[00:00:00] Christine J Ko: Welcome back to SEE HEAR FEEL. I'm interviewing two people at the same time. One is Dr. Jong-Sung Yoon, and the other is Kyle Harwell, soon to be Dr. Kyle Harwell. Dr. Jong-Sung Yoon PhD is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of South Dakota. He received his PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Florida State University in 2015, during which time he overlapped a little bit with Kyle. He has both an MA and BA degrees from Yonsei University in South Korea. His research interests include memory, cognitive aging, human factors, and the development of expertise. Kyle Harwell, again, soon to be Dr. Kyle Harwell, received his MA from Florida State University and will be receiving his PhD in Cognitive Psychology, like Dr. Yoon, in the summer of 2022. Kyle Harwell has the distinction of being Dr. Anders Ericsson's last graduate student. His undergraduate degree is from the University of West Florida. Both Doctors Yoon and Harwell are grounded in the study of expert performance, the essence of deliberate practice, and applying the ideas of deliberate practice and the expert performance approach to the study of human performance in various fields, including in healthcare. A wonderful review of this topic is in The Journal of Expertise by Kyle Harwell, and a link is in the show notes. And another important link is to one of Dr. Yoon's papers; the link is also in the show notes. A really in-depth dive into deliberate practice is in a book that I love titled, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, a book of Dr. Anders Ericsson's, that you can find on Amazon or in bookstores. Welcome to Kyle and Jong-Sung.
[00:01:43] The first question I wanted to ask these two wonderful experts in deliberate practice is, in your words, what is deliberate practice?
[00:01:52] Jong-Sung Yoon: Deliberate practice is what asks you to be fully concentrated during the practice activities with very high level of cognitive effort as well as physical effort, demanding, depending on domain. As parents, you can hire really expensive coaches, tutors, other expert to help your kids. But when learner is not ready, and if they're not fully focused during those activities, could be still very meaningless or not that effective.
[00:02:26] Christine J Ko: Great. Thank you. And Kyle, do you want to answer?
[00:02:29] Kyle Harwell: First, I wanted to say, thanks again, Christine, for giving us this opportunity to talk about the deliberate practice. So just to add on to what Jong-Sung just said, I think that motivational factor really is key, right? So it doesn't matter how well designed the practice is if the learner isn't ready or willing, or, sufficiently motivated to take advantage of whatever the practice environment is. Deliberate practice generally refers to structured training activities that have met certain criteria that Dr. Ericsson and other researchers have found are characteristic of the types of practice that's routinely performed by experts.
[00:03:02] The first is a no-brainer: the task should be well defined and have a clear goal. Second, the trainee should be able to do the task on their own. Third, the trainee should be receiving immediate feedback and actionable feedback as Jong-Sung said. Fourth, the trainee should be allowed to engage in the activity repeatedly, so they get multiple attempts or multiple practice trials per session. And then finally, the assessment of learner skill, as well as the design of the next stages of practice, should be overseen by a qualified teacher or coach. So these kind of relatively rigorous elements of deliberate practice are what differentiate deliberate practice from what a lot of people colloquially refer to as practice, which is really just repeated engagement in the domain versus a highly structured activity.
[00:03:43] Christine J Ko: Is it possible to be your own self-coach?
[00:03:47] Kyle Harwell: Yes, or at least that's that's the general thinking, particularly when you're getting to really high levels of expertise.
[00:03:53] Jong-Sung Yoon: Just try to satisfy just some of the principles of deliberate practice. I think that's better than doing same things over and over without cognitive effort.
[00:04:04] Christine J Ko: If I really want to maximize efficiency and continue to improve throughout my professional life, I probably would benefit from finding a coach in say, dermatology or dermatopathology. That would still probably advance my skills more efficiently, maybe, than my setting up my own kind of practice activity.
[00:04:28] Jong-Sung Yoon: Again, it doesn't necessarily have to be a perfect deliberate practice activity.
[00:04:31] Kyle Harwell: Regarding practice and professions specifically, I think one of the challenges, and this is true across multiple domains of profession, not necessarily just in healthcare. Once you enter into most professions, generally your incentive structure for maintaining your performance changes. In one of Dr. Ericsson's older papers, they talked about the difference between maintenance practice and practice directed toward improving performance. I would imagine for most doctors, after 10-plus years of very grueling education, they're ready to start actually seeing patients and actually, doing the job versus doing the learning. And for most professions they're set up the similar way. You've established that you have a particular set of skills and then for the rest of your career, really, the only extrinsic motivational factor is to maintain your level of skill per se. Improving your skills might be something that a person takes upon themself. It's not necessarily built into the job's incentive structure. The idea of changing your mindset toward one of continual improvement versus maintenance is a huge first step. You don't need to do all the five elements of a deliberate practice in order to have a very effective, personal practice plan. As many as you can get in there, particularly the seeking out feedback, I think, is key. It's more about making sure that your goal of continuing to improve your performance versus just maintaining it, I think, is maybe the best way to frame it.
[00:05:49] Christine J Ko: Yeah. That's so helpful. Can you briefly speak about how you came to study deliberate practice?
[00:05:55] Jong-Sung Yoon: I love sports. Whenever I see some kind of super exceptional performance in sports it always makes me think how it is even possible.
[00:06:04] Christine J Ko: Kyle?
[00:06:04] Kyle Harwell: I've always had a fascination with expert performers, and how they're able to achieve. The incredible feats of skill that they do and make it look easy. And that making it look easy component is really what I think drove me to go into Psychology for my undergraduate degree and then pursue it at the graduate level. What really caught my attention is the differences in the way that people speak about expert performance, or expertise. So if you look at the way using the sports example, if you look at the way that, let's say, the announcers or the telecasters or the sports talk shows talk about these professional athletes. You'll hear a lot of discussion about talent, innate talent, giftedness, things like that. But when you actually look at the interviews of the professionals themselves, you see much more of a shift in the discussion toward practice history and a lot of hard work, right? The fact that you see this pattern repeat itself across many domains, that really caught my attention when I was a young undergraduate student.
[00:07:01] Christine J Ko: Can you give an example then of how you use deliberate practice in your life?
[00:07:06] Jong-Sung Yoon: One of the key principles of deliberate practice is yes, it should be challenging, but still doable. So when I get out from my comfort zone, it tells me where I need to improve. Then I try to design some activities. Or just work really hard to improve that specific aspect as a teacher or a researcher. And it's not easy, because many times it hurts my self-esteem; I experience some awkward moments as well.
[00:07:33] Kyle Harwell: Going off of that a bit, one of the important things to consider for applying deliberate practice to daily life would be... in my case, it's about reframing failure, or reframing how I attribute hitting a wall. My study of deliberate practice has taught me that's basically the best signal that you need a coach.
[00:07:54] Personal example of this: I'm interested in learning Mandarin. It's the most difficult thing I've ever tried to do. Given that I had been working on it for a few months, and I was really struggling, particularly with just developing my vocabulary and sentence comprehension. And what I recognized was that the production problem, which would be because I could not pronounce certain things, I was having a hard time remembering, like maintaining, the whole sentence or phrase, whatever, in my mind, that was a particular issue that was limiting my progress. So I've come to the conclusion that I will need to find a skilled tutor or coach or someone to help me with understanding pronunciation. And that, I think, will help me get past that wall. But the idea is because I've worked with deliberate practice, and I know that there is a path forward eventually. So the idea of really looking at why you are not successful or why you're encountering failure or mistakes. And identifying the causal mechanisms of those failure, I think, is one major difference between the way I think about practice and training now than the way I thought about it before I was introduced to Dr. Ericsson's work.
[00:08:56] Christine J Ko: I love that. Yeah. I've never thought of deliberate practice in quite that way, but I like that you framed it that it's a way to think about failure and kind of have a path to move forward. I did want to cover mental representations...
[00:09:14] Kyle Harwell: The relationship between mental representations and expert performance, at least according to Dr. Erickson, is that it's really the underlying mental representations that are driving the performance differences between experts and novices. So where this idea of the mental representations really became more widely studied was in the domain of studying chess. So the idea, initially, before there were really good behavioral studies of chess experts, the assumption was that chess Grand Masters were just geniuses. They were all super intelligent. They could process all that information like a computer. And that every move they're making was based on a series of really complicated calculations they were doing in their head. Where in reality, it seems much, much more common that they're relying on these patterns that they've stored over many years of really difficult and concerted effort and practice. So the idea of experts being able to do the amazing feats of skill that they do being driven more by what they've learned versus what their innate abilities are is a defining characteristic of Dr. Ericsson's model of expertise. And it's one that differentiates it from classical models of expertise as well.
[00:10:20] So you could argue that mental representations are like the engine in the car that is expert performance, and deliberate practices is what builds that engine.
[00:10:28] Christine J Ko: I think that the mental representation concept helps me because I'm in a visual field of dermatology and also visual field of dermatopathology. So what I see on the patient or what I see in a microscopic slide, that's how I come to a diagnosis, and I have mental representations in my mind of what a given disease looks like. And so it clicks in a System 1, Type 1, instinctual, expert type of thinking. Like this is this because it is. And then I can use System 2; Jong-Sung mentioned before: metacognition. I can use that and explain why. We call it in dermatology and dermatopathology, especially dermatopathology, pattern recognition.
[00:11:12] But I think that pattern recognition is essentially developing as many mental representations as you can for a given disease and then multiple diseases. I love this concept of deliberate practice because as Kyle just mentioned, it makes it feel to me that expertise is achievable. Do you have any final thoughts?
[00:11:36] Jong-Sung Yoon: People just easily say, oh, the natural talent is more important. And when we see the sports event, the commentators, even former players say too often and easily, Okay, that player, that kid, so talented, so natural... without deeply thinking about what that means. So it actually also really bothered me.
[00:11:57] Christine J Ko: Awesome. Kyle?
[00:11:58] Kyle Harwell: If I really am serious about getting better, I use the Mandarin example, previously. Like I know I'm never going to be like a simultaneous translator for English to Mandarin. I would never want to put in that much time. But I do have a particular goal in mind. I want to have conversational proficiency to speak with my in-laws and have a meaningful conversation with them. So having that goal in mind is really good, because it also puts parameters on the total amount of effort that I'll have to put into it. I think that's what overwhelms a lot of people.
[00:12:24] And I think when you're talking about, you're already an expert in your field, right? Your performance goal is just continual improvement, right? Being the best in the world is something that a lot of people would aspire to. But it's not a very clear path to getting there. But the idea of making small, incremental improvements on your own personal performance day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year;, that's something that I think is very achievable, and I think deliberate practice is a really good way to keep yourself motivated, and also provides a framework for actually achieving your goals.
[00:12:54] Christine J Ko: Thank you very much to both of you for spending time with me. I really appreciate it.
[00:12:59] Jong-Sung Yoon: Yeah. Thanks for having us today.
[00:13:00] Kyle Harwell: Yeah, thanks. It was fun.
