The Learning Cue #16: Blind Spots & Feedback
How deliberate practice and expert coaching can change the game
Preview
In this post, I reflect on learning pool from an expert coach in a small group setting—and what that experience reveals about feedback and skill development.
We’ll explore:
Stages of Competence
Johari Window
Corrective, Directive, Verification, and Elaborative Feedback
Purposeful Practice vs. Deliberate Practice
How expert feedback accelerates learning
Pool School
Recently, my friend Divij, an advanced player in my league, offered to run lessons for a few of us intermediate players. Our informal “Pool School” has met three times so far, and it has made a big impact on how I think about both pool and learning.
Image from our group text and Divij Baboo
The first thing Divij did was simple but powerful:
he put balls on the table and had me shoot—while he watched.
This diagnostic observation was critical. Before deciding what to teach, he needed to understand how I actually played.
Our Blind Spot
My biggest “ah-ha” moment came when Divij focused on our stroke fundamentals—stance, grip, timing, and smoothness.
Before Pool School, I believed:
My fundamentals were solid
To improve, I needed new knowledge and advanced techniques
In reality, my stroke was inconsistent—good sometimes, but unreliable under pressure.
Small jerks, uneven tempo, or tension often would creep in, especially on harder shots. When my attention shifted away from fundamentals, accuracy suffered.
My fellow intermediate players had similar issues, so Divij designed our practice to focus on:
building a repeatable pre-shot routine
internalizing fundamentals until they became automatic
It’s demanding work—but it’s already paying off.
Key takeaway: Improvement stalled not because I lacked effort or information—but because I lacked awareness of what actually needed work.
“You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know”
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
I didn’t know my stroke was a problem.
Image from YouTube video “How to Finish the Stroke”
I knew fundamentals mattered. I’d watched countless videos from instructors like Dr. Dave.
What I didn’t know was that my execution wasn’t consistent enough to fully benefit from higher-level practice.
Without expert eyes, I was practicing around my biggest weakness.
Key takeaway: Motivation and effort don’t help if they’re aimed at the wrong target.
Blind Spots in Learning Frameworks
The Four Stages of Competence
This classic framework (often attributed to work from the 1960s at New York University) describes where learners are in their learning process:
Image from Wikipedia
Before Pool School, I was unconsciously incompetent with aspects of my stroke.
Now, through focused practice and feedback, I’m working toward conscious competence, with the long-term goal of automaticity.
This model is descriptive and it spirals —not a linear learning process —but it’s powerful for understanding learner awareness.
It can be especially helpful in describing where a learner is to a particular aspect of a skill like the stroke in pool, rather than trying to use it assess the whole skill.
The Johari Window
Another helpful lens is the Johari Window, developed by by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham (using a combination of their first names!)..
Image from Wikipedia
Using this framework:
My stroke flaws lived in the Blind Spot
Divij could see them; I could not
The Johari Window isn’t a learning theory, but it’s useful for diagnosing awareness gaps—in this case between experts and learners.
Key takeaway: Many learning problems aren’t about effort—they’re about unseen blind spots.
Is Pool a “Kind” or “Wicked” Learning Environment?
In his book Range, David Epstein distinguishes between:
Kind environments: clear rules, stable patterns, immediate feedback
Wicked environments: noisy, unpredictable, delayed or misleading feedback
At first glance, pool seems kind:
You control the setup and you have time to make decisions and shoot the bal
You know immediately whether you made or missed the shot
But there’s a catch.
You can:
Make a shot despite a flawed stroke
Miss a shot without knowing why
Speed, spin, alignment, and timing are all variables which interact and affect outcome and consistency—and without expert feedback, diagnosing errors is extremely difficult.
Key takeaway: Pool is kind at the outcome level (made/missed), but partially wicked because of all of the variables (why you missed).
Purposeful Practice vs. Deliberate Practice
In my fifth post of this blog, I focused on Deliberate Practice, but this latest experience has given me a much deeper understanding and appreciation of that process. In that post, I summarized the work of Anders Ericsson and the ingredients of deliberate practice as he described it. However, it wasn’t until my experience with Pool School that I truly understood the difference between deliberate practice and purposeful practice.
Jim Heal and Rebekah Berlin in their book, Mental Models, explain different types of practice:
Naive Practice
Playing casually with no specific focus - just hitting balls inPurposeful Practice
Setting up exercises that have a goal, repetition, and clear immediate feedback on whether you were successful - in this case making the shot or getting the cue ball into the correct position areaDeliberate Practice
Purposeful practice designed and guided by an expert, with targeted feedback
Before Pool School, I did a lot of purposeful practice—but I wasn’t always practicing the right thing.
Divij set up deliberate practice for us by pointing out our problem areas, modeling correct techniques, providing targeted practice exercises, and giving us feedback on whether our stroke was correct.
Types of Feedback That Make a Difference
During Pool School, Divij used multiple kinds of feedback (as outlined by Heal and Berlin)—each serving a different function:
Corrective Feedback
Describes what went wrong
“You jabbed the ball.”Directive Feedback
Tells or shows what to do
“Pause and then do a smooth pendulum motion.”Verification Feedback (Knowledge of Results)
Labels what worked
“That stroke was smooth.”Elaborative Feedback
Explains why something worked or didn’t
“When you do a jab, the jerky motion can pull the cue off the aim line.”
Elaborative feedback is especially powerful because it helps learners build mental models—so they can eventually self-assess and recognize when they did something correctly or not.
Another teaching technique that Divij used after giving us feedback was to ask us whether we thought our stroke was correct after taking a shot.
This helped us build inner criteria about our performance so that we could start to judge and feel the quality of our shots. In this way, we developed our awareness so that we could practice on our own.
Key takeaway: Deliberate practice enables high-quality purposeful practice later on.
Working in small groups also mattered. Watching others, giving each other feedback, and comparing experiences helped us clarify, remember, and internalize the lessons.
Summing It Up
Learners often have blind spots that prevent progress
Pool is a ‘kind’ game to some degree because there is immediate outcome feedback, but it is also a bit ‘wicked’ because of all of the variables like speed, spin, timing of the stroke, which can make it hard to figure out what is causing misses.
Expert coaching helps learners see what they cannot see themselves
Deliberate practice is designed by and expert coach and jump-starts awareness with focused areas to practice and feedback; purposeful practice complements it and sustains growth
Expert coaches provide a variety of different types of feedback including: corrective, directive, verification, and elaborative feedback.
Bottom line: Feedback doesn’t just fix mistakes—it builds awareness.
How About You?
What ideas from today’s post most resonated with you?
What experiences have you had with blind spots in skill development and/or expert coaching?
When has feedback been useful (or not useful!) for you?
In the next installment of The Learning Cue, we’ll start to look at one of my favorite topics in teaching and learning - Reflection. Stay tuned!
Works Cited
Dr. Dave Billiards. (2025). How to finish the stroke [YouTube video].
Epstein, D. (2019). Range: Why generalists triumph in a specialized world. Riverhead Books.
“Four Stages of Competence.” (n.d.). Wikipedia.
Heal, J., & Berlin, R. (2023). Mental models. John Catt Educational.
Luft, J., & Ingham, H. (1955). The Johari Window. Human Relations Training Laboratory.