Practice is essential for learning. Ask any professional athlete, musician or home cook: you get better at something by doing it over and over. Outliers author Malcolm Gladwell explained that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert. For kids, whether they are learning to learn to walk, tie their shoes, ride a bike or learn to read, practice is how we learn new things. Whether a student dreams of being ‘pretty good’ or an ‘expert’, practice is essential .

Practice involves essential components to be effective.

• Begin with the end in mind: Humans are innately goal-driven to feel happy, competent, feel in control or help others . Best-selling Grit author Angela Duckworth describes the importance of “deliberate practice,” centered on a “stretch goal” . You don’t spend hours learning to play the guitar for the sake of playing the guitar; you practice for hours to learn to play a song. Children are driven to tie their shoes because they want to be independent, and/or Big Sister or classmates can tie their shoes. Students will persist with sounding out “C-A-T” because it feels good and/or makes them feel competent, and/or their ultimate goal is to read The Cat in the Hat on their own. Helping readers identify a clear goal, whether it is learning to read a specific book or join classmates in discussing a series, can fuel a learner’s desire to practice.

• Focus – Combining attention and intention are essential for practice to improve skills. Focus author Daniel Goleman highlights the importance of attention, intention and effort. Dr. Duckworth emphasizes the importance of both time on task and “high quality practice”. An athlete must pay attention to specific elements of an effective throw, kick or shot. Musicians must intentionally practice a difficult section repeatedly in order to refine their performance. Students must spend time intentionally practicing decoding, fluency and comprehension that enable them to learn to read.

• Struggle – Jo Boaler, Stanford professor and author of Limitless Mind, says that “…if you aren’t struggling, you aren’t really learning.” UCLA scientists Elizabeth and Robert Bjork talk about the importance of “desirable difficulties” as their research found that the brain needs to be pushed to do things that are hard. We know that humans gravitate towards doing pleasurable tasks and avoid difficult ones. This is why I am writing and not doing the dishes at the moment. As reading is a mentally taxing endeavor, beginning readers need adult support to work through the struggles of sounding out C-A-T to get to the joyful moments when they can independently chant familiar nursery rhymes.

• ‘Just right’ Practice: Athletes tell us that practice is essential to improving skills, but what kind of practice is important? Best-selling author Daniel Pink talked about finding ‘the sweet spot’ when it comes to finding practice opportunities that are ‘just right’, or not too hard and not too easy. He summarized the importance of ‘just right’ practice when he explained “Goldilocks tasks”:

  If a task is too easy, people—whether they’re children or adults—will get bored. If it’s too hard, they’ll get anxious or frustrated. You want that sweet spot, where something is within our range of challenge—not too easy, not too hard, but just challenging enough that we’re engaged and being pushed to a slightly higher level. Those moments are some of the most optimal experiences in human existence—what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow. In flow moments, we lose a sense of ourselves, we’re in the moment, and we’re deeply engaged. We need to create more of those moments in school. If you’re doing something easy, you’re never going to improve; if you’re doing something too hard, you’re not going to succeed, so you won’t improve that way either. But if you have a Goldilocks task, you’re much more likely to move toward greater mastery.

Supporting practice for young learners is essential in their learning-to-read quest.  Whether we are teachers, parents, school leaders or volunteers, adults are essential facilitators to help students establish a practice routine to build their skills and confidence.