Serial Practice - Mix It Up To Level Up Your Practices

Early in Covid, I started taking guitar lessons. I had never played guitar before, but wanted to learn something new with the time I had.

During my lessons and practice sessions, I would play the same notes and chords over and over. I was learning which strings to play and which finger went on which fret.

By the time I finished most sessions, I felt confident I could play the chord without thinking.

But then I'd come back a day or two later and something strange would happen. Much of the progress I'd made in the last practice session had seemingly disappeared.

My hands would be in the wrong place. My fingers would be on the wrong string. This was frustrating.

But if I'd have been thinking through my coaching lens, it wouldn't have been surprising!

Are You SURE Your Players Have Learned What You Taught?

As we covered in the first part of this series, block practice serves a number of purposes. It's a great way to introduce a topic. It's a great way to build comfort and confidence. It helps you isolate technique.

Block practice is simply repeating the same action multiple times in a row.

That's why you should use it.

But you should also keep in mind its limitations. One of the biggest limitations of block practice is that it can trick you into thinking more learning has occurred than actually has.

In fact,studies show soley using block practice leads to less long-term retention.

This is because when you do the same thing over and over, you are likely to improve within the session. It appears that you've mastered the skill.

However, that appearance can be deceiving. My guitar experience was a great example of this. The learning I thought I'd done at the end of the session has been partially erased by the start of the next session.

This conundrum is detailed in Doug Lemov's book, The Coach's Guide To Teaching.

Lemov talks about the battle against forgetting. Among his key points:

As soon as you learn something, you immediately begin to forget it (think of the names of people you meet!).
The rate of forgetting is surprisingly high - a few hours after learning something, you often remember only a small fraction of it.
Each time you practice recalling something you know, the rate and amount of forgetting decreases slightly.
The timing of bringing something back into your working memory (retrieval practice) is important and can be done in multiple ways.

With this in mind, you'll want to move past block practice once players have mastered technique. In doing so, you'll be able to more accurately gauge their learning.

Enter serial practice, an often overlooked practice strategy.

What Is Serial Practice?

Serial practice occurs when you work on multiple skills within a sequence. The sequence remains the same throughout the duration of the drill or practice session.

Let's use golf as an example. You might hit a driver, then a 5-iron, then a pitching wedge, and then go back to the driver.

In basketball, serial practice could involve a shooting drill where you shoot a 3, then a mid-range shot, then a layup. Then you repeat the sequence.

Or you could make a crossover to a shot, followed by a between the legs to a shot, followed by a behind the back to a shot.

The possibilities are endless.

Is This Block, Serial Or Both?

Here's an example from The Flow Motion Offense With Matt Lewis. In this drill, players do one rep of each finish. They would continue to cycle through the finishes one at a time for a predetermined period of time.

In this way, they would never do the same finish 2x in a row. Every rep would be different, requiring them to call on different skills and techniques in every rep.

Some might view this as a block practice finishing segment. Others might view it as a serial segment cycling through different finishes. In fact, Breakthrough Co-Founder Joe Haefner and I went back and forth on this exact question in a series of emails. We'd be interested to hear your feedback!

Ultimately, there is some gray area. The most important part is not how you define the type of practice. What's most important is using different types of practice to continuously challenge your players as they improve.

3 Critical Benefits Of Serial Practice

Serial benefits offers a couple of benefits

Players use multiple skills - in the game, players will have to use multiple skills. They have to be able to shoot from different places or use different moves. Serial practice integrates multiple skills into a session.
It's more engaging - because it involves multiple skills and makes players think, players tend to enjoy serial practice more than block practice. Player satisfaction is likely to be higher, making them want to practice more!
It gets better results - studies show that using serial practice leads to greater learning than using exclusively block practice. As we've said, block practice is a good starting point. Then serial practice is the next step to take your player's learning up a level.

How Serial Practice Gives a Truer Test

Block practice makes us feel good as coaches. When we see our players doing a skill correctly time and time again, we want to believe they've learned it. We want to believe we can move on.

And yet, we should know better. Just like me learning my chords, block practice can send a false signal.

By integrating serial learning, you will challenge your players in ways that solidify their learning. Over time, they will be able to more quickly and accurately analyze a situation and perform the correct skill.

By using serial practice as a progression from block practice, you are building out your toolkit. You are on your way to becoming a handyman (or woman). But you're not all the way there, yet. For that, stay tuned!