Practising the Bit You Are Bad at

I remember sitting in a windowless training suite back in 2014, nodding politely while a consultant in a slim-fit suit explained exactly how deliberate practice works using a polished slide deck. He made it sound like a seamless, clinical process—just a matter of breaking skills into tiny chunks and applying immediate feedback loops. It sounded lovely, didn’t it? But he didn’t account for the reality of a Tuesday afternoon when you’ve got thirty-two teenagers, three of whom are currently testing the structural integrity of their chairs, and a lesson plan that is rapidly disintegrating. In those seminars, they talk about deliberate practice as if you have the luxury of a controlled laboratory, rather than a room full of living, breathing, unpredictable human beings.

I’m not here to sell you on more pedagogical jargon or expensive coaching frameworks that fall apart the moment a student asks to go to the toilet. Instead, I want to talk about what actually happens when you try to strip a skill down to its bones in a real classroom. I’m going to show you how to find those small, manageable wins that don’t require an extra hour of unpaid prep time. We’re going to look at how to make it work when the bell is about to ring and your energy is hitting zero.

Beyond Anders Ericsson Mastering the Skill Acquisition Process

Now, we have to talk about Anders Ericsson. If you’ve spent any time in a CPD session lately, you’ve likely heard his name tossed around like a magic wand. His work on Anders Ericsson mastery theory is the bedrock of this whole concept, suggesting that greatness isn’t about innate talent, but about a very specific, very taxing kind of effort. But here is the rub: in a research paper, “effort” is a controlled variable. In my classroom, effort is a finite resource that evaporates by lunch.

The actual skill acquisition process isn’t just about doing something over and over until your fingers ache; that’s just mindless repetition, and we’ve all seen how much that bores a Year 9 class. True mastery requires pushing just past the edge of what you can currently do. It’s about building those internalised mental models that allow a student to see a math problem and instinctively recognise the pattern before they’ve even picked up a pen. It’s difficult, it’s messy, and it’s often much more exhausting than the flashy “engagement” strategies we’re sold in staff meetings.

Managing Cognitive Load When the Classroom Gets Loud

Here is the reality of the classroom: you can have the most theoretically sound lesson plan in the world, but if the room is buzzing with that specific, frantic energy of thirty teenagers all trying to find a lost pen at once, your carefully constructed cognitive load in learning goes right out the window. When the noise level spikes, students aren’t just being “difficult”; their working memory is being hijacked by environmental static. You can’t expect them to engage in the deep, focused repetition required for true skill acquisition when they are using half their brainpower just to filter out the person tapping their ruler in the back row.

To make this work, you have to become a gatekeeper of attention. I’ve learned that you can’t just “do” deliberate practice; you have to curate the environment so it’s even possible. This means breaking tasks down into much smaller, bite-sized chunks than a textbook would suggest. If you try to push a complex new concept while the room is loud, you aren’t teaching; you’re just shouting into a vacuum. You have to wait for that brief, fragile moment of quiet to introduce the core mechanic, ensuring they have the mental space to actually build those essential mental models before the chaos returns.

Five Ways to Make Deliberate Practice Survive the Reality of Period Four

• Stop trying to “do” it to everyone at once. Deliberate practice is precision work, not a blanket strategy. If you try to have thirty kids performing high-stakes, error-corrected repetitions simultaneously, you’ll just end up with thirty kids making the same mistakes at high speed. Pick a small group, or even just one specific sub-skill, and tighten the screws there first.
• Shrink the feedback loop until it’s almost uncomfortable. The “deliberate” bit of the practice only works if the gap between the error and the correction is tiny. If a student does a task and you don’t get around to marking it until next Tuesday, the practice wasn’t deliberate; it was just busywork. You need to catch the slip the moment it happens, ideally while they’re still holding the pen.
• Focus on the “micro-skill,” not the whole damn lesson. You can’t “deliberately practice” an entire essay in twenty minutes. You can, however, deliberately practice the transition between a piece of evidence and an analytical sentence. Break the big, intimidating goals into tiny, repeatable movements that don’t require a PhD to master.
• Embrace the “sweet spot” of frustration. If the pupils are breezing through the task, they aren’t practicing; they’re just performing what they already know. If they’re staring at you in total, silent despair, you’ve gone too far. You’re looking for that specific level of cognitive strain where they’re working hard but actually making progress. It should feel a bit like a workout, not a stroll in the park.
• Forget the fancy worksheets; use the “live” correction. The best deliberate practice I’ve seen doesn’t involve a printed handout with twenty empty boxes. It’s me standing at the front, scribbling a student’s flawed attempt on the board, and having the class collectively dissect exactly where the logic tripped up. It’s messy, it’s loud, and it works far better than any polished resource I’ve ever bought from a catalogue.

The Reality Check: Three Things to Take Away

Stop aiming for perfection in every drill; deliberate practice in a real classroom is about finding those small, high-impact moments of focused repetition that actually stick, rather than trying to engineer a flawless academic laboratory.

Focus on the feedback loop, not just the repetition; if you’re just having them do the same task over and over without correcting the misconceptions in real-time, you’re not practicing, you’re just reinforcing mistakes.

Protect the cognitive space; the best deliberate practice happens when the environment is controlled enough that students can actually focus on the specific skill you’re targeting, rather than fighting the noise of the room or the chaos of a poorly planned transition.

The Gap Between Theory and the Timetable

“The problem with most literature on deliberate practice is that it assumes you have the luxury of a controlled laboratory; in a real classroom, ‘mastery’ isn’t about perfect repetition, it’s about finding those tiny, jagged moments of focus amidst the chaos and making them count before the bell rings.”

Ellery Mwangi-Selkirk

The Reality Check

Look, we’ve covered a lot of ground, from the high-level theory of skill acquisition to the messy reality of managing cognitive load when the radiator is clanking and the Year 9s are restless. At its core, deliberate practice isn’t about adding more to your plate; it’s about being ruthlessly intentional with the small windows of time we actually have. It’s about moving past the mindless repetition that looks like learning but isn’t, and instead focusing on those tiny, targeted adjustments that actually move the needle. If you can find a way to help a student face a specific difficulty—rather than just letting them coast through what they already know—you’ve done the hard work of real teaching.

I know it feels like there’s always one more initiative or one more “game-changing” strategy to master, but don’t let the noise drown out the craft. You don’t need a perfect, textbook-ready classroom to make deliberate practice work; you just need the willingness to stop, observe, and pivot when something isn’t landing. Teaching is a marathon run through a series of sprints, and some days you’ll feel like you’ve mastered the art, while other days you’re just trying to keep your head above water. Just remember that the small wins matter. If you can get one student to tackle one difficult concept with focus today, you’ve won the day.

About Ellery Mwangi-Selkirk

Most educational advice is written for a classroom that does not exist — twenty motivated pupils, unlimited preparation time, no behaviour to manage. I write for the room you are actually in. What retrieval practice looks like when marking is already three weeks behind, why the seating plan matters more than the starter activity, and which of the last decade's initiatives left anything behind. Nineteen years taught me that the good ideas survive contact with a wet Wednesday and the rest do not.