I just read .
One of the book’s main arguments is this:
- Performance is improvement is driven by: maintaining intense focus, staying on the edge of one’s comfort zone, getting immediate feedback, identifying weak points and developing practice techniques designed specifically to address these weaknesses.
- This cycle is best done in fields where there is a long history of teaching that clearly articulates specific phases of mastery (musical instruments, chess, etc. all have fairly linear performance paths).
- Because deliberate practice is hard work, those individuals who are successful over the long run have generally found ways to keep themselves motivated and have crafted supportive environments for themselves.
Jal Mehta’s book thoughtfully narrated how teaching failed to develop a professional body of knowledge.
Rather than refining practice by building a long-history of evolutionary cataloguing of what works or conducting rigorous research on teaching techniques, the teaching profession formed through continuous bruising battles around contract rights.
In many cases, these battles led to real improvements in teaching workforce conditions; however, they also came at the expense of a professionalization of the practice.
So, for most of the 20th century, teaching suffered from a lack of a body of knowledge around performance progression *and* a lack of a culture of feedback.
The lessons put forth in Peak have in most ways been ignored.
Children have likely suffered.
Enter Harriet Ball.
Enter Doug Lemov.
Enter Dave Levin.
Enter Mike Goldstein.
And so forth.
Basically, you have a group of educators saying: what the f**k?
Why, in one of the world’s oldest professions, do we not have a cannon of performance progression?
I am highly skeptical of most human capital education reform efforts.
I think state mandated teacher evaluations will yield little over time.
I think most education schools care more about spreading ideology than building a knowledge base around effective teaching.
I think most districts are hopeless when it comes to giving timely and precise feedback to teachers.
My guess is that the way forward is supporting the Lemov / Relay effort to capture the practices of best teachers, and then to compliment this evolutionary approach with RCTs when feasible.
And move from district operation of schools to non-profit operation of schools (so as to better implement cycles of feedback + creating intensive and insular cultures of performance perfection, as with music academies).
But given our starting point, we’re probably decades away from hitting peak teacher performance at scale.