Experts are expected to be teachers (and vice versa). If we confuse these two equally important skills, we dramatically devalue what makes them particularly helpful.

Writer Joy Beth Smith tweeted about the demands of publishing her first book. As if publishing wasn’t challenging enough, she also must promote her book — a job requiring skills very different from writing. What should she charge for speaking engagements? How can she compress 60,000 finely-tuned words into a half hour speech?

Education as a field might suffer a similar confusion. Experts are expected to be teachers (and vice versa). If we confuse these two equally important skills, we dramatically devalue what makes them particularly helpful.

Put simply: Experts advance a discipline; teachers advance learners.

An expert focuses on mastering a discipline in order to advance it. By contrast, a teacher transfers disciplines to others. Teachers operate within their specific community of learners to help those learners attain mastery. Hopefully, their learners become experts.

Why do we confuse these roles? What's lost in the process?

Not too long ago, lecture circuits were like Netflix. Vast information bound up in books didn’t move easily. Unless you were wealthy enough to be literate or lucky enough to live near a library, you had little means to learn. Unless an expert came to town. On this rare occasion, you’d gather in a big hall and binge on lectures for hours.

If you were really lucky, you might be able to afford university — experts talking for hours and days on end. Then, you became the expert! You could lecture, too!

Repeat this process for hundreds of years. Congrats, you created our education system.

Eventually, digital circuits got pretty great at transferring information, too. This sadly hasn’t yet changed much about how we teach. Learners still sit through long lectures to get information or wade through millions of pages of Google search results that never seem to stick.

Somehow, we still require teachers to play experts, conveying the minutia of their fields in a few interminable minutes (regardless of the strain this puts on learners and teachers alike).

Earlier, I said teacher and expert are different roles. If we emphasize their superpowers, they start to work together.

Export their answers for other experts and teachers

Understand the lexicon and essential questions of their discipline

Engage their specific community of learners

Adapt essential resources for their communities

Invite learners along a path to new levels in their discipline

What strikes me is that these roles don’t compete — they complement. Scramble them together and you have long, dull lectures. But treat them as white and yolk in the same egg, and I think we’ll forge an alliance that finds answers and explains them for communities who need them.

The rare few will master both roles. But we might more often need to say, “Those are totally different skill sets!” If we create easy channels for experts to share their expertise and effective tools for teachers to bring that expertise to their communities, we’ll be in better shape. Teachers, experts, and learners alike will certainly be happier.

At Pathwright, we aim to equip both experts and teachers. That’s why we’ve made tools for both. Experts can now offer their curriculum for teachers in communities around the world. Teachers get power-packed courses complete with teaching tools that make helping their learners even easier. Here’s a short article from our guidance team on offering your course to multiple Groups. If you’d like to find out more about Pathwright, check out Intro to Pathwright.

The story of the three-point shot and what it has to teach us about why point values matter in an online course.

It’s difficult to imagine basketball without the three-point shot. But before 1967, it didn’t exist. When the American Basketball Association established the three-point arc in 1967, it remade the game.

As the great people at 99% Invisible note, the three-point shot “critically changed the dynamic on the court.” No longer did players amass right under the net, looking to make a surer shot. Instead, shorter, faster players were rewarded for moving outside.

The added diversity and extra value of the three-point shot created the fast-paced, dynamic sport we know today.

To me, the story of the three-point shot parallels why point values matter in an online course. Just as the three-point line changed the landscape of the court, point values in a course create a terrain of value that helps your learners focus.

In short, points send value signals to your learners to help them pay attention. The bigger the learning outcomes and the further we have to travel from point A to point B, the more important it is to understand the value of each learning activity.

Your learners will benefit when they understand what’s intentionally practice and what activities have higher stakes. Varying these point values through the course also gives your learners a chance to relax in certain activities and ramp up efforts in others.

A few factors influence point values. First, I match value to activity. Short readings and videos warrant fewer points. But if a learner contributes to a discussion or writes a reflection, I often double the point value of that step. The increase in points signals that I notice their extra effort.

I also increase points as the course goes on. Early on, assignments carry less weight. Learners should feel comfortable trying new things, making mistakes, and finding out what they don’t know so we can fill in the gaps together.

In other words, lower point values early on signal that learners are in practice mode. Later in the course, point values will match their increased intensity and skill.

The overall effect is an ebb and flow that engages and re-engages learners at every step. With simple value reminders and small feelings of accomplishment along the way, we help learners reach their smallest and biggest goals.

If you’d like to create dynamic, engaging online courses, you can try Pathwright for free.

To kick off a new school year, I thought I'd share some of my favorite wisdom from other teachers.

Computers Teach What Computers Can Be and Other Lessons from Great Educators

To kick off a new school year, I thought I'd share some of my favorite wisdom from other teachers. After all, someone else can't always stand in the classroom with you, but they can help you prepare for the day.

"To me, teaching is a holy calling, especially with students less likely to succeed. It’s the gift not only of not giving up on people, but of even figuring out where to begin.

You start wherever you can. You see a great need, so you thread a needle, you tie a knot in your thread. You find one place in the cloth through which to take one stitch, one simple stitch, nothing fancy, just one that’s strong and true. The knot will anchor your thread. Once that’s done, you take one more stitch — teach someone the alphabet, say, no matter how long that takes, and then how to read Dr. Seuss, and Charlotte’s Web, and A Wrinkle in Time, and then, while you’re at it, how to get a GED. Empathy is meaning."

2. A computer teaches what a computer can be.

"Computers are no more your friends, and no more increasers of your brainpower, than slot machines…

Only well-informed, warm-hearted people can teach others things they’ll always remember and love. Computers and TV don’t do that.

A computer teaches a child what a computer can become.

An educated human being teaches a child what a child can become."

3. Warm-hearted teaching involves personal risk.

“If we want to grow as teachers—we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives—risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.”

4. Learn the rules. Then throw out the rules.

"RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.

RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.

RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher — pull everything out of your students.

RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.

RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined — this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.

RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.

RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.

RULE TEN: “We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” (John Cage)

HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything — it might come in handy later."

What wisdom and lessons would you share with fellow teachers?

At Pathwright, we believe teaching is an art. It's more than content or expertise alone. Teaching is about designing space and relationships in which real learning can happen. If you'd like to design a teaching and learning experience using Pathwright, try it for free here.

To do a little myth-busting, a course isn’t simply collected information. Teaching is the shape that information takes and the relationship that’s built around it.

Teach Through Connections and Communities, Not Content

An effective course depends on good course design. Or, to do a little myth-busting, a course isn’t simply collected information. Teaching is the shape that information takes and the relationship that’s built around it.

To understand this more fully, let’s think of a specific example — architecture.

When you think of any kind of building — your office or home, St. Paul’s Cathedral or the Chrysler building — I doubt that the building material comes to mind first. Instead, you think of the building as the space it creates for you to work, live, stress, hope, and love. You think about the particular kinds of connections that are made in that space and the feeling the building gives you. A building’s material matters, no doubt. But it’s only one aspect of what makes it special or essential.

A course is the same. Just as particular buildings are designed to foster certain activities and connections — between people and around information — so are courses.

That’s the long route to a simple idea: Teaching is more about connections and communities than content.

I like to think about the particular challenge this creates for those of us who design courses that are partly or entirely online. At times, creating meaningful communities in an online course feels a bit like being an architect tasked with building a tall, thin tower in a windstorm.

We’ve written before about how technology helps to solve this problem — whether that means minimizing distractions or creating more places for conversation. But I’d like to suggest a simple solution to help us as curriculum designers to create more space for connections and communities.

If it’s true that teaching is more about connections and communities than it is about content, we should constantly press our content to be more useful by asking, “How can I make this course about my learner’s real life?”

I love watching masterful teachers do this. For my college literature teacher, this meant pushing her students to empathize with John Milton’s blindness, so we could better understand his poetic genius. But I’ve seen solutions in the form of creative and clever projects as well.

One of my colleagues at Pathwright who teaches software design transforms his class projects by making them as much like real life as possible. He could simply tell students, “Design this app.” Instead, he creates elaborate scenarios in which fake clients email students requesting them to bid for a specific project.

Sure, the students know the emails aren’t real. Even so, his projects are infused with a lot more real-life energy than typical bulleted instructions for college assignments.

Answering the question “how can I make this course about my learner’s real life?” might not result in any revelatory new teaching methods. It doesn’t have to. Our aim is simply to help students connect what they’re learning to the people around them and with their everyday lives. If we can do that, we’ll have created a space in which true learning happens.

This kind of course design requires buckets of empathy and planning. If you want to see the tools we use for this kind of work, check out our course on planning effective learning experiences.

On a given Saturday, with time on my side and a bit of boldness, YouTube will teach me almost any skill. I need to change the oil in my car? 3,660,000 videos are ready at hand to show me how.

Why Teachers Should Give Questions, Not Answers

On a given Saturday, with time on my side and a bit of boldness, YouTube will teach me almost any skill. I need to change the oil in my car? 3,660,000 videos are ready at hand to show me how. I want to write a stand-up comedy routine? I probably shouldn't, but 15,500 videos explain the process.

And it's the same with Siri and Google and Quora and . . . is AskJeeves still a thing?

They'll give me an answer, but they'll never give me a question to ask.

The point, I think, highlights two remarkable realities:

Answering questions has never been easier. This is the definition of "a given," so I won't say any more about it.

Questions have never been more valuable.The Internet Age's great pioneers (and now overlords???—looking at you Google) staked their claim around questions. Panning for these little nuggets we tossed their way, they found them to be bonafide gold. Let that sink in: companies exist because we ask questions.

What does this mean for teaching? I think it means that we often don't need teachers to be the at-hand experts ready to answer our questions. That doesn't mean we don't need teachers who are also experts (Who made all those YouTube videos after all?).

It does mean that a teacher's job on the ground often looks different than we imagine. If 15,500 people are ready to answer my questions about stand-up comedy, what do teachers do?

There are a lot of important answers to that question. Teachers contextualize expertise. They identify specific hurdles learners face and customize their journeys around and over those hurdles. Teachers sometimes simply encourage at just the right moment. But here's an answer I think gets overlooked:

Teachers, unlike YouTube, give us questions to ask.

When we don't know what we don't know, teachers can tell us. By giving us questions to ask, teachers show us what's just beyond our peripheral vision.

You may have had an experience like this. Maybe you sat down with a mentor and lamented over two career choices that were seemingly at odds. "Which one should I pick?!" you asked. Maybe your mentor returned with a question: "What if instead you asked, ‘How can I combine these two passions?’"

A whole new direction opens up to you in an instant. 

In other words, even at a time when questions are answered so easily, we often need help asking the right questions.

What might it look like if, as teachers (whether in a classroom or out), we focused more on giving our learners the right questions than the right answers? What if, as learners, we paused to ask, "What should I be asking?"

Try this. Whenever you sit down to design your next course—whether it's an employee onboarding course or an intro to graphic design—don't just make a list of what your learners should know. Make a list of the questions they should ask to find those answers themselves.

In the process, you'll not only help learners find answers to their questions, you'll reveal mysteries they didn't know they were searching for. You’ll give them something worth more than gold.

Last year, after working in the “real world” for three years, I decided to move to England in order to study for a Master’s degree.

Last year, after working in the “real world” for three years, I decided to move to England in order to study for a Master’s degree. (By the way, if you can, find a company cool enough to let you move to another country to get a Master’s degree.) Going back to school reminded me that students often miss what a grade is meant to communicate. And teachers often fail to remind them.

After a year of classes, writing, thrown-away pages, and then slightly better writing, I found myself waiting for a big grade for my big, final project. The waiting was accompanied by a familiar, antsy feeling. You probably remember that feeling you’d get waiting for a big project to come back?

While I waited, I asked myself what this grade would say about me.

An A+ will say I’m as smart as I think I should be. A B will say I’m not quite as good as the really smart girl who sits next to me.

A C — well, *gulping sound* a C will mark me forever as plain ol’, stinkin’ average. *Secretly shudders at the thought of anything lower than a C.*

That’s how old, undergraduate me would probably think of grades. In other words, grades were a final marker of my ability, a certification of my innate intelligence or skill (or lack thereof).

Four years later, I realized how stifling this mindset was. It’s the mindset that our current system of education, I believe, has pushed us toward. Or, at the very least, it isn’t a mindset the system tries to correct. And there isn’t a single part of it that is wise or helpful.

Grades don’t tell us anything about who we are. They help us measure what we’ve gained. In other words, they don’t mark genius. They mark growth.

If we believe grades mark genius, we’ll always see them as endings. As markers of genius, grades act as a rubber stamp smushed against a forehead, telling a person what they can or can’t do. This kind of grading is symptomatic of conveyor-belt-education in which quality control inspectors toss out products that don’t seem quite up to snuff.

But if we view grades as markers of growth, they can be generative — continually opening onto the next right step up. Like signs in a forest marking a trail, grades can let us know things about the path ahead.

“The trail ahead gets really steep. If you found the trail you’re on difficult, maybe you should take this other route until your legs are stronger or camp out and do some stretching.”

“If you found this trail easy, why not give yourself a challenge on the next leg?”

What would our classes look like if we pressed our learners to think of grades as ways to make a plan instead of as stamps marking innate talent and skill?

“It looks like you found this a little challenging. Let’s identify the prickly points and take another pass at it. We’ve got time to learn.”

“You found this really easy it seems! Why not bump up the intensity next time?”

All a grade says, in other words, is that you’ve grown into a new challenge.

The pervasive mindset of measuring for genius instead of growth is subtle, but powerful. Teachers should probably address it according to their context, whether that means doing away with the word “grades” altogether or explaining clearly to learners what grades are all about.

Regardless, if we equip our learners with the right mindset, a grade never has to be discouraging. No matter the mark, it can be the beginning of new growth.

Grades don’t tell us anything about who we are. They help us measure what we’ve gained. In other words, they don’t mark genius. They mark growth. If we equip our learners with the right mindset, a grade never has to be discouraging.

Before you read this, pause and take a look at everything you’ve learned in the past month. …and done? Of course not.

Before you read this, pause and take a look at everything you’ve learned in the past month.

👀 Take a close look at what you’ve learned…

Of course not. Unless you’re an unusually studious and visually-oriented notetaker there’s nothing for you put your eyeballs on and look at. We humans haven’t come up with a way to visually show a learning journey.

But if there were a way to look back at a learning journey, or to look forward at what we want to learn next, what shape would it be in?

This may come as a surprise, but at Pathwright, we think learning looks most like a path. As a path, learning is…

Connected: No matter how spontaneous it seems in the moment, everything we learn is connected to something we’ve previously learned — like steps in a path.

Active: Real learning happens when we reflect, apply, and act not just watch and read. Passively absorbing content without action is like sitting on a path enjoying the view and going nowhere.

Progressive: Learning doesn’t really happen in giant leaps or light bulb moments. Learning happens as we struggle step-by-step towards a destination and make discoveries along the way.

Meandering: Learning isn’t like a highway fading straight into the horizon or like a neat grid of city streets. Learning is more like a connected series of winding paths we stumble on, explore around, and even carve our own paths from.

Communal: Paths are best taken with others and learning happens best with other people.

Whenever I’m teaching, thinking of learning as a path helps me remember a few core principles:

Every new idea or concept must be connected and built on a previous one. It’s impossible to teach someone something entirely new.

Paths are best taken together. How can I encourage “togetherness” even if I’m teaching online, at a distance?

Learning is active, not passive. Watching and reading doesn’t move people forward unless it’s acted upon.

As a teacher, I’m primarily a guide that helps people choose the right path and arrive safely at their destination.

As a course designer, I’m primarily a path maker (or “pathwright”) who creates a path through the chaos of information and ideas that I and others can guide people down.

The true shape of learning is a path — not a syllabus, a classroom, or a video playlist. As teachers, our primary job is to make paths and guide people along them.

Online courses should be more than just an attractive way to convey information, because learning is more than just relaying facts. It’s about relationships that build frameworks for information.

Online courses should be more than just an attractive way to convey information, because learning is more than just relaying facts. It’s about relationships that build frameworks for information. Asking useful discussion questions will help your students in three key ways:

To learn through explaining things themselves

To synthesize what they’ve learned with their experience

Below you’ll find four tips to help you write questions that accomplish these goals:

Strong open-ended questions guide our thoughts without expecting specific answers. Asking an open-ended question is like fencing in a pasture—a farmer wants his cattle to have plenty of grass on which to feed, but he doesn’t want any of them going too far off on their own. The right discussion question will push students in a helpful direction without giving them too much room to follow unhelpful tangents. Let’s imagine what open-ended questions about this blog post would sound like:

What’s one thing that you found really helpful from our discussion about open-ended questions? (Too broad.)

How do you think your specific subject material will shape how you write open-ended questions? (Helps students apply information to their own context)

What are some important things to remember when you’re writing open-ended questions? (Expects regurgitation of what’s been discussed, doesn’t push students for original thoughts)

How can open-ended questions in early lessons prepare your students for what you want to teach them later in the course? (Pushes students to consider specific benefits we didn’t discuss)

Even if you write the perfect open-ended question (broad enough to be challenging without being so broad it’s unhelpful), expect to see a wide array of answers. Students will combine what you’ve taught them with their own experience to bring something original into the conversation. That’s discussion’s superpower—each student becomes a teacher, and each benefits from the experience of others.

The community aspect of discussion groups will also provide more (and better) feedback. Feedback from peers not only helps a student benefit from someone else’s ideas, but it applies positive pressure to the learning process. No one wants to come to a discussion empty-handed, knowing that their fellow classmates will be watching, so they’ll put more time into answering a question well.

As you write discussion questions, consider asking yourself: “Does this question help students to add their own experience to this discussion?” Try following that up with: “Does this question motivate students to give a thoughtful response?”

Offering more than one question to answer — providing some that are very accessible, others that are more challenging — will draw in more students to participate. Many of your students won’t be used to online discussion. And others will squirm at the thought of having to share in front of their classmates. For these students, easily accessible questions will become a training ground for healthy discussion. These easier questions will familiarize students with what it’s like to discuss and get feedback. Again, let’s imagine an accessible question we might ask if we were teaching this blog post:

How have discussion questions helped you learn in the past? (Simply focuses on the student’s personal experience while drawing out information about the subject.)

4. Offer Incentive (Grade the Discussion)

It’d be difficult to grade every discussion post (much less the feedback on those posts). And, if you’re asking the right kind of discussion questions, there shouldn’t be a “right answer” to grade. But offering points for participation will usually draw in the stragglers.

Participation points may seem a little too pragmatic at first. After all, we want students to want to discuss, right? But no one learns to swim without getting in the water, and some of us need a little push off the edge of the swimming pool. Giving out points will get them involved, and once the student is in the discussion, they just might find that it’s really helpful. 

(Read more on grades at their worst (and best) and how points create dynamic courses.)

Helpful discussion questions take time to write. The process isn’t easy, though it gets easier with practice. But when you’ve mastered it, your online course will feel more like a class and not just a textbook. Students will begin to engage with what you teach and with their classmates. You’ll build a community of learners prepared to apply what they know.

Every so often a person is gifted with both wonderful skill and the skill to teach. David Foster Wallace was such a person.

An Undoubtedly Fun Class I’ll Never Get to Take

4 Things David Foster Wallace Taught Me About Teaching

Every so often a person is gifted with both wonderful skill and the skill to teach. David Foster Wallace was such a person. Not only was Wallace a wonderful novelist and essayist (known best for his novel Infinite Jest and essays such as “Shipping Out”), but he also taught writing and literature with passion. Even before he was known as an acclaimed writer, he was shaping a future generation of writers. From his syllabi, we can piece together certain keys that made Wallace a great teacher.

Wallace cared about details. While he experimented in fantastic ways with the limits of writing fiction—with the limits of the page itself—he knew the importance of mastering the basics of the craft. And, while some of these standards must have been institutional, most seem aimed at motivating students to think charitably about their classmates and respect the language in which they write. As one of his former students put it:

“To fail the language, through a half-hearted peer critique or an overlooked comma, was to fail the writers we wished to become.”

For instance, all through college I was asked to turn in papers with one-inch margins. But never once did a teacher include a note as simple and helpful as Wallace did for his students:

“For writers: One reason to double-space your essays and to give them generous margins is to give us space to write marginalia. For readers: Make sure that your margin comments are legible and lucid, and that they’re directed to the author . . .”

It’s a small note on a smaller detail. But these tiny notes show how seriously Wallace took students and their work.

2. Teach students by letting them teach.

Wallace’s courses focus on student-to-student interaction. His classes relied heavily on class discussion, one-on-one feedback, and personal interaction with the texts. It seems Wallace was determined to burst whatever bubble of isolation these budding writers would be tempted to create around themselves.

Wallace required students to give detailed feedback on their classmates’ work. His aimed for this critique to help the original writer and the critic:

“This class operates on the belief that you’ll improve as a writer not just by writing a lot and receiving detailed criticism but also by becoming a more sophisticated and articulate critic of other writers’ work.”

In short, he taught his students by letting them teach. He taught by giving them room to make mistakes. He didn’t see himself as The All-Wise Knowledge Keeper coming down from the mount to impart Truth from which no student could deviate. He saw himself as a gardener, ready to cultivate and direct.

Wallace set clear and aspirational learning goals. In fact, one of the strengths of his learning objectives is that they don’t feel like learning objectives at all. They feel like a conversation—like Wallace telling you what he expects from you and hopes for you.

This is one of my favorite examples of his conversational tone and clear objectives. In his syllabus on Creative Nonfiction, he tells students:

“[A]n essayist’s goal is [not] to ‘share’ or ‘express herself’ or whatever feel-good term you got taught in high school . . . In the grown-up world, creative nonfiction is not expressive writing but rather communicative writing.”

In these two sentences Wallace simultaneously breaks down myths and lays out clear expectations for what his students will learn and learn to do.

You won’t find a lot of easily-skippable bullet points in Wallace’s syllabi. He spoke to his students simply and, because of this, they could take him at his word and work toward a definite end.

Not many teachers would grade students on their “alacrity of carriage,” but Wallace did. The phrase simply means that Wallace expected his students to carry themselves with an apparent joy and enthusiasm for learning.

Wallace taught energetically, sprinkling class discussions with movement and jokes. It’s clear that in asking his students to come to class with energy and enthusiasm, he intended to do the same.

Wallace’s energy and expectation created an environment in which it was easier to learn — a kind of vortex of positive peer-pressure that propelled students toward rigor and joy.

The result of Wallace’s blend of enthusiasm and charity created an environment in which students could be happy about taking their work seriously. Each student would’ve understood that dumb ideas might be picked apart, but that critique was for their building up. Wallace created an atmosphere in which joy and responsibility could give way to the kind of humility that learning requires.

If you’d like to check out Wallace’s syllabi for yourself, you can do so here, here, and here.

Should Teachers Be Experts?

How Point Values Create Dynamic Courses

Words to Teach By

Teach Through Connections and Communities, Not Content

Why Teachers Should Give Questions, Not Answers

Measuring for Genius or Growth

The Shape of Learning

How to Write Discussion Questions

4 Things David Foster Wallace Taught Me About Teaching

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