5 Pillars of Great Teaching: Pillar 1 - Expert Knowledge
Pillar 1: Expert Knowledge
This post is part 2/7 of a series on How to Pick Good Teachers to Accelerate your Learning.
Imagine a maths teacher who was bad at maths or a swimming teacher who was bad at swimming? Their students are gonna have a bad time! Great teachers must be proficient in the things that they teach. You can’t teach something if you yourself don’t understand it.
Clarity of explanation is the hallmark of Expert Knowledge. When conveying new concepts, they know when to zoom in, to focus on technical details, and when to zoom out, to focus on the thematic and the abstract.
Teachers with Expert Knowledge of their topic carefully lay the foundations for their students to understand the topic. They do so brick by brick, ensuring that they don’t take leaps of logic or “handwave” away things that don’t make sense to their students. They understand all the steps they went through and are able to explain why something is the way it is and not resort to “the book says it’s like that” or “that’s what’s in the syllabus”. Teachers with Expert Knowledge don’t just teach to a syllabus or to the test.
Teachers with Expert Knowledge have developed several mental models of their field that they can pass onto their students, so that they can serve as starting points to building their own maps of the topic. They know several different techniques to do one thing (e.g for doing long-division, brainstorming an essay, structuring an argument). This enables their students to use the methods and tools they like best, in order to explore the topic in the way that resonates most with them.
The teacher who exemplifies Expert Knowledge for me is Benjamin Morison, a professor of Philosophy at Princeton, who taught classes on Plato and Aristotle during my time there. Ben is probably the best ‘teacher’, in the traditional sense, I’ve ever had. He introduced concepts which still shape my life to this day, like the idea that “All knowledge can be framed as answers to questions” and the concept of Akrasia, doing something despite knowing it is the wrong thing to do. Ben was a master explainer thanks to his clear and methodical way of making points, and his entertaining lectures and sense of humor turned ancient philosophy from a dry topic into one that was practical and colorful.
However, Expert Knowledge, by itself, is not enough. Experts in a field can sometimes be so familiar with a topic and so deep in the weeds, that they forget what it’s like to not know basic concepts. This makes such experts difficult to relate to, leaving their students feeling alienated and guilty when they have trouble understanding.
Moreover, experts, who are removed from the day-to-day practice of their chosen topic, can sometimes be disconnected with the reality of being a practitioner and applying the knowledge they share. Therefore, Expert Knowledge must be accompanied by practical knowledge about the topic they teach, gained by having Skin in the Game and Beginners Empathy.
Next, read about the second Pillar of Great Teaching, Skin in The Game.
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