Can you teach something well just because you're an expert?
We've been hearing a lot about folks transitioning out of teaching–what about those transitioning into it?
Last week, I mentioned I’d have a potentially spicy 🌶 take for this week’s post. I want to briefly examine the question: can you teach something well just because you know it? This involves discussing the underpinnings of this question: what we as a society imply about teachers and teaching in our discussion about moving in or out of teaching as a career change.
Transitioning out of teaching
I’m not sure if it’s just the industry I’m in, but I often see posts on LinkedIn and other social media about #transitioningteachers–typically K-12 teachers who are looking to find a job outside of the K-12 classroom. Full disclosure: I’m technically a transitioned teacher! I taught high school history for five years before leaving the classroom and becoming an instructional designer in 2014.
If this isn’t something that’s in your algorithm, there’s a lot out there for transitioning teachers (just search the #transitioningteachers hashtag on LinkedIn). There are influencers, courses, resume coaches, and more offering to help teachers transition out of the classroom. Sometimes, when I see teachers asking for advice about transitioning into instructional design specifically, there’s a lot of push back from current IDs insisting that teachers don’t have the skills needed to switch careers (I’m looking at you, r/instructionaldesign).
Perhaps I’m misreading the room here, but the general gist I get from industry folk when reading about transitioning teachers is that some sort of upskilling is needed in order for a transition to be successful.
I’m not necessarily arguing that’s not true, but why does the discussion of the transition into teaching seem to be so different?
Transitioning into teaching
A couple of weeks back, I saw a post on LinkedIn celebrating the opposite: someone transitioning from tech into teaching. Someone shared the post below and noted how refreshing it was to see someone transitioning into teaching instead of out of it!
I have to admit, I had a visceral negative reaction to this. Not because I think this person is a bad teacher, or that people shouldn’t transition into teaching. But I think there is a persistent message out there that if someone has content knowledge, they can be a teacher with no pedagogical training. I mean, much of our higher education system in the US is built around this idea.
The teacher shortage hasn’t helped. Some evidence:
In Florida, military veterans can get a teaching certification without a bachelor’s degree.
This WSJ article from 2017 outlines states that have reduced professional certification requirements to try to meet teaching demand, oftentimes reducing them so that only subject matter expertise (a college degree in a subject) is required.
This mid-2022 report from the Annenberg Center at Brown University states that there are currently “163,000 positions being held by underqualified teachers.” which they define as “a teaching position filled by a teacher who is not fully
certified by the respective state’s standards, or certified but in a subject area other the respective teaching assignment is referred to as an underqualified hire.” (p9)
So can I really blame people for thinking that just anyone can start teaching with baseline content knowledge when many states appear to allow you to do that? Maybe not. But I do think it shows the lack of respect we have for teaching and pedagogical expertise as a domain of its own in the US. Instead of trying to incentivize quality educators to stay in the field or attract new quality educators, say, through higher salaries or more sustainable working conditions, we are reducing the requirements needed to become a teacher.
Probably no surprise here, but I don’t think that just because you are a content expert, you can teach something well. Teaching and learning are a science of their own. Understanding how to appropriately set goals, break down and present content in a multimodal way, and provide formative assessment and ongoing feedback so a learner can achieve success is a process and a content area of its own. Instruction can be especially difficult because you not only need to understand the content at hand, but how to teach the content in a way so that learners can learn.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are facing a math and reading crisis in the US (although measurements relying on test scores is a whole other post) in the same years we have been watering down certification requirements and putting pedagogical expertise in the back seat.
Here, I’ve discussed my potentially🌶 spicy take about teaching. Next week, I’ll go back to being a little less spicy and talk about an article I found interesting:
It’s called “AI, Algorithms, and Awful Humans” By Daniel J. Solove and Hideyuki Matsumi. It made me think about education and the quantification of learners. Catch my reflection next week-
Thanks for reading and see you then!