In the first post I wrote for this blog, I noted that no matter how boring drilling may seem, it is a useful method for honing your skills. Looking back at that piece, I didn’t offer much evidence to support my conclusion. In this post, I aim to briefly review Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?, with special attention to Chapter 5: Is Drilling Worth It? This chapter not only provides evidence for why drilling is important, but it also gives us insight into what separates novices from experts.

The overall gist of the book is, as the subtitle suggests, a cognitive scientist’s perspective on how the mind works and what that means for the classroom. Willingham, a cognitive scientist and educational psychologist, takes the reader on an exploration of various issues in education practice and why they often negatively impact students’ desire to learn. He covers topics such as standardized testing, working and long-term memory, teaching abstract ideas, and how technology impacts learning. He also discusses drilling, which is what I will focus on here.

In the traditional classroom as well as in most martial arts academies, drilling is a major method of instruction. The sensei or coach shows a move, and the students then drill that move for several minutes, similarly to the way you might have memorized times tables in math or grammar rules in grade school. Some folks may frown on this and call it “drill and kill,” referring to killing student motivation, while others see the value in learning facts and skills that may not be riveting to the student.

Willingham asks, “Does the cognitive benefit make it worth the potential cost to motivation? Answer: The bottleneck in our cognitive system is the ability to juggle several ideas in our mind simultaneously… The mind has a few tricks for working around this problem. One of the most effective is practice, because it reduces the amount of ‘room’ that mental work requires” (p. 119).

This means that when we drill and practice, we free up mental space in our working memory. While Willingham is specifically discussing mental activities, the principle applies to physical activities as well. For instance, if you’ve drilled a sequence or move to a point where it is instinctive and you don’t have to think about it during a match, you can devote that mental space to dealing with other contingencies that may arise.

Willingham notes that one reason for practice is “to gain a minimum level of competence” (p. 120). Can you shrimp competently or sprawl effectively during a stressful situation? He stresses that we also “practice tasks that we can perform but that we’d like to improve” (120). Maybe we are competent in our movements during a practice session, but we need to get crisper for competition.

But what if you don’t feel like your technique is improving even after you’ve been drilling endlessly for weeks?

Willingham says this paradox is essential to learning and fluency in a task. Drilling even when you don’t feel it is effective “reinforces the basic skills that are required for the learning of more advanced skills, it protects against forgetting, and it improves transfer” (120).

He breaks this statement down further, which is where we begin to see the difference between novices and experts. The basic skills that practice reinforces, as mentioned above, frees up room in our working memory, what Willingham calls “a fundamental bottleneck of human cognition” (121, his emphasis). As you gain expertise, you can lump several techniques into a single unit, a process called chunking. These chunks, rather than individual bits, take up less space in our working memory.

Another aspect of expertise is that the more techniques and concepts we have in our long-term memory, and the better we can recall them when needed, the more efficient we become during stressful situations. The actions and reactions become automatic rather than having to think about what is going on. You may watch an expert Judoka or BJJ player execute a technique seemingly out of nowhere. They may even surprise themselves. This is the automatic response instilled by drilling. Willingham suggests that automatic processes “require very little working memory capacity” (p. 123) and seem rapid or surprising because we aren’t conscious of them (we aren’t necessarily thinking about them).

Another reason that may seem obvious for practice is pattern recognition. Just as master chess players are so good because they have memorized and mastered thousands of sequences on the chess board, an expert martial artist may seem like a Jedi master in their ability to know what is going to happen before it actually does. This is not a case of telling the future so much as it is they’ve been there before, sometimes hundreds of times. Their body knows what’s happening before their mind does. Intuition takes over.

Again, Willingham is discussing memory and cognitive activity. He asks, what helps us protect against forgetting? “Continued practice” (128). When you feel like you’ve mastered a technique or sequence, keep studying it, a process he calls overlearning. Have you ever taken a break from training for a few weeks, a month, or heaven forbid, a few years? When you come back, did you feel rusty? Maybe you remembered the basics, though.

That’s because you overlearned them, things like shrimping, break-falling, shots and sprawls, jabs and crosses, are all fundamentals we repeatedly work in our training. These basic movements are also likely the elements your particular art needs to become automatic. Overlearning makes them automatic, cutting down your working memory load, and embeds them in your long-term memory for retrieval, even years after you haven’t done the movement (think about tying your shoes).

A last area where drilling affects expertise is the process of transfer. Transfer is where you can apply old knowledge to a new problem, as Willingham argues. When you are drilling, you are likely staying at the surface level of a technique. As you develop expertise, you can start transferring the surface-level technique to new applications. You may begin to see the technique as a pattern in other areas, revealing a deep structure. For instance, you may notice the mechanics of a kimura mirrors a toe-hold, or a sumi gaeshi Judo throw is similar to a BJJ hook sweep.  

Regarding transfer, you may recall reading a book as a child, such as Gulliver’s Travels or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. At the surface level, these books were interesting stories with giants, talking animals, and good overcoming evil. As you get older, or if you re-read these stories as an adult, you may discover a deeper meaning or structure behind the stories. Gulliver’s Travels becomes a social satire about 18^th-century England, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe parallels the Christian narrative of Christ overcoming Hell through his self-sacrifice. You are reading the same words, yet they have a different meaning because you have grown in your ability to recognize relationships in ideas. The same applies to technical expertise.

In sum, Willingham suggests that we practice to gain a minimum level of competence and to gain proficiency. He urges the need to continue practicing, even after you think you’ve mastered a concept or skill, because it cements the mechanics in memory and makes them automatic. Lastly, practice helps the process of transferring one skill or idea to others in the future.

If you are a teacher, coach, or just a curious learner, I think this book offers valuable insights into how we learn, what motivates us, and why understanding these processes changes the learning environment. Keep these things in mind as you hit the books or the mat. And ever be the student.

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