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.

How much of their limited attention can teachers give to learners? For a long time, we’ve operated as if only two choices exist. But I think there’s an Option Three.

Learner Attention vs Scale at Odds Then, Not Now

This post is an expansion of my own notes from working on our new About page. You can check that out for a quicker overview and cooler pictures.

Let’s say you have one bottle of Dasani. Just one. But on the table in front of you sit two dozen potted tomato plants, just beginning to bear fruit. What do you do?

Do you divide the water fairly between all twenty-four, even though each would get less than an ounce? Maybe give the water to just a few, so they actually grow? Drink the water yourself and learn to like tiny, green tomatoes?

Today we're looking at a problem parallel to this tomato teaser. How much of their limited attention can any teacher give their learners? For a long time, we’ve operated as if only two choices exist. Option One—limit learners to increase per capita attention—or Option Two—scale over everything. But I think there’s an Option Three.

For Option One, we flip to the front of the history book. Back in Aristotle’s time, the mid-300s BC, teachers work with very few learners. Aristotle teaches only a few aristocratic pupils at a time. Later, Jesus educates at a teacher-disciple ratio of 1:12 (excluding his TED Talk-like addresses). Da Vinci manages an even lower ratio—more like 1:7.

Let's start graphing. I know, I know, I'm excited too! But settle down, please.

We draw one axis for how many learners each educator teaches at once—"# PPL." Now we draw another for how much attention each teacher could afford per learner—"ATTENTION." Our apprenticeship examples in purple fall on the far right. Low number of people, high amount of attention.

Okay, we flip forward in history. Now we're in the 1700s and 1800s. This era marks the rise of what’s sometimes misleadingly called industrialized education. The teacher-learner ratio changes; we find Option Two.

In Europe and North America, smart folks like Horace Mann wonder how to make educated citizens out of their diverse, far-flung populations. They begin developing a concept we'll later call the "common school"—the seeds of our modern public education system. As education goes national, they discover a new appetite for scale. I’d like to think those early meetings must have sounded like start-up pitches—“But how will it scale?”

Education leaps from a few learners at a time to dozens at once.

We flip further to the back of the history book. Starting in the 1920s, radio helps audiences experience arts, education and entertainment as it happens. Everyone watches the 1969 Apollo 11 mission on TV. Fred Rogers uses his show to reach 1.8 million homes at its peak in 1986. Geography and history game “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” sells more than 4 million copies by 1995. The learner masses grow to almost inconceivable scale.

Let's revisit our attention-to-people graph and add Option Two. A few blue dots for public school in the middle, a few at the far left for mass media.

When we draw a curve to connect all of our points so far, we get this:

It looks like Option One and Two combined to create a system that biases toward giant settings. Most learners represented on our graph would be in the head, with very few filling out the long tail. We can tell that teachers figured out how to give a few drops of attention to a lot of learners at once. Learners, on the other hand, don't receive much personal attention unless they're long-tail outliers. This system bias results in extreme efficiency but risks efficacy in the process.

Earlier, I dangled the possibility of Option Three. What would a third way look like?

At Pathwright, we've spent the last decade working to balance the curve with thoughtful, creative educators and organizations. We gave customer Krista King the features to personally tailor thousands of her individual learners’ paths just for them. Fellows programs like the C.S. Lewis Institute used Pathwright to scale their high-attention mentorship. They scaled to many new cities while helping supervisors give the timely attention their fellows need to explore through independent study.

Option Three uses a modern learning platform like Pathwright to share engaging learning with a personal touch. If we draw the curve our customers created, we get something very different:

This curve accounts for a few turnkey courses on the left tail. But it scales both attention and learner headcount nicely, for the first time. To compare, here’s the curve Option One-Two created, overlaid with our Option Three curve.

It seems to me that education has wound through the phases of a start-up over the last few millennia. It incubated in tribes and apprenticeship settings. It launched a compelling MVP in the 1700s and 1800s as education went to market at scale. But now it’s upgrade time.

I think education deserves to get out of beta, don’t you?

Both schools and organizations work better with clear paths and close connections. At Pathwright, we’ve seen giant institutions use well-designed paths with effective teachers to bring their scale down to each learner. So I'm certainly not suggesting closing schools. We’ve also seen two-person operations scale out to serve thousands. So apprenticeship isn't dead either.

We think you should be able to scale your attention with your learners—our amazing educators provide the proof. We’re not here to change the world (you’re doing that already). We’re working to give you the creative tools you need to keep doing it without having to choose between attention and scale ever again.

Give every plant the water it needs to grow.

Again, this post draws from my own notes as I worked on our new About page. All of these ideas wouldn't fit on that page. If you have a sec, check out our About page for a more fast-moving, visual overview of what we're here to do.

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.

The idea of “teaching” an online course has been largely distorted to mean packaging up a bunch of videos and documents and then focusing all energy towards selling it

The idea of “teaching” an online course has been largely distorted to mean packaging up a bunch of videos and documents and then focusing all energy towards selling it. In real life, this would be like a professor selling you a textbook he wrote along with a few slideshows and then heading out the door.

Content marketers, often motivated by a mythical idea of hands-off content streams as passive revenue gold mines, have found creating online “courses” to be an easy sell. You can spot these kinds of courses by the snake-oil style sales tactics used to sell them: access windows that expire for no good reason, super long sales pages, a pyramid-scheme-like emphasis on buying into a passive-revenue lifestyle, unreasonably high price points with steep limited time discounts, etc.

A whole industry of content marketing experts and course creation platforms has emerged around this fad of using “courses” as a get rich quick scheme. While there’s nothing wrong with creating and selling useful content, calling it a “course” and calling offering it “teaching” is at best an abuse of some important words and at worst deceptive.

So what does great online teaching look like? It’s actually pretty easy to identify — being a great teacher online requires doing the same things you’ve seen your favorite teachers do in the classroom.

Build a path of small steps to reach big goals. They understand where their students’ are first and carefully guide them to achieve their goals one step at a time. Great teachers get in their student’s minds so they can make them better people not so they can get in their wallets.

Design practical projects and exercises. Watching a video isn’t enough. Until we can apply the content, we haven’t learned it. It’s one thing to watch a video demo on baking macaroons and another thing entirely to get in the kitchen and actually do it.

Communicate the cost. Effective teachers calculate what their course costs for students both in terms of time and money. This allows teachers to communicate the necessary investment upfront, which helps students buy-in with confidence knowing the challenges and rewards that lie ahead.

Give accountability and motivation. Staying motivated to learn in an online environment is tough. Great teachers help motivate their students by setting a schedule with reasonable deadlines, evaluating and scoring work, and checking in on how they are doing.

Encourage discussion and collaboration. Include opportunities to learn with and from other people through discussion, debate, and collaboration — not just from passive content.

If that sounds like a lot of work, it is. There’s nothing passive about real teaching. It is as much a craft and art as any other job. And doing the job well comes with immense rewards, as any teacher knows.

The good news is that the internet and technology can and should act as a multiplier to great teaching not a bastardization of it. In fact, at a time when so much great content exists, we need truly excellent teachers more than ever — this is not the time to sell out.

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?

Learner Attention vs Scale at Odds Then, Not Now

Words to Teach By

Teach Through Connections and Communities, Not Content

Why Teachers Should Give Questions, Not Answers

Measuring for Genius or Growth

Content Marketing Is Not Teaching

4 Things David Foster Wallace Taught Me About Teaching

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