Knowing and Teaching are not the same

Meryl Links
3 min readAug 30, 2023

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Knowing a thing and teaching others the thing are not the same at all. In fact, they share little in common.

One thing you realise watching youtube tutorials is that a lot of people who make video tutorials on things are actually really bad at explaining how to do the thing. They’re making the content because there’s demand, but they aren’t actually good teachers. Which is entirely understandable. Teaching is a really hard practice! It’s somethinbg that itself has to be learnt. Good pedagogy is something that takes a lot of study to fully learn, and then even more real practice to become good at. Developing ‘lesson plans’, anticipating learner questions, reflecting on lessons afterwards, and continually developing strategies to adapt to whatever it is you didn’t anticipate (and there will be things you didn’t anticipate).

People think that if they can do / understand a thing, they’ll naturally be equipped to teach others how to do / understand the thing, when actually the opposite can be true. This comedy sketch illustrates that point:

Still from a Dave Allen stand up comedy sketch.

Obviously it’s just a stand up comedy bit, but I think it makes a really interesting observation: explaining things can actually make them harder to understand if you don’t anticipate what it is that learners are actually struggling to understand. Making references to concepts the learner hasn’t encountered before (let alone internalised) can end up being confusing, and actually end up working against the intentions of both the teacher and the learner.

A core element of what comprises teaching, is a process of identifying and breaking down the barriers that learners actually have learning something. That’s a very different process from simply ‘explaining all the details of the thing’ which is what a lot of people commonly mistake teaching as. It’s not sufficient to simply recite all the details of how to throw a yo-yo for example. You need to talk about what it feels like and anticipate what might go wrong. Eventually, learners are going to need to feel it in their own hands and are probably going to run into problems you didn’t anticipate (because you never encountered them as a learner) and you’ll need to spend some time replicating their problem and developing a strategy to help them overcome it, considering very carefully what their capacities and limitations are.

If you don’t identify obstacles to learning, it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll be able to tackle and overcome them at all, let alone do so consistently. That first step in teaching is absolutely crucial and also commonly overlooked in most casual/informal teaching, which is understandable since most people are not professional teachers. However, if you find yourself in that teaching/instructional role and feel like you could be doing better, my advice would be to spend some time after each ‘session’ with your learners, reflecting on what went wrong, what went well, and then before the next session trying to write down at least 5 questions you anticipate the learners are going to ask you, and think about how you’re going to answer. You likely won’t anticipate everything, so then reflect on that, what did you not expect? Or what did you expect that didn’t come up in the session?

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