Teaching advice is popular, and I think most of it is pretty good. A lot of (non-woo) self-help is underrated, in fact. We look down on it mostly because we’re too human (i.e. lazy, weak, and capricious) to follow it consistently, not because the advice is generally bad.
In terms of teaching: “Keep PowerPoint slides to 5 words per line, 5 lines per slide”; “make eye contact with the audience from time to time”; “ask the students questions”; “convey confidence”; “use humor”, and so on. All good stuff. What I want to write doesn’t gainsay any of that, but rather gets at the spirit of teaching—at least as I see it—from a different angle.
I’ve been a teacher in various official capacities for just over 20 years now, from high school music tutoring through college, medical school, residency, and on to today—so this post is also an occasion for some reflection on my experiences.
What follows isn’t quite as practical as “make sure the video you embedded in the presentation actually plays, sound and all.” Still, the seeds of that sort of advice lie inside the four points below.
(1) Take Your Work Seriously
Teaching, like leadership, is a significant responsibility that too few take seriously. Most teachers try to do enough to get the job done, but the best teachers take full ownership of the task and devote themselves obsessively to it.
The best teachers believe what they teach is important and interesting, not merely a prerequisite, requirement, or check-box for something else (even if the student is inclined to see it that way). If a teacher is wondering why he is teaching something, the students are likely wondering the same thing. If you don’t find what you’re teaching interesting, you can be certain your students share your boredom. The best teachers are always able to have fun with the material.
Admiral Forrest P. Sherman (1896 – 1951) wrote—
I concur that we can take average good men and, by proper training, develop in them the essential initiative, confidence, and magnetism which are necessary in leadership. I believe that these qualities are present in the average man to a degree that he can be made a good leader if his native qualities are properly developed; whether or not he becomes a great leader depends upon whether or not he possesses that extra initiative, magnetism, moral courage, and force which makes the difference between the average man and the above-average man.
Roughly the same could be said of making good teachers, who are, like most leaders, formed by a combination of natural talent and diligent practice. With sufficient training and a bit of luck, many fairly average people can be turned into passable leaders or good-enough teachers. However, a distinguishing mark of the good teacher is continued and disciplined attention to refining the practice despite having attained recognition.
(2) Kill Your Ego
Part of taking teaching seriously is killing your ego, as best as any of us can. By this I mean: not getting caught up in how cool it is that you know so much and get to dispense your wisdom to initiates who look up to you. It is cool for sure, but it’s not the point, and many otherwise good teachers unconsciously use teaching as an outlet to display their woefully unappreciated intellectual talents. This corrupts the teaching and, at best, impresses for a moment before the room tires of the pedantry.
Teachers who measure themselves in this way become miserly. They forget the fundamentally dynamic nature of knowledge. Instead they treat it as a static thing—a precious good, a signal of status—which they can possess and, crucially, dole out to those beneath them.
(3) Always Be Prepared
Teaching at a consistently high level typically requires investing more time and effort than most are willing to give.
Prepare to teach with the same spirit as you would prepare a fine dinner party at your home. Consider the quality and freshness of your ingredients, cleanliness of the cooking space, methods of preparation, the time spent making sure things are in order. Just as you’d be embarrassed if your guests showed up to find your house a mess and dinner two hours late, teachers should be similarly embarrassed when they disrespect their students with a half-baked lecture so soporific it makes Ambien look like a stimulant. Unless you have both the natural talent and mastery of the subject to perform without preparation, the best way to feel free, flexible, and spontaneous while teaching is to have absolute confidence in your preparation.
Do not confuse preparedness with perfectionism: burning an extra four hours making sure your PowerPoint’s curlicues are perfect is not the same as investing time preparing for the “so basic you didn’t even think about them” questions your students are going to be wondering about, but too afraid to ask (wait, so is the cell membrane depolarizing during this action potential, or repolarizing? and by the way, what does depolarization even mean again?).
Needless to say, “always be prepared” doesn’t mean you never say “I don’t know”. On the contrary, being prepared makes saying “I don’t know” easier because your preparation has given you a very clear idea of what you actually do and don’t know, so you can be more confident that you haven’t simply missed something, or blundered.
(4) Cultivate Beginner’s Mind
This is the fundamental principle from which all good teaching springs: beginner’s mind. Beyond showing up to class alive and breathing, maintaining beginner’s mind is the essential quality of a teacher.
Beginner’s mind—shoshin in Japanese—is a term common in Zen practice. It refers to the open, flexible, receptive state of mind one has when approaching something new. The openness is pre-conceptual in the sense that the beginner’s mind is not tied down with accumulated layers of rules, procedures, methods, knowledge, or facts. Everything is possibility and potentiality. As we learn more about something, we develop a holistic or gestalt understanding of how it works—an instinct for it—which lets us solve certain problems faster without having to think through every step. While this understanding may be indispensable for the experienced practitioner in applying his knowledge, it is an understanding of which the new learner is wholly ignorant, and cannot be assumed or relied on when teaching. Because the beginner’s mind is unencumbered by this understanding, it can explore the new subject in a freer, more playful way. The teacher must be able to play along with the student.
As Shunryū Suzuki famously said, “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.”
While beginner’s mind is usually talked about from the student’s perspective, it is no less vital for the teacher. From this angle, it can be understood as the opposite of, or the antidote to, the “curse of knowledge” in which an expert forgets that those he is teaching aren’t also experts who know everything he knows. This is especially problematic when the accursed expert assumes not only the same high-level objective knowledge about a subject, but all the foundational and intermediate knowledge necessary to fully comprehend it as well. Things get even worse when the expert assumes familiarity with various kinds of “on-the-ground” or procedural knowledge, some of which might be tacit or otherwise unsaid (for example, consider how different it is to know facts about medicine or the law vs. having a concrete working understanding of how medicine or law is actually practiced day to day).
When the teacher cultivates beginner’s mind, he maintains a connection with the wonder, excitement, and relative ignorance of the novice. He remembers what it is like not to know the subject at hand, even its most basic terminology. What is second nature to the teacher is new and unintuitive to the student. Although the teacher has created well-worn mental paths through a jungle of dizzying information, he remembers that this is the student’s first hike, and guides him accordingly. In psych-speak, beginner’s mind preserves cognitive empathy between teacher and student.
With this spirit, the teacher is unafraid to present the subject as if he is encountering it for the first time. He is unafraid to think out loud, step by sometimes painfully obvious step, through the most basic concepts. He allows the students to see not only the what but the much more important how and why things are the way they are. He is genuinely learning side by side with them (the challenge is finding something new to see each time—that’s the key!). He gives them a boost but lets them clear the hurdle themselves.
With beginner’s mind, there are no stupid questions. Well, that’s not quite true. Anyone who’s taught long enough has heard some true howlers—utterances so boneheaded you wonder how the student manages to tie his shoes in the morning. But the teacher with beginner’s mind never mistakes a stupid question for an unproductive question. The teacher who can’t work with a “stupid question” is like the Michelin-star chef who can’t scramble an egg or heat up leftover pizza. With beginner’s mind even the dullest question is grist for the mill.
In case 6 of The Blue Cliff Record, a 12th-century Zen koan anthology, Master Yunmen answers his own cryptic question by stating, “Every day is a good day”. One layer of this koan is the Zen teaching that every moment of our existence is a perfectly complete and pristine manifestation of Reality itself, assuming we’ve cultivated the appropriate state of mind to appreciate it. As they would say, any moment is as good as any other to recognize your inherent Buddha nature—don’t wait for better weather. But on a less metaphysical level, for koans and for teaching generally, every question is also a perfectly good question, insofar as the teacher can leverage it as yet another avenue to understanding. Children learn a lot from skinned knees. Judoka see an incoming strike as just one more opportunity to hit their opponent with the Earth. How could a competent teacher not make the best possible use of the stupidest questions? How could they not be rungs on the ladder of understanding? How could they not be gateways to the joyful heart of learning itself?
To suppose that ‘practice’ and ‘realization’ are not one and the same is a view of those who are outside the Way...
Because our practice right here and now is practice in the midst of enlightenment, the practice of beginner’s mind is itself the entire original realization.
—Dōgen Zenji, Bendōwa (On the Endeavor of the Way), Answer to Question 7
This is some good advice. I completely agree with the part about preparation. Students have a way of telling how much effort you put into your classes, and if you come across like someone who just walked into class and started figuring things out, they are going to respect you less.
I remember the first class I taught. I was so afraid that I would have some super intelligent student who would ask me a question I hadn't thought of and didn't know the answer to. That never actually happened. Instead, you get basic questions that might sound silly to someone with a PhD. To students, though, it might be something many people in your class are asking themselves. You have to think not just about what the answer is, but how you can help them understand that answer. How do you convey this information to people who don't have the background you do? I think teachers often forget to ask themselves that question at some schools.
Thanks. My French horn teacher of many years seemed to know these things implicitly, much to my benefit. You articulated them very well.
I often encourage people learning to teach to try to figure out how to like their students. It isn't necessary, but it sure helps.