Succession of Practice Activities
also Practice progression · Sequence of exercises
A designed chain of practice exercises that keeps advancing in difficulty or relevance instead of repeating one activity indefinitely.
CF reframes learning as a succession of things to practice, deliberately paralleling Popper’s view of progress as movement from problem to problem. Where the Popperian picture sees you solving one problem then advancing to a better one forever, CF says the concrete engine of that progress is usually practice: you practice something, then something else, then something more advanced. If no practicing is happening, Elliot Temple argues, the person probably isn’t actually learning.
The “succession” matters because a single repeated activity stops teaching. The first hundred repetitions may be good practice; the thousandth often teaches nothing new. So the learner must keep moving to fresh activities rather than grinding the same one — a key reason intentional practice outperforms incidental repetition: the intentional practitioner adjusts the activity to keep learning.
Designing the chain involves choosing concrete drills with a way to judge success or failure, raising your success rate until it’s high, then expanding. CF stresses building in small steps from an established history of success, and pushing variations to locate the breakpoints that separate success from failure rather than always playing safe. Speeding up on worksheets signals automatization of the knowledge.
For philosophy specifically, CF connects this to concept-application practice — applying, explaining, defending, and criticizing alternatives to a concept — and warns against treating everything as relevant, urging learners to practice spotting significant relevance.