Throughout this book I may have given the impression that I am anti-problem-solving. I certainly am not. I love a problem, and my students to need to build up the experience of solving them. It is just that in the past I have forced my students into problem-solving activities too early on in their development of a skill or concept. Findings from Cognitive Load Theory and my own experience of watching students struggle fruitlessly have led me to the conclusion that this is not a good idea. Novice learners may not learn from solving problems.
I suggested in the previous chapter that a model to help our students become the problem-solvers we all want them to be is to first develop inflexible knowledge via explicit instruction, then carefully batch related problems together, before finally presenting those problems in isolation over time.
But there may be another way. There is a branch of problems that fit under the category of what I will call Purposeful Practice. They enable students to develop that all-important inflexible knowledge and procedural fluency that is key in the transition from novice to expert, but also provide opportunities for students to make connections and think a lot deeper about concepts.
Where Deliberate Practice is my preferred model for introducing a concept, Purposeful Practice has become my go-to strategy for recapping a topic, which, as we will find out, is how we spend the majority of our time as a teacher.