EDI & ‘The Talent Code’

MichaelGhany,HeadofEnglsihWA

It was a brisk and bright morning in the Spring of more years ago than I care to recount. I was midway through my university degree and sipping a piping-hot, strong black coffee as I waded through that week’s heap of seminar reading. Occasionally, I would pause to watch the Ilford traffic pass, as if gleaning some existential gold dust from their metallic exteriors…or, more realistically, being wilfully distracted as I waited for my mentor to be just on time.

He arrived breathless. I almost forgot: Bobby would always leave a little late from his home (a 15 minute walk or 7 minute sprint away). Bobby would have to run not to be late; he abhorred being late. And each week, he would leave a little less time to challenge himself that bit further and ensure his muscles kept up with his strict ethos. “6 minutes is the target, by next month.” He would say panting, hands on his thighs, as he briefly looked up. Bobby was in his mid 40s, but most thought he was a lot younger. He was an accomplished martial artist, had a six-pack and knew just about everyone.

“You look like a teacher sitting there,” he said. “I’m thinking about it…after uni perhaps…” I replied tentatively.

“What you reading?”

“The new politics of South America’s ‘pink tide’.”

“Here’s what I’m reading.” He dove into his rucksack, casting aside the mountain boulders or whatever was in there increasing the gravitational stress of his run. Withdrawing a cute, novella-sized book, its pristine white cover and gold writing gleamed in the sunlight, and my life changed in the same moment.

When I told him I hadn’t read ‘The Talent Code’ by Daniel Coyle, his jaw hit the floor. It was like I had informed him of my inadequacy for never having watched ‘Goodfellas’ or ‘Avatar 2’. “But you know it explains… pretty much everything?” He clarified, “It’s everything you need to know, to be incredible at anything you want.” Anything you want. That idea alone captured me. Maybe I could get through this seminar reading a bit quicker, then?

So, let’s get to the meat of it.

Whilst confessing to be no expert of neuroscience, the book explains it thus: your brain is effectively lots and lots of wires all tangled together in intricate patterns. These wires we keep in a box and that box we call: your head. We’re increasingly more wireless these days, but if you remember what it was like when you shoved your earphones in your pocket without anything to divide them, only to find they were an inextricable mess later that day - then multiply that by a few billion - that’s the idea. God bless ear pods, by the way.

Yet, it is the idea that these wires are different where things get really interesting. Some of your wires are the real KitKat chunky/HDMI ones that you connect a laptop to a TV screen with. Whilst others are like those cheap £2 earphones you bought from Woolworths thinking, “They’ll do.” They won’t. God bless ear pods 2.0.

So, what causes this? What is the wrapping that coils around the wire to make some of them thicker and faster firing whilst others thinner and weaker? Apparently, it’s this pretty magical stuff called ‘myelin’ that slowly wraps itself around any neural pathway you consistently fire. The more you do something - the more myelin wrapping - and so the thicker the wire gets. Your thickest wire/neural pathway is (probably) your heart beating in case you were wondering. But I didn’t even realise there was a wire for that. And that’s the thing, some wires fire so quickly, with such efficacy, we don’t even have to think about the actions they produce or feel the stress of having to enact their process. This is where we need to think about how ‘The Talent Code’ applies to EDI and how we want all our students, in all our subjects, to be wired like the more fortunate siblings of Medusa.

I don’t drive. Yet everyone that does always tells me at first it’s a ghastly experience with too many things going on at once: the handbrake, the clutch, looking out the rearview mirror, looking out the rearview mirror, the steering and so on. Driving initially is like an orchestra in your head, where the strings are tuned to D minor, the woodwind is an unflattering G sharp and the percussion didn’t show today but billed you with a headache. Things get a little easier with each deep practice you engage with and then one day you find yourself on a road and your anxiety drops a little and you realise you're driving Jack, you're driving.

At that blissful moment of “I’ve got this!” your neural pathways have become so used to firing, as a result of the thicker myelin sheath encasing them, that it does not require as much effort and you can start to focus on the more pernickety minutiae of the experience like ensuring a smooth ride for your passengers or performing an impromptu three point turn into a space that is way too small. It’s not necessary but desirable. And moreover, it’s possible, it’s the aim and it’s what we want to achieve. Now, let’s make that three point turn synonymous with GCSE results and we have the EDI and ‘The Talent Code’.

I’ve had a lot of fun writing this so far, so please just bear with me for another few sentences before you email your LM to tell them this is the best article in ‘Habits’ ever.

Daniel Coyle researched examples from all over the world and sought to identify what made the greats great. What were the conditions around The Beatles and Michael Jordan, the Bronte Sisters and tennis prodigies, to find the central secret to their success. He found the below:

“Skill is a cellular insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows in response to certain signals. To get good, it’s helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad. Baby steps are the royal road to skill. To sum up: it’s time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect. There is no substitute for attentive repetition.”

Before I joined CST, my teaching pedagogy, based on ‘The Talent Code’ was to ensure that students wrote in every lesson. Daniel Coyle calls it deep practice; we call it SLOP.

“Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again. Slowly, and a little painfully, you explore the space over and over, attending to errors, extending your reach into the room a bit farther each time, building a mental map until you can move through it quickly and intuitively.”

Skills are really just circuits in your brain, then. There is something very egalitarian about that and perhaps it’s why teachers have this unyielding faith and vision of helping every student in every class achieve to the highest possible standard. Of course, this looks different for every individual. Daniel Coyle does account 5% of talent to the way we usually think of it: permanent, immutable genetic characteristics but the other 95%, he posits, is up for grabs. How many times are you willing to walk in the dark room and bump into the sofa, the coffee table, the TV? It certainly helps if you’ve got someone with a spotlight behind you and that’s exactly where the role of the mentor steps in. During live feedback, you are that spotlight, helping students to navigate their way through the curriculum dark with the majesty of

Batman at the ballet.

‘The [deep practice] sweet spot is that productive, uncomfortable terrain located just beyond our current abilities, where our reach exceeds our grasp...’

And all of sudden it hit me, Bobby was using the Talent Code in his everyday life, in everything he did. He was deep practising, SLOPing all over the place. Every time he did martial arts, worked out, ran a little faster to not be late…probably even as he talked to me - he was consciously refining his deep practice skills. In honesty, the last part made me feel a little uncomfortable. I had to remind myself he was a good man and not a complete robot and I was not his victim. If anything, he had shone the spotlight in the dark room and substituted it for the glorious Ilford city sun.

I think it is far too easy to make a lurch for being profound. Yet, all these years later and looking back, that conversation and that text really changed the way I thought about learning. Hopefully, in the way you apply this to your own life and as part of the EDI, it will change yours and your student’s lives too.