Category: Education

Peak - Deliberate Practice

11/3/2022

Another excellent recent read has been the book ”Peak”, by the late K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Poole. The book is essentially a reader-friendly summary of the work that Ericsson had done throughout his extensive career looking at what makes experts as good as they are. As such, it provides some fascinating insights into many aspects of human learning and development - some of which are quite surprising. It was just by luck that I had also recently read a review on this topic by Duncan Chambliss entitled “The Mundanity of Excellence”. There are some overlapping themes here and both of these pieces are well worth a read. This blog post will primarily focus on the book but I shall draw any parallels where relevant.

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Moonwalking With Einstein - The Memory Palace

20/2/2022

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Whilst I have been exploring the different approaches to educational theory there is a book that I have heard mentioned a few times. I think it was probably first highlighted to me in the “Learning how to Learn '' course from Barbara Oakley, and it was one of those that I had put away on my list of books that I would one day get around to (this is a very long and increasing list). Now, finally, we have crossed paths and the lessons from it seem particularly relevant to some of the other areas of learning theory that I have touched upon before. As such, I wanted to put some of my thoughts together and share them here. Let’s begin.

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Micromastery

13/5/2021

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My ongoing interest in learning techniques has led me to the book “Micromastery” by Robert Twigger. This is a fascinating read which promotes a slightly different approach to learning than I have ever previously explored. He describes how the “mastery” of small and well defined skills can actually provide notable educational benefits that go beyond the sum of these component parts. As such, it is really more a book about an approach to life than it is about educational theory, but this definitely adds to the relevance rather than detracts from. Indeed, its pages contained some great ideas that I wanted to share with you here. So let’s dive in.

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Atomic Habits

6/2/2020

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Once again, some time has passed since my last post and it felt as if that needed changing. As such, this outing is a mild departure from some of the more clinically-directed recent posts and looks at a slightly more parallel topic: that of habits. More specifically, this is a reflection on one of my recent reads which I have found to be particularly worth eulogising.

The book in question is “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, and it follows in the footsteps of another fascinating (though slightly less recent) read of mine: “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. You’ll not win any prizes for guessing that the topic of these books is habit formation and the manipulation of such habits towards one’s desired goals. In a profession such as medicine, some of the concepts here have huge potential, and I so I thought this would be a worthwhile exploration.

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Peak - Deliberate Practice

Moonwalking With Einstein - The Memory Palace

Micromastery

Atomic Habits

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