5 Pillars of Great Teaching: Pillar 3 - Beginner’s Empathy
This post is part 4/7 of a series on How to Pick Good Teachers to Accelerate your Learning.
Pillar 3: Beginner’s Empathy
Skin in the Game alone is not enough to make a great teacher. Often, practitioners with Expert Knowledge are so in the midst of competition or practicing their craft that they aren’t able to translate that into useful knowledge for others. Those with Expert Knowledge and Skin in the Game have probably deeply internalized the skills and mindsets that make them great. Therefore, they might struggle to deconstruct their knowledge and explain it to others in a relatable way, or they might forget what it’s like not to know the fundamentals. Another reason is that these teachers over-emphasize the final 10% of the learning curve when they should be focusing on the first 90% - this can lead to people obsessing about ‘morning routines’ and pre-game rituals of great practitioners, rather than focusing on the fundamental principles in a domain.
Beginner’s Empathy is the skill of being an expert in a topic while still remembering what it’s like to be a beginner. Such teachers remember what it’s like to not know things. They’ve deconstructed why they excel and are able to explain it to others in a relatable way. Teacher’s with Beginner’s Empathy also know that different tactics and methods are required at the beginning of the learning curve, than at the middle and the high end. Josh Waitzkin, former US National Chess Champion and Tai Chi Push Hands World Champion, might be the best example of such a teacher. In his book, The Art of Learning, he presents the deconstruction of what made him so great from both a technical perspective and an emotional and psychological perspective in the fields of Chess and Tai Chi Push Hands by looking at the interconnecting themes in his approaches to both disciplines.
Unfortunately, this phenomena of top performers lacking Beginner’s Empathy is rampant at top universities. There you have professors and graduate students digging deep into one topic during their careers and then getting placed to teach classes, many of them introductory or survey classes. They zoom through topics, as the material seems elementary or obvious, leaving students confused and opting to self-study instead. I felt this at times during my freshman year in college, where it seemed better to skip class and read the textbook (or watch Khan Academy) than to go to lectures (the good news is I still passed).
Beginner’s Empathy is important because it enables the teacher to relate to a topic from both an insider’s and outsider’s perspective. To beginners, who are still outsiders to a topic, teachers can focus on conveying principles and fundamental concepts, using analogies that a lay person could understand,only bringing in technical terms as needed. As students progress and become insiders, the teacher can start using technical terms and jargon more frequently and explore nuances and details of topics.
In college, I enjoyed Computer Science classes from Ed Felten and Arvind Narayanan, two fantastic professors at Princeton. They both had Skin in the Game, with Felten previously holding the positions of US Deputy Chief Technology Officer and Chief Technologist for the US Federal Trade Commission during the Obama administration. They were also able to approach topics from zero, remembering what it was like not to know something, and then build from the ground up. They embodied Expert Knowledge, Skin in the Game and Beginners Empathy and that’s what made them fantastic teachers. They helped me understand key topics in security and cryptography. That feeling, of concepts being familiar and not foreign, gave me confidence, which led to my becoming more interested in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, and eventually my first startup.
Next, read about the fourth Pillar of Great Teaching, Embracing Many Paths to Greatness.
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