I feel like sometimes people lose sight of what I consider the first premise of teaching:

The objective is for people to learn the thing.

That’s it. It’s that simple.

How we get there is another story, and teaching is a skill which, ironically, is not that easy to learn. 1/

When you’re doing it right, IMHO, it doesn’t cause stress to learners.

Now, it’s true that most of the time, people don’t simply learn things by being told, or by seeing them demonstrated.

It’s also true motivation is a factor: ppl don’t learn things they don’t want to. 2/

But people also don’t learn things if they think they can’t, if they’re ashamed that they don’t know, if it isn’t safe to try, or if they believe they can’t or that there are intentionally imposed barriers to ever achieving success. 3/

As an experiential and Socratic teacher I believe people learn from open ended exploration and questioning and striving and even struggling.

But.

It is specifically my job as a teacher to establish the framework and conditions where those things happen, and be a guide 4/

Course design isn’t the same thing as presentation either and not everyone excels at both.

But the reason teachers say to seize the teachable moment when it arises is because it’s important for us to recognize that it does so, sometimes, unexpectedly, and the goal is 5/

...that someone learn something.

It is not that we, the teachers, feel validated for knowing something.

It is not to keep from having to show someone how a can opener works so you can keep doing what you were interested in. 6/

I never finish a teaching engagement without being exhausted and evaluating what went right and what went wrong.

And if I’m getting ratioed for my methods, I have to step back and reflect that something did not in fact go right.

I have to learn from that. Because? 7/

If I don’t then I’ve lost touch with what learning is about, and then I can’t do the fundamental thing teaching is about, which is making it so someone can learn a thing. /end