Practise Like a Pro: What Teaching Can Learn from Deliberate Practice

Imagine if footballers prepared for the World Cup by just playing more five-a-side down the park. Or if Beyoncé rehearsed for a world tour by singing in the shower and hoping for the best. Ridiculous, right? Yet that’s often how we approach teaching: “just keep teaching more lessons, and you’ll get better.”

But what if there’s a smarter way — one that athletes, musicians, and surgeons have been using for years? Spoiler: it’s called deliberate practice, and it might just be the teacher’s secret weapon.

What Is Deliberate Practice? (And Why Piano Lessons Matter Here)

Deliberate practice isn’t about grinding through endless hours. It’s about practising with precision. A pianist doesn’t play the whole concerto start to finish when they’re learning it. They slow down, target the tricky bar with the awkward left-hand stretch, and repeat it with feedback until it’s smooth. Only then do they slot it back into the whole piece.

For teachers, the classroom is our concert hall. But unlike musicians, we often skip the rehearsal and just go live. Deliberate practice asks us to step back: break teaching into small moves, practise those moves in low-stakes settings, get feedback, and refine them before the “performance” of the lesson.

The Research Base

Deliberate practice is grounded in decades of evidence. Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson’s classic studies (1993) showed that top performers in music and sport don’t just log hours; they improve through focused, feedback-rich practice targeting specific weaknesses. Later, Macnamara, Hambrick and Oswald (2014) confirmed this across domains, finding deliberate practice explains a significant share of performance differences — more than talent or experience alone.

Education offers clear proof. At Uncommon Schools in the US, teachers rehearse classroom moves with coaching and feedback. The result: students in low-income communities now achieve at or above national averages. In Shanghai, lesson study has long embedded repeated practice and refinement of lessons, contributing to world-leading PISA results. And in Volusia County, Florida, every teacher created a deliberate practice plan linked to goals, leading to documented rises in teaching quality and student achievement.

Across contexts, the message is consistent: when teachers practise deliberately, teaching improves — and when teaching improves, students learn more.

How to Use Deliberate Practice in Your Classroom

Deliberate practice has a few active ingredients that research shows make the difference:

• Choose a precise focus (not a vague area like “questioning” but one clear move).

• Practise outside the classroom (so you can rehearse without pressure).

• Get immediate feedback (so errors don’t harden into habits).

• Repeat until fluent (automation only comes through repetition).

• Apply in class, then reflect (closing the loop between practice and performance).

Fidelity to the whole process matters: if you skip rehearsal, or avoid feedback, the impact is lost. And just like athletes or musicians, teachers need to set aside regular time to build that rhythm of practice. Growth comes not from a one-off attempt, but from returning to the same skill, week after week.

Here’s how to do it:

Step 1. Pinpoint one high-leverage move.
Be precise. Don’t say “I’ll improve questioning.” Instead: “I’ll extend my wait time after asking a question to at least 5 seconds.”

Step 2. Rehearse outside the spotlight.
Find a colleague or coach. Role-play. Try it three or four times in a row. It might feel awkward, but the evidence is clear: practice is most powerful when it’s low-stakes and isolated from live performance.

Step 3. Demand immediate feedback.
Ask your partner to stop you mid-flow, correct phrasing, or suggest tweaks. This keeps practice targeted and prevents bad habits embedding.

Step 4. Repeat until it feels natural.
Three or four runs isn’t enough. Deliberate practice requires multiple cycles until the move becomes automatic. Think of it as pressing “save” on your teaching muscle memory.

Step 5. Transfer and reflect.
Pick a lesson where you’ll deliberately try your new move. After class, ask: Did I do it? How did students respond? What’s my next refinement?

💡 Example: A teacher wants smoother transitions. Instead of “trying harder,” she practises giving a 10-second direction three times with a coach. In class, the transition takes half the time, students settle faster, and the lesson starts with focus.

Common pitfalls to avoid:

• Tackling too many skills at once (progress gets diluted).

• Skipping rehearsal and expecting change to happen mid-lesson (old habits dominate).

• Treating feedback as judgement rather than as the engine of improvement.

Bottom line: Schedule time, stick to the full cycle, and practise with rhythm. It’s fidelity to each stage — not the occasional burst of effort — that turns small changes into big shifts in classroom culture and student behaviour.

Reflection & Call to Action

The beauty of deliberate practice is its simplicity: small, focused steps add up to big change. When teachers build this into their routines, accountability shifts from “being judged” to “getting better.” Over time, it changes culture: classrooms become calmer, feedback becomes normal, and students mirror their teachers’ growth mindset by being more open to feedback themselves.

If you’d like to dive deeper, here are three practical techniques you can sharpen through deliberate practice — each with its own blog to get you started:

• 7 Steps to Make Learning Stick: From Mind to Memory — sharpen your ability to help students retain what they learn (through spaced practice, retrieval, etc.).

• Cold-Calling That Works — practise your questioning and interaction skills in class, making students more engaged and holding everyone accountable.

• Making Maths Meaningful Every Day — focus on how to present mathematics in ways that connect with students, with clarity, relevance, and consistency.

Each of these techniques offers excellent opportunities for targeted rehearsal, feedback, and gradual refinement.

👉 If you found this useful, join the EBTD newsletter for monthly, research-backed tips, free classroom tools, and updates on our training in Bangladesh — no spam, just what helps. Sign up to the newsletter and please share this blog with colleagues or on your social channels so more teachers can benefit. Together we can improve outcomes and change lives.

References

• Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. Link

• Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: A meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1608–1618. Link

• Lemov, D., Woolway, E., & Yezzi, K. (2012). Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better. Jossey-Bass.

• Uncommon Schools. (n.d.). Teacher development and rehearsal practices. Website

• Huang, R., & Shimizu, Y. (2016). Improving teaching, developing teachers and teacher education: Lesson study in research and practice in China and Japan. ZDM Mathematics Education, 48, 393–409. Link

• Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., & Gardner, M. (2017). Effective Teacher Professional Development. Learning Policy Institute. Link

• Volusia County Schools (2013). Deliberate Practice Plans: Linking professional growth to student achievement. Florida Department of Education report. Archived summary