A deliberate-practice log for one skill: goal, feedback and error per session

Goal

Keep a practice record that distinguishes goal-directed practice from mere repetition. Ericsson and Harwell (2019) restate the original 1993 definition of deliberate practice: solitary practice designed by a teacher, with explicit goals of improving aspects of individual performance, immediate feedback and opportunities for repetition after reflection, the teacher helping to identify goals and methods for the sessions between lessons. Individualised practice aimed at improving performance but without a teacher who knows effective methods they call purposeful practice, after Ericsson and Pool (2016); the much broader category counted in the meta-analysis they criticise they call structured practice. The log below makes the shared features (goal, method, feedback, error) explicit for a learner who has no teacher and is therefore, in their terms, practising purposefully.

Prerequisites

One skill narrow enough to be broken into sub-skills (a keyboard passage, a language's verb forms, reading a stack trace, a particular kind of proof), a reference against which output can be checked (recording, answer key, a more skilled reviewer, an automated test), and a fixed session length.

Steps

1. Before the session, write the date, the sub-skill, and one goal for this session stated as an observable ("play bars 12–16 at 80 bpm with no wrong note", "translate ten sentences with the subjunctive without consulting the table").
2. Write the method: what will be repeated, how many times, and what will be varied.
3. Practise for the fixed time. Do not extend a session because it goes badly.
4. Immediately afterwards, obtain feedback against the reference and record the errors by type, not by count only: which note, which form, which step was wrong and what was done instead.
5. Write whether the goal was met, and one sentence on what the next session targets, chosen from the error list rather than from what is enjoyable.
6. Once a week, tabulate goals met per sub-skill and the error types that recur; move a sub-skill to maintenance when its goal has been met on three separate days.
7. Record total minutes, but read progress from the goals met and the error types that disappeared.

Expected result

A log in which every session has a goal, a feedback step and a named error, and a weekly view showing which sub-skills moved and which did not.

Limits and test basis

The cited paper concerns the definition and the measurement of practice in research on expert performance; it does not prescribe a log format, and no effect of keeping this log is claimed. Self-assessed feedback is weaker than a teacher's; where the reference is the learner's own judgement, the log should say so.