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I see good teaching overlooked, unappreciated, and discarded all the time. Why?


It seems that most people have the same dichotomy about teaching as they do about public speaking: they are quick to notice the faults of others, yet assume that they have all the skills to perform perfectly themselves. Well, the reality is much different, and it's really quite simple. Teaching, like public speaking, is something that is very easy to do badly. To do it well takes a lot of practice and a lot of improvement. Teaching, like anything else, gets better as you work on it.

First, we can address the presumption that experience with some material implies ability to teach that material. It is easy to see that this isn't the case. Walk into any university class and you will likely find an instructor who doesn't do a particularly excellent job. There are many reasons for this, but a big one is that professors are hired based on their expertise in a given field, not in their ability to teach. (In fact, university professors are hired primarily to do research, but that's a different discussion.) The point is that even if you know certain material very well, that does not imply being an expert in how to communicate it.

Of course, knowing the material is a critical aspect of teaching. This point leads to another important aspect of teaching: you are not a book to be read to the group, you are a role model for how to engage with the material. If you don't understand and enjoy the material, it is hard to pass on a desire to learn to the students. If you aren't enthusiastic in this field, your students won't be inspired to absorb the material. Anyone can read a textbook on a given subject. Teaching is about encouraging students to want to know more.

So, I am suggesting that teaching requires some skill in and of itself, independently of the content to be taught. Another way to support this idea is to look at the whole teaching process, not just the communication. Class design, assessing students, and developing teaching goals are all critical tasks, all of which there is no reason to assume that people would be able to do well by accident.

Second, we can discuss the presumption that teaching is easy. It is not. Again, watch a few people teach and you'll inevitably notice some of their weaknesses. Teaching competently isn't very hard, but it's not so easy that it doesn't take some practice and dedication. Teaching very well takes quite a lot of work. Two reasons for this are that feedback is not automatic and that teaching requires various disparate skills.

When developing any skill feedback is very important, and for most skills feedback is inherent in the process. When learning to drive a vehicle, play an instrument, or cook a meal, if you are doing something wrong you quickly find out. This is a natural part of the situation. If you are playing wrong notes, in general you can hear it, and you learn how to fix it. In teaching usually there isn't this benefit. I could be speaking too softly, avoiding eye contact, or not conveying the right material for the given audience and never know. Feedback is critical for improvement.

Teaching also requires skills in a few different areas. Knowledge of the content is needed, as discussed above, although this alone isn't sufficient. Teachers also require excellent skills in public speaking, reading the audience, diagnosing student problems, and curriculum design, among other things. Each of these skills require significant practice and each can very easily and noticeably detract from the students' experience if done poorly.


Over and over I see people acting on the false assumptions discussed above. For those who see the value of and difficulty of excellent teaching, watching others toss teaching aside like an uninteresting piece of clothing can be an unpleasant experience.