Range vs Narrow Focus - Ms Gandee's Blog

10,000 hours of purposeful practice or of unstructured dabbling. Which is most likely to make your child successful? 
 

Who will be more successful, the child who dedicates herself to at least 10,000 hours of purposeful practice on, let’s say, the piano from an early age or the child who dabbles with a range of instruments? Which is more likely to become a professional musician? 

It turns out that the answer is significantly more nuanced than I would have thought before reading Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. Books like Bounce by Matthew Syed and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell have popularised the notion that at least 10,000 hours are required to become an elite musician or sportsman, and that, encouragingly, in a number of fields it is the tenacity and the purposeful practice that count rather than natural talent. Epstein agrees that this is true in some fields, those he calls ‘kind’ learning environments. These are ones, such as chess or golf, where patterns repeat, feedback is immediate and clear, and similar challenges occur repeatedly. These domains have been termed ‘kind’ because narrow focused practice pays off and problems or challenges are predictable. However, most domains are ‘wicked’. In these, environments, feedback can be confusing and patterns are either non-existent or difficult to spot. It turns out that in these domains, varied experience is far more useful than a large amount of practice focused on one area. 

Indeed, extensive, but narrow practice can be counterproductive. Classically trained musicians often find it difficult if not impossible to perform jazz because the essence of their musical upbringing has been that they should play the notes on the score exactly as they are written. Improvisation feels alien, transgressive. Great jazz musicians, on the other hand, often can’t read music. They learn to play by experimenting until they produce the sounds they want. There is a joke amongst jazz musicians. You ask, “can you read music?” and the musician says, “not enough to hurt my playing.” This isn’t to say that one method of learning to play music is better than another, simply that they are different. 

It turns out that creativity, the type of creativity required to improvise, can be difficult to nurture, but all too easy to destroy. Research has shown an average of six household rules for typical children, but just one in families with extremely creative children. The parents certainly let their children know when they get things wrong, but after the event. They aren’t prescriptive beforehand. Their children don’t have to stick to the notes so to speak. 

For some parents this may seem chaotic. Equally, for many parents, it feels counterintuitive to suggest that it is at best pointless and at worst harmful not to get their children ahead by starting them early on music, sport, Mandarin or whatever is the hobby of the moment. Yet, contrary to popular belief, most top sports players were not ruthlessly channelled into one sport from an early age. Rather, they played a wide range of sports before specialising relatively late.  In 2014, a team of German scientists published a study showing that members of their national team, which had just won the World Cup, were typically late specialisers who didn’t play more organised soccer than amateur-league players until age 22 or later. They spent more of their childhood and adolescence playing non-organised football and other sports. Another football study published two years later matched players for skill at age 11 and tracked them for two years. Those who participated in more sports and non-organised football, “but not more organised soccer practice/training”, improved more by age 13. Findings like these have been echoed in a huge array of sports, from hockey to volleyball. 

And yet, most parents, understandably, imagine that concentrating on one sport will bring more success more quickly to their offspring. 

In school we similarly assume that rapid progress is the best sort of progress and that getting lots of the answers right in class indicates successful learning. As an aside, it seems to me that we have become increasingly obsessed with racing to the next milestone. Let’s stop for a moment instead of speeding to the end of this paragraph. What  worthwhile experience is improved by completing it more quickly? Eating a great meal, watching a wonderful film, spending time with your children? You see my point. Of course, the internet is full of life hacks to give you more time by doing everything more quickly. Frankly, I recommend creating more time by doing less. Get off the hamster wheel.  

Back to life at school, David Epstein tells us that we don’t want our pupils to get things right all the time. We want them to struggle to make connections for themselves rather than mindlessly following patterns. Alarmingly, research has shown that although a significant percentage of questions in class start out as making-connections problems, in some countries well-meaning teachers give so many hints that not one of these questions end up as making-connections problems. That’s right none of them. The educational culture in countries such as the US, and indeed the UK, is such that pupils don’t expect to struggle in class without the teacher intervening. Teachers whose pupils get questions right in class are highly ranked by their pupils. The pupils feel as though they are making good progress. But when they came to take tests a few weeks or months later, they performed worse, significantly worse than pupils who had struggled more in class on the same topic. Why? Because, amazingly, struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning. What can we do as parents? Explain to our children why we are not going to help them with their homework, make them a healthy snack and encourage them to come to find us when they have solved the problem themselves. Will this work? There is a good chance if your child’s school encourages the same approach. 

I have sometimes looked at a busy cv of someone applying for a job at my school and wondered whether having quite so many jobs might indicate that they don’t stick at things. David Epstein turns this on its head and points out that in order to find a career that suits who we are, it is imperative that we try different things. Why stick with something if it isn’t right for you?  

He suggests that dabbling at school and university makes it more likely that you will find the right job. He points to a study by Ofer Malamud of English and Welsh students on the one hand and Scottish students on the other. As we know, in England and Wales, students narrow their subject choices at A level and then again when they choose a degree course. In Scotland, the 4 year university course gives a broader range of options. Malamud found that students from English and Welsh universities were more likely to change careers completely than their later-specialising Scottish counterparts. Having more opportunities to sample different subjects at university allowed Scottish graduates to make better career decisions. 

What can we take away from Range, which I thoroughly recommend you read? That we shouldn’t worry whether our child is the first to master a skill, that we should encourage them to try a range of activities, that desirable difficulty is important in the classroom and that we accept that real, sustainable progress may look more like zigzagging than we had ever imagined.