Effective practice promotes mastery
Did David Didau go far enough in his promotion of effective practice?
Over on his ‘stack, David Didau has a post worth reading.1 The post is called “Three rules for effective practice: The hidden curriculum of practice: how habits, as well as knowledge, shape learning” and it’s available for free. I encourage readers of Special Education Today to read it before or after reading this post.
“Dr.” Didau2 provided clear and compelling background and explanation in his post for promoting practice when teaching. I fear that some may cast a negative light on his discussion, arguing that he’s recommending “skill and drill,” “drill and kill,” and other odious, repugnant, and horror-filled actions for some educators.
What he said
In the post, the good doctor explained important aspects of the relationship between knowing and doing. It affects both declarative and procedural knowledge.
He presented three guiding ideas for promoting helpful practice activities:
Practice accurate responding, not mistakes;
Practice for shorter periods and in diverse contexts;
Practice over learning.
In his presentation of these recommendations, Dr. Didau weaves in evidence from cognitive psychology. He also situates practice in common knowledge about skilled performance (e.g., musicians rehearsing, runners improving their form, etc.). Go read his post. You’ll likely come away from it prepared to educate your colleagues who pejoratively dismiss practice as a teaching (ahem) practice.
One more time!
As valuable as I found “Three rules for effective practice,” I would have liked to see it taken just a tad farther. As David Didau noted, practice is “how knowledge turns into skill and skill into mastery.” There is an important level of competence beyond “mastery” for which practice is essential.
In a post for 21 August 2025 right here on SET, I drew upon a paper by Carl Binder, Elizabeth Houghton, and Barbara Bateman to explain how mastery is represented in accurate performance over time. Rather than drawing on cognitive literature, these authors went to (horrors!) the behavioral research to explain why and how practice is important.
This diagram offers a conceptual framework to understand Binder et al.’s point.
The Binder team not only explained how fluency is a better indicator of mastery than traditional measures such as simple accuracy and that practice promotes fluency. They even provided guidelines for what counts as fluency in rapid naming, phonemic awareness, oral reading, computation, and more.
The argument for fluency that Carl Binder and colleagues advanced has implications beyond underscoring the value of practice. They explain how we special educators should get rid of “% correct” as a measure of performance. Get those measures out of Individual Education Programs! Use fluency!
Comment
Mastery is important. Practice is an important way of developing mastery. Mastery ought to be consider as fluent performance.
Now, when you read (or reread) David Didau’s excellent Three rules for effective practice, you can nod along and say, “Right! Good point! Yes, and..fluency.”
Reference
Binder, C., Haughton, E., & Bateman, B. (2002). Fluency: Achieving true mastery in the learning process. SpecialEducationToday.com. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/U9JA53
Footnotes
Actually, he has lots of posts worth reading on his ‘stack. I subscribe. I encourage Dear Readers to check his archive of posts as well as his Web site, The Learning Spy.
He disavowed “doctor” as an honorific term when I used it in the past. He claims he’s “just a teacher.” I get it, but I still use the appellation for him as a light tease. Once one has read his writing for a little while, it becomes obvious that he draws on sophisticated research and knows about a heckuva lot of it. Although he’s clearly skilled enough at academic reading and writing to merit the label, he apparently never took sat for the union card.
Long-time followers will recognize that I originally posted the Binder et al. article in 2002 on a now-defunct Web site that Kerri (Frymier) Martin, Sean Smith, and I built in the 1990s; we called it “The Office of Special Education.” The wonderful Internet Archive has a link to the page where the Binder et al. article originally appeared: https://web.archive.org/web/20150501135402/http://special.edschool.virginia.edu/resources/papers.html/