Whether competing in the Olympics or playing a musical instrument, expertise takes years of practice to develop. “Practice makes perfect” according to the old saying, but is it true? Unless you practice doing it well, you’re just developing habits that you’ll have to unlearn later. It’s more accurate to say, “Practice makes permanent.”
In learning anything, there’s a lot of failure along the way. If you never make mistakes, you can be sure you’re not learning. The key is to learn from your mistakes, correct them, and practice doing it better.
Good, timely feedback is essential to this process. At the University of St. Thomas, I teach engineering students to write reports for their clients in the capstone Senior Design Clinic. Eventually the students produce a report of about 50 pages detailing the results of their two-semester design project that meets our student learning objectives. But they don’t start there.
Instead, they have a series of short, low-stakes assignments. That way they can focus on a few things at a time. Each subsequent assignment builds on the previous one. For the three drafts, I tell them to just write something, going for quantity rather than quality. However bad it is to begin with, we can make it better, and we do. I give detailed feedback on each assignment within a week. That gives them time to incorporate it into the subsequent drafts. There’s no penalty for making mistakes; the only penalty is for not trying. They just need to correct any mistakes quickly so they don’t reinforce bad habits. Practice doesn’t make perfect; it makes permanent.
In reading the drafts and then the final report, I see improvement at each stage. The final reports are something the students can be proud of, as am I.