Marginal Gains – Huge Results

Tags

autonomy, habits, learner independence, psychology

[The importance of improving the way you do things]

The year 2003 marked what has to be the most spectacular turnaround in sports history. For more than a century, the British cycling team had performed so badly, that they had not won a gold medal since 1908 or the Tour de France in 110 years! Then Dave Brailsford took over.

Brailsford introduced an interesting new strategy, which he called ‘the aggregation of  marginal gains’. This was the idea: there are a number of factors which contribute to a cyclist achieving a top performance; if we break down all of these and then make an 1% improvement in each one, the overall result should be very significant.

Following this logic, the team got together and analysed everything: the bike and its parts; the athletes’ clothes; the training, the athletes’ diet, their health, etc. They looked at every single detail and then made dozens and dozens of changes. For instance, they improved the saddles to make them more comfortable; they switched to lighter fabrics for the athletes’ clothes; they used biofeedback sensors to see how each athlete responded to the training so as to customize their work-outs; they even tried out different pillows and mattresses to ensure that the athletes got the best sleep possible.

Did all this work pay off? You bet it did. In the Beijing Olympics of 2008, the team won 60% of all the gold medals in cycling. In the London Olympics of 2012, they set seven world records. And in a stunning winning spree, they won the Tour de France five out of six times in the period between 2012 and 2017. Amazing! (‘Atomic Habits’ – pp. 14-15 [Watch the short clip below] ).

So what if we as EL teachers were to take a leaf out of Brailsford’s book? What if we were to look at how our students try to learn English and improved every single thing by 1% (or more)? Here are some ideas:

• If our students record single words, why not show them how to record collocations?
• If they enjoy watching TV series, why not tell them to watch them with English subtitles on?
• If they revise by re-reading their notes, why not teach them how to quiz themselves instead?

Apart from the language benefits, getting students to change the way they practice should produce a far more important change – a change in identity: ‘I am an active language learner’. That would be a huge win.

The Moral: FiShow your students how to make ‘marginal’ changes.

The Valley of Disappointment

Tags

habits, homework, Motivation, strategies

[The importance of persevering in building learning habits]

In his excellent book ‘Atomic Habits’ James Clear makes some very interesting points about the nature of progress (pp. 20-23).

In most cases, when we are learning something, progress is much slower at the beginning (when we are building the foundations of learning as it were) and it gradually accelerates as we continue. Think about learning words for instance; initially, you have few other lexical items in the L2 to peg the new ones on to. Later however, you can link new vocabulary to all kinds of synonyms, opposites, similar words, collocations etc.

If one were to present this diagrammatically, the line you would get would be one curving upwards – it is exactly the same line as if your English keeps getting better at the rate of, say, 1% every week. And yet when we study, most of us expect our progress to be linear (‘I have put in so much effort – I expect to see some results’).

Look at this excellent diagram (James Clear ‘Atomic Habits’ – p. 22). Notice the grey area. Clear calls this ‘the valley of disappointment’ and it represents the period of frustration when we keep working at something and the results seem meager at best. This can go on for months and months. But notice what happens then: beyond a certain point, we experience a period of progress which just seems explosive and it is way beyond our expectations.

I have seen this time and again with my students: they study and study and complain about how poor their English is and then they travel to the UK and when they come back they are ecstatic ‘After the first few hours I started talking and talking so freely and easily and I just couldn’t believe it was me!’

So this is the moral here: choose a few learning habits and stick with them. Keep reading a few pages of that reader every day. Keep singing along to songs. Keep watching your favourite series with English subtitles. All this work is bound to pay off and when it does, you will be amazed.

The Moral: Stick with your habits even if you cannot see any progress.