Another important feature of deliberate practice lies in continually practicing a skill at more challenging levels with the intention of mastering it. Deliberate practice is also discussed in the books Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin and The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle,[6] among others.