The OK Plateau

I just finished Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, a year-of memoir of the author's experiences preparing for and competing in the US and World Memory Championships.  I enjoyed the author's style and the way he juxtaposed personal anecdotes and research from a variety of experts and disciplines.

Though I did not read it with the intention of it intersecting with my summer professional development project (I read it because of the intriguing title and cover), one chapter in particular, The OK Plateau, really stood out.  The entire chapter focuses on moving past the plateaus that individuals encounter on their way to expertise.  Though an array of examples were given ranging from ice skaters to typists, the one that stood out to me was about mammographers.  According to Foer,

Even though you might be inclined to trust the advice of a silver-haired doctor over one fresh out of medical school, it’s been found that in a few fields of medicine, doctors’ skills don’t improve the longer they’ve been practicing.  The diagnoses of professional mammographers, for example, have a tendency to get less and less accurate over the years.  Why would that be?

For most mammographers, practicing medicine is not deliberate practice, according to Ericsson.  It’s more like putting into a tin cup than working with a coach.  That’s because mammographers usually only find out about the accuracy of their diagnoses weeks or months later, if at all, at which point they’ve probably forgotten about he details of the case and can no longer learn from their successes and mistakes.

One field of medicine which this is definitely not the case is surgery.  Unlike mammographers, surgeons tend to get better with time.  What makes surgeons different from mammographers, according to Ericsson, is that the outcome of most surgeries is usually immediately apparent—the patient either gets better or doesn’t—which means that surgeons are constantly receiving feedback on their performance.  They’re always learning what works and what doesn’t, always getting better.

The first thing I took away from this passage is the immediate feedback is essential to developing increased expertise. Because of the delayed nature of feedback, mammographers are unable to immediately reflect on their performance and make adjustments to their practice.  And to me, as an educator, I must admit that I am guilty of delaying feedback, perhaps not weeks or months, but long enough for it to lose much of its value. And the question I must ask myself is: if it is not valuable, what good is it?  If I am serious about providing my students with opportunities to grow and improve, I need to adjust my feedback to ensure that it is immediate and constant. 


Those who enjoy the structure of this book may also like Outliers by Malcom Gladwell, Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs, or the Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.