Is practising old-fashioned?
Mr Born, what does the word practice trigger in you?
Ah yes, I want to be able to do something, so I start practising. Practising is always closely linked to the desire to be able to do something - regardless of whether it's maths or reading, playing the guitar or a sporting activity such as football or high jumping.
Is practising old-fashioned?
Schools often place too little value on practising. There is a one-sided focus on understanding, on insight and on the child coming to the respective «realisation» as independently as possible. Practising or cramming is then seen as old-fashioned and almost uneducational.
Tips for effective practice: Small, regular learning portions and, if possible, daily repetition at the beginning.
The old ideological ideas of reform pedagogy still have an effect here, although these have proved to be erroneous and wishful thinking. Current research findings in learning psychology and neuroscience fully confirm the need for practice and repetition.
In your books, you emphasise the importance of automation. What do you mean by this?
At the beginning of the learning process, people require a great deal of mental effort and a high level of attention. After frequent and intensive practice, however, what has been learnt comes almost automatically. Information can now be processed very quickly without much effort. Automation has occurred.
Does this mean that insight and automation belong together on an equal footing? One of the two alone is not enough?
Correct. Compare, for example, a child at the beginning of the process of learning to read with a proficient reader. At the beginning, the child needs a large amount of neuronal activity just to recognise words and thus almost completely exhausts the processing capacity of its working memory. In contrast, the automation of the reading process enables experienced readers to grasp the meaning of what they read with the help of free capacities in their working memory.
The «drill» thus relieves the working memory. This frees up working memory for processing other solution steps. Flexible application then builds on this. I have to master my tools and know what they are good for in order to be able to use them flexibly.
What does practice have to look like to be effective?
Some basic principles for brain-friendly, effective practice are: small learning portions, regular, preferably daily repetition at the beginning, short, time-limited learning phases, «less is more». It is also important to «overlearn». Don't just practise until a child can do something for the first time, but for much longer. The forgetting rate in humans is simply terrible. However, forgetting can only be counteracted by repeating what has been learnt.
How do you motivate children to stay on the ball and practise something until they get it right?
I always explain to the child and of course to the parents how the brain works and what happens in the brain during learning. In addition, brain scans can show that the more a process - e.g. reading or maths - is automated, the less brain activity is required. The child therefore always knows why it is practising or repeating something.
