{"id":23510,"date":"2016-11-22T06:00:46","date_gmt":"2016-11-22T12:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/?p=23510"},"modified":"2016-11-22T00:05:07","modified_gmt":"2016-11-22T06:05:07","slug":"apsus-kevin-harris-investigates-how-to-create-expert-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/2016\/11\/22\/apsus-kevin-harris-investigates-how-to-create-expert-teams\/","title":{"rendered":"APSU\u2019s Kevin Harris investigates how to create expert teams"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AustinClarksville, TN<\/strong> – On a warm, May afternoon in 2012, Australian tennis star Samuel Groth stunned spectators at the Busan Open when he delivered a 163 mph serve\u2014the fastest serve in the history of that sport.<\/p>\n

A grainy YouTube video from that day shows Groth\u2019s opponent, Belarusian Uladzimir Ignatik, flailing in his unsuccessful attempt to connect with the ball.<\/p>\n

\"APSU's<\/a>

APSU’s Kevin Harris<\/p><\/div>\n

Ignatik looks like an amateur facing off against a seasoned pro, but that\u2019s an unfair analogy. Even at slower speeds, returning a professional tennis serve is one of the most difficult feats in all of sports.<\/p>\n

The ability to hit back a high-speed serve is often what separates the novices from the stars, but scientists recently uncovered a trick that is helping scores of young athletes with their game. The advice? Don\u2019t look at the ball.<\/p>\n

\u201cRecent research using eye tracking showed that the top tennis players in the worldlook at the lower torso of their opponent to successfully return a serve,\u201d Dr. Kevin Harris, Austin Peay State University associate professor of psychology, said.<\/p>\n

When a group of tennis players was trained to look at the lower torso of their opponent, mimicking what stars of the sport do unconsciously, they successfully returned more serves than a control group that focused on the ball. This is the type of discovery that fascinates Harris.<\/p>\n

Throughout his career, the APSU professor has looked for the hidden secrets that allow experts to perform at the highest levels. While a graduate student at Florida State University, Harris studied under renowned psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, who\u2019s work in this area was highlighted by Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling 2008 book, \u201cOutliers: The Story of Success.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ericcsson, as Gladwell points out, discovered that \u201cworld-class\u201d musicians, such as Mozart, aen\u2019t innately gifted, they simply \u201cworked much, much harder.\u201d Ericcson\u2019s research helped transform the way people think of talentedindividuals\u2014musicians, tennis players\u2014and now Harris is expanding upon that work in the field of deliberate practice to discover how teams of people can become expert teams.<\/p>\n

This summer, Harris\u2019s scholarly article, \u201cTeam Deliberate Practice in Medicine and Related Domains: A Consideration of the Issues,\u201d appeared in the scientific journal, \u201cAdvances in Health Sciences Education,\u201d and now researchers across the globe are discussing his findings. The article was added to the Clinical Human Factors Group website and recently promoted by Martin Bromiley, a champion of improving healthcare at the system level. Bromiley\u2019s own case is featured in Matthew Syed\u2019s new book, \u201cBlack Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success.\u201d Syed is also the best-selling author of \u201cBounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham and the Science of Success.\u201d Following the article\u2019s publication, Harris was also asked to contribute a chapter on his research to the prestigious \u201cOxford Handbook of Expertise.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDr. Harris is building a national reputation as extending Dr. Ericcson\u2019s work to the medical field,\u201d Dr. David Denton, dean of the APSU College of Behavioral and Health Sciences, said.<\/p>\n

[320left]In his article, Harris points out that poor teamwork in medical situations, such as in an operating room, \u201cis a key cause of preventable errors in healthcare.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there are seven members on a team, what can be done where everybody is on the same page?\u201d Harris said. \u201cWe identified what would be important to allow that to develop. What are the obstacles?\u201d<\/p>\n

His research led him to develop three guiding principals that teams can follow to allow its members to function, collectively, at the highest level. These principals include \u201cprolonged engagement in increasingly difficult deliberate practice,\u201d rehearsing activities that are proven to enhance performance, and developing a training system that has \u201cclear, objective, and quantifiable measures of performance and improvements in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

His paper also encourages teams to practice actionable ways to overcome obstacles inherent in team performance, such as getting interrupted in their tasks, so they\u2019ll be able to handle similar situations in the future, and for members to undergo assertiveness training so that lower ranked members of a team feel confident in providingimportant information to the team\u2019s leaders.<\/p>\n

Harris\u2019 work focuses on team deliberate practice in medicine, but it also offers a framework for anyone working on a team. Shortly after the paper\u2019s publication, Harris discussed its principles with an individual in Oklahoma, interested in training teams of oil field workers.<\/p>\n

His hope is that his research, which took several years to develop, will help build expert teams, ultimately lowering the number of medical errors.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s one of the things when you wake up in the morning or go to bed at night, you\u2019re like, \u2018wow this is real,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cAt one point it was just things I was thinking about. But we know from individual deliberate practice research that this saves lives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clarksville, TN – On a warm, May afternoon in 2012, Australian tennis star Samuel Groth stunned spectators at the Busan Open when he delivered a 163 mph serve\u2014the fastest serve in the history of that sport. A grainy YouTube video from that day shows Groth\u2019s opponent, Belarusian Uladzimir Ignatik, flailing in his unsuccessful attempt to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[23,5764,262,825,6351,13800,14145,7337],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xGYI-67c","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23510"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23510"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23511,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23510\/revisions\/23511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.discoverclarksville.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}