Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice is a theory of expert skill acquisition developed by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues, most fully set out in a widely cited 1993 paper studying violinists at a Berlin music academy, holding that expert-level performance is produced not merely by accumulated experience or innate talent but by a specific, effortful kind of practice with defined characteristics: it targets a well defined aspect of performance just beyond the learner's current ability, it is performed with full concentration, it is followed by immediate, informative feedback, and it typically requires a teacher or coach to design tasks the learner would not devise unassisted. Ericsson's study found that the amount of time expert violinists had spent in this specific kind of solitary, effortful practice, rather than simply years of playing, best predicted their skill level, a finding later popularized outside academic psychology in a simplified and heavily contested form as a general rule about ten thousand hours producing expertise. In education the theory has informed research on coaching and the design of practice tasks that push a learner just past their current comfort zone with structured feedback, rather than practice that simply repeats what a learner can already do.