Why expert practice?
The practice of experts may appear to be a source of mystery more than science. After all, most individual practice happens in private, away from the eyes and ears of students and audiences. In addition, experts often don’t know the exact features of their practice that result in the most improvement. While practicing, they are justifiably focused on improving, not the analysis of their moment-to-moment activity. But behind closed doors, experts do the same thing as effective practicers at all levels: they turn passages that are currently problematic into passages they can perform reliably and beautifully. They just do it really well.
Learning is adaptation. It’s change. To get great at a skill, experts have changed how they perform that skill over time. Every expert was once a beginner. Ronaldo, Kleiber, Nuryev, and Coltrane all behaved like beginners, making the sorts of gross errors beginners make. They succeeded at some tasks (the easy ones) and failed at others (the harder ones). Over time (and trials) they expanded what they were capable of doing. Time and again, they confronted tasks that were just beyond their capabilities and adapted what they thought and did to succeed. In other words, they learned new, better behaviors. They expanded what they were capable of doing by adjusting and refining the things they could already do well. This expansion is the observable unfolding of expertise but doesn’t account for the processes underpinning adaptation.
To understand how experts improve as efficiently and effectively as their performance demands require, it helps to look at what experts are doing in the practice room to find clues about why they do what they do. Practice behavior is the outcome of thought. Musicians can only aim to reduce the errors they perceive, and perceiving errors requires an intent, an assessment of what was actually played, and recognition of discrepancies between the two. Expert practice behavior looks and sounds the way it does because of the way experts process information. Expert practice shows expert thought.
Skill develops in tandem with changes in perception and cognition. As novice musicians transition into experts, they learn to hear and think about music differently. Specifically, they learn to imagine what they intend to play with more clarity and they learn to hear more subtle errors in what they actually play. Refined perceptions of error afford experts the ability to aim attention at subtle updates to what they do, leading to elegantly refined motor behavior. These refinements are required for the resulting skill development, yet they often happen below conscious awareness.
Surface features of individual practice may appear to differ substantially among practicing experts. However, through the noisy differences, expert commonalities reveal patterns in how they adapt to reach goals. Experts adapt by clearly representing intent, accurately assessing what is played, perceiving subtle discrepancies between the two, and exploring ways to bring them together.
We look to expert practice not to simply mimic what experts do. What they do in the practice room is an extension of what they hear and think. We look to expert practice to learn what they intend to play, what they think about what they hear, and how they adapt to reduce the discrepancy between the two. In other words, we study expert practice to learn how they optimally reduce error. Optimal perception and reduction of error is a central feature of effective practice at every ability level affording the development of expertise. Learning to think like an expert must come before performing like one. The mastery of expert musicians is the outcome of thinking like an expert, and learners across the skill spectrum can begin thinking like experts now.
