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Why Experts Make Bad Teachers

98 点作者 baptou12将近 9 年前

33 条评论

coreyp_1将近 9 年前
Saying that all experts are bad teachers is like saying all &lt;insert ethnic group&gt; are &lt;insert stereotype&gt;.<p>Good teachers are good teachers. If the good teacher is an expert, then they are better than the good teacher who is not an expert, especially if they are trying to teach a nuanced topic.<p>Does every teacher need to be an expert? Of course not. But plenty of non-expert teachers will actually lead students astray by teaching them the wrong model.<p>I&#x27;ve had plenty of &quot;bad teachers&quot; who were experts. I&#x27;ve also had plenty of &quot;bad teachers&quot; who were not experts. I&#x27;ve had very few good teachers, period. Bad teachers in lower-level topics are not noticed very much, but they are the bane of undergraduates who are subjected to them often. Survivorship bias might lead me to conclude that most experts are bad teachers, but the better explanation is simply that teaching and being an expert in field X are distinct abilities&#x2F;skills, and that it is rare to find people who have mastered both.<p>I aim to be an expert in my fields (currently 3 disparate ones in which I hold degrees). I also aim to be a good teacher, which means that I take time to figure out the best approach and experiences for teaching a particular topic. I consider my expert status to be an advantage that complements my teaching ability. Being an expert does not make me a bad teacher. Being a bad teacher makes me a bad teacher.
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wccrawford将近 9 年前
&gt;Now imagine an expert who understands this model and tries to teach it to you. Would they take you out in the world and let you encounter Binkles? Probably not.<p>So it&#x27;s not &quot;experts&quot; that are the problem, but &quot;bad teachers&quot;. Trust me, not taking the time to teach properly is not something unique to experts. Plenty of non-experts fail to teach well, too. And plenty of experts teach well.<p>The best teachers are people who know the subject <i>and</i> know how to teach. Eliminating them from teaching simply because they know the subject will eliminate the best teachers.
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ep103将近 9 年前
I understand the article, but the best teacher I ever had was an expert in his field, and taught by the Socratic method. Only teacher I&#x27;ve ever had that had enough knowledge of a topic that he could both truly answer any question we asked via the method, _and_ answer in such a way as to direct the lesson. Miss that guy.
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LanceH将近 9 年前
Perhaps someone can sort this into the fallacy in which it belongs.<p>Experts make bad teachers -- Most people make bad teachers -- easily explained by teaching being a skill separate from other skills.<p>&quot;Technical people make bad managers&quot; is another one I see put into use all the time.
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koolba将近 9 年前
Teaching is a skill that is orthogonal to the subject being taught. Like patience (closely related) and emotional intelligence (tangentially related), you either have it or you don&#x27;t.<p>Purely anecedata, but I don&#x27;t know of anyone I&#x27;d consider a good teacher that was taught to be such. It seems innate to them.
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Newtopian将近 9 年前
There is one reason that can make it harder for &quot;experts&quot; to teach a subject that others may teach better.<p>Best I can explain this is from a personnal story. I used to do rollerblade... I mean a lot of it. It was my main mean of transportation ans I could do easily 20-50km per day. Obviously after a year or two of this I got pretty good and many of my friends would ask me to teach them how to do it. And I did, relatively well, they got the hang of some subtelties of breaking and turning.<p>However, I noticed that as time went on, I found it more difficult to teach it. It got so natural for me that decomposing the movements in their atomic parts was difficult.<p>I cound identify two factors that contributed to me going from a decent teacher to a lousy one while at the same time I went from a decent rollerblader to a pretty good one.<p>For one, the abstraction went from a concious one to a subcouncious one. I no longer had to think about doing it right, I just did. Second I had not taught anyone for a while, so I did not keep in touch with how I built these abstractions in the first place. Both together contributed in me forgetting how to build these abstractions.<p>To teach one does not have to be a foremost expert in a field but just ahead of the target audience to be in control of the material they need to absorb. The greater the difference in knowledge between the target audience and the teacher the harder for the teacher to &quot;bring down&quot; his thaught processes to their level. That is unless you 1 - were teaching the whole time between getting from pretty good to expert. This way you&#x27;ve kept contact with the different steps and breakdown you&#x27;va had to go through yourself while learning. Here is probably where most have had their bad experience when an expert tried to teach them but miserably failed at it. 2 - are a natural pedagogue, in other words you are a genious at making things around you look simple. I think Richard Feynmann would be an stellar example of this.<p>That being said, as a corrolary to point 2 above, there are people that are just bad at teaching reagardless of any other factors.
whistlerbrk将近 9 年前
I&#x27;ve had this notion for a while that the most qualified person to teach you something is often a thoughtful person 1 or 2 levels above your current level of understanding, not someone all the way at the top who can no longer relate to your level of understanding.<p>All this said, being a truly good professional educator is a learned skill.
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franciscop将近 9 年前
I disagree with the premise:<p>&gt; &quot;We’d all agree that to teach a subject, you must know the subject. So you’d think that experts would be the best teachers, but they’re not. The question is why?&quot;<p>That is like saying that dogs are animals so you&#x27;d think all animals are dogs.<p>Moving past of it, I took a class on education which is probably the best class I&#x27;ve ever taken in my life. First they made us create a 1 sentence stating our goal for the teaching material we were going to create. Then we created the content outline and then they made us ask ourselves how the student would profit about each of them for the course objectives. We realized how many of the things we added were abstractions we learned through the years and totally unnecessary for a beginner in the subject.<p>To make the group assignment, we created a series of concrete tutorials where, through concrete examples, we tried to add a specific (or more) new material on each one while strengthening the previous learned lesson (each would build on each other).<p>I am interested mainly in group learning (though I do some one-to-one), so another important point is the speed of the learner due to previous abstraction models. While on one-on-one you can tune up&#x2F;down to the person, with group learning the most you can do is to put them in knowledge groups or try to automate it (which is quite hard). For instance, unless we are talking about kids, most people know that you read top to bottom in English&#x2F;most languages and left to right, so explaining that about programming is not only unnecessary but it makes your course boring. Then depending on the level you can skip variables, or variable types.
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sandworm101将近 9 年前
The OP makes the false assumption that the goal of the teaching is to generate other experts. That may be true of some courses at some schools, but I would say that most teaching does not involve trying to turn a student into an expert.<p>For instance, I am a lawyer. I am an expert in certain areas of law. I teach&#x2F;sell a lecture on intellectual property law, mostly to startups full of young people who don&#x27;t know IP from IP addresses. I have no intention of turning them into IP experts let alone lawyers. That&#x27;s not why they hire me. My job is to give them a taste of some basic rules, to give them enough knowledge so they can spot some red flags. And I&#x27;m there to answer specific questions, to address those red flags. That;s most teaching. You want the expert to relate a tiny piece of their knowledge, the focused bit you actually need, so that you don&#x27;t have to spend years at law school. Half of the task is relating knowledge, the other half the selection of which knowledge to relate. The expert then goes away to continue learning in their field, returning as needed to keep you abreast of changes. The relationship remains asymmetrical.
heisenbit将近 9 年前
&quot;If you can&#x27;t explain it to a six year old, you don&#x27;t understand it yourself.&quot;<p>This quote is attributed to both Feynman and Einstein. Both were very good in breaking down complexity into chunks digestible by mere humans. Ironically the author choose an Einstein image.
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6stringmerc将近 9 年前
Very odd article to me and not particularly fond of what it&#x27;s reaching for as a concept. I mean, I think the premise being promoted is debatable from an Educational Research perspective, which I got familiar with in graduate school.<p>Honestly I kind of bristle at the implication being done at the bottom of basically letting a child&#x2F;student&#x2F;trainee wander through the forest of music in the name of learning abstraction the hard way, because, you know, experts aren&#x27;t good teachers. With something like guitar, I&#x27;d argue anything <i>but</i> and expert makes a mediocre or even poor teacher because of the nature of the objective.<p>It&#x27;s not against the rules to reply a student&#x27;s question with &quot;I don&#x27;t know the exact answer to that, but I will get back to you&quot; but I&#x27;d like to think those are infrequent asides in an otherwise useful exchange where the teacher&#x2F;prof actually knows the ins and outs of things and can explain them because they had to learn them too.<p>Then we start getting into issues of diversity in learning styles and the conversation gets a lot more complex than what this piece asserts. Good food for thought and a neat topic, but I&#x27;d pass on endorsing its conclusion(s) as stated herein.
krosaen将近 9 年前
I like this post, but perhaps it&#x27;d be more accurate to say that expertise is a necessary but not sufficient condition to teach a subject? I do find that the very best teachers have mastery of the material.<p>On a related note, when I posted this notebook about the sigmoid function to HN<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;karlrosaen.com&#x2F;ml&#x2F;notebooks&#x2F;logistic-regression-why-sigmoid&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;karlrosaen.com&#x2F;ml&#x2F;notebooks&#x2F;logistic-regression-why-s...</a><p>it was upvoted to the front page (presumably by non-experts like me) but derided in the comments by some experts, I think in part because it seemed so obvious to not bare explaining. So I think a challenge of having expertise is to remember what it&#x27;s like to not understand something and take the beginner on the journey somehow, as the article gets at. And from this perspective a non-expert or aspiring expert can be in a sweet spot of just having learned the material him&#x2F;her self. But it can be dangerous if you end up with the blind leading the blind.
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whack将近 9 年前
The author makes some very good points, but seems to have missed the real punchline. Instead of making this about experts-vs-non-experts, the real lesson is the value of <i>pretesting</i> and similar methods.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;07&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;why-flunking-exams-is-actually-a-good-thing.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;07&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;why-flunking-exam...</a><p>The basic idea is simple. Instead of &quot;telling people the answers&quot;, let them bang their heads against the wall first, trying to solve a problem that they have never studied before. Once they&#x27;ve realized that they don&#x27;t know how to solve the problem, then teach them how to do so. This way, because the students have experienced the frustration of solving the problem themselves, they&#x27;ll truly appreciate whatever knowledge you provide that can help them out.
arkj将近 9 年前
There are experts who are bad at teaching but be assured all good teachers will be good enough &quot;experts&quot;.
einhverfr将近 9 年前
I don&#x27;t agree that experts are necessarily bad teachers. Some of the best experts in physics have been those who were widely regarded as great teachers (Feynman and Heisenberg being great examples).<p>However, I think there is something to the article as applied to the software industry. Often times we have come to understand solely through abstractions and abstractions are dangerous in this regard particularly when they don&#x27;t match reality.<p>A really good example of this was the effort to apply the OSI model of abstractions to TCP&#x2F;IP back around the turn of the century. Without an understanding of what made the ITU OSI effort different from the DARPA TCP&#x2F;IP effort, at best one got an overly confusing and misleading understanding of what was actually happening from a networking perspective.<p>I do a lot of teaching these days as I have changed from being a self-employed consultant to being an employee at a Swedish consulting and training firm, and I do a lot of thinking as to &quot;what are the right abstractions to push in this course?&quot; In IT, that is a remarkably difficult question and one I answer largely through my love of history. For example, when I talk about object-orientation, I start with procedural programming, discuss why structural programming largely replaced it, and then discuss the problems of having your code contracts based on your data structures in C. From there I go to my main abstraction: Object orientation is an effort to hide state changes behind interfaces, to make the interface responsible for the state rather than the outside routine responsible for it. (This also makes it easy to start discussing functional programming.)<p>The danger of the expert is that the expert may become complacent about this question but the best experts are those who have not. Feynman wrote about insisting that he could explain his theories to his non-physicist relatives. Heisenberg wrote a book on the history of philosophy and how this applies to physics arguing the whole time that data does not imply theory.<p>If our experts aren&#x27;t good teachers, that says more about what we want from experts and about our industry than it does about expertise generally.
skybrian将近 9 年前
This article would be stronger if it were just about the importance of learning from concrete examples.<p>After all, education is all about taking shortcuts compared to figuring everything out from first principles.
chatman将近 9 年前
Richard Feynmann was one of the best teachers ever!
kristianc将近 9 年前
&gt;&gt; Binkles have long plackerts and whipitat their snoblats when they get excited<p>What I was most interested by was how much of this example you could understand. A binkle is some kind of animal, a plackert is some kind of body part, i&#x27;d imagine a whipitat is some kind of action, and I&#x27;d imagine a snoblat is another kind of body part. Already I know more about binkles than I did.<p>You&#x27;re also, however, a long way from a dog simply by describing a &#x27;barking thing&#x27;. There are things that bark that are not dogs, and there are somewhere, dogs that do not bark. Wittgenstein demonstrated that there are an entire set of items that you could call a table than share no common features whatsoever.<p>I&#x27;m a fan of the dialectic method for this reason: it encourages people to go beyond the limits of their own knowledge by applying first principles to things they don&#x27;t understand. This tends to take you a lot further than &quot;here, learn this.&quot;<p>Further reading on this:<p>Wittgenstein: Blue and Brown Books (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Blue_and_Brown_Books" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Blue_and_Brown_Books</a>)<p>Plato, Meno (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gutenberg.org&#x2F;files&#x2F;1643&#x2F;1643-h&#x2F;1643-h.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gutenberg.org&#x2F;files&#x2F;1643&#x2F;1643-h&#x2F;1643-h.htm</a>)
clifanatic将近 9 年前
Well, no, experts teach just fine, if they&#x27;re good teachers. I agree with the author&#x27;s premise that &quot;the only way to learn is the hard way&quot;, but there&#x27;s not reason to think that being an expert in a subject means that you&#x27;ve forgotten the &quot;path to learning&quot;. Experts still make better teachers because they understand why things are the way they are and can answer questions that somebody else might not even have thought of.
golemotron将近 9 年前
There&#x27;s another problem where a teacher makes a false generalization, maybe due to lack of expertise, and attempts to teach by writing an article about it.
lordnacho将近 9 年前
I&#x27;m not sure the &quot;hard way&quot; is the only way that works.<p>If you look at a new field, you can often do some meta-learning that will help you.<p>For instance, you can browse the introductory texts for common words. Words that are uncommon in normal English (ie not &quot;the&quot; or unspecific verbs like &quot;do&quot; or &quot;have&quot;) will appear frequently. You&#x27;ll quickly discover the subtopics this way. For instance, you will find the word &quot;inflation&quot; in an econ text and conclude it&#x27;s something to be learned about.<p>The organization of the text is also a clue. You can scan headings and suppose that whatever terms are there are considered important.<p>Once you&#x27;ve done a scan you have some priors that hopefully will put your mind&#x27;s model nearer to what the experts have, and you can start refining by actually reading.<p>Basically, apply some ML-like ideas to what you&#x27;re looking at (clustering, correlations, and so on).
cirgue将近 9 年前
Even though the article bungled the concept IMO, this is actually a pretty well-documented phenomenon in psychology and economics: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Curse_of_knowledge" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Curse_of_knowledge</a>
ColinDabritz将近 9 年前
The article makes some good points, part of the problem I have with describing &quot;functions&quot; is that there really is a LOT to unpack there, but after years of software development the idea of a function with all its nuance is a single idea, very compressed. To teach that you have to unpack it and take it slow.<p>I would also note that expertise in one field doesn&#x27;t mean you have expertise in another field. Many (or most) expert software engineers are not expert educators. They are separate skills. It&#x27;s beautiful to watch someone with both skill sets work. I strive for understanding and expertise in both, and I hope that it helps.
bbctol将近 9 年前
I think this might be a post hoc explanation of an old fallacy. People become teachers, and are promoted to a visible level, based on a combination of teaching skill and expertise in the field. If someone was a bad teacher and <i>not</i> an expert, they&#x27;d be cut off. Thus, there are many teachers who are good at teaching with low expertise, and many teachers who are top experts with little teaching skill. I think there are also people who are top experts and good teachers (I&#x27;ve been fortunate enough to meet some), but they&#x27;re obviously rare than the other two.
eastbayjake将近 9 年前
I was a history major in college before joining Teach For America as a chemistry and physics teacher. That pivot often surprises and confuses people -- and is occasionally a reason they criticize TFA -- but I think it was done deliberately and for good reason: as a history expert I would have relied much more on my abstractions while teaching history than I did teaching chemistry&#x2F;physics I had to re-learn from my high school notes and my students&#x27; textbook.
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zeveb将近 9 年前
This is why folks who complain about rote learning are on the wrong track. You have to learn things by rote before you can internalise the abstractions. Yeah, that means lots of boring scales before you can play a solo; it means sitting in a classroom saying, &#x27;amo, amas, amat&#x27; before you read Bellum Gallicum; it means … whatever one does to first learn to program (it&#x27;s honestly so long ago now that I really can&#x27;t remember what it was like).
cannonpr将近 9 年前
Why can&#x27;t the article simply say that being a subject expert is required to teach a topic to someone to an expert level, however you also need to be an expert in teaching, in other helping someone build a model of the knowledge in their mind. Both are required ?
rimantas将近 9 年前
As many already said: being an expert does not magically make you a good teacher. But if you are an expert AND understang teaching you will be a great teacher.
forgottenpass将近 9 年前
<i>We’d all agree that to teach a subject, you must know the subject. So you’d think that experts would be the best teachers,</i><p>No I wouldn&#x27;t. Why would anyone think that? This article is built on a foundation of affirming the consequent. (Sorta, there are enough fuzzy words to weasel around making a logical assertion, but it boils down to &quot;if there&#x27;s a lot of Q, then in that case surely there must be a lot of P&quot;)<p>If someone is going to write such bollocks, not only do I not trust their article, I stopped reading because I fear it will only make me stupider.
posterboy将近 9 年前
Because few are experts in two things, the subject matter <i>and teaching</i>.
purplelobster将近 9 年前
Can anyone recommend a good book on teaching?
perseusprime11将近 9 年前
Some please define expert for me.
known将近 9 年前
Subjective versus Objective