Those who can’t do teach, it’s sometimes said. But can those who really know their stuff also teach?
Did you have a teacher at school or a lecturer at college who was brilliant – but just couldn’t teach? On the other hand, perhaps you had a great teacher who made everything simple and spelled it out clearly.
Very often being an expert on something and having a talent for it is not a pre-cursor to being able to inform others about it or to offer advice on it. Similarly, you might be familiar with a concept, but can you explain it to others?
Now psychologists have dug deeper into this phenomenon. Of course, having knowledge of something is essential to be able to teach others about it but you also need to be able to empathise and communicate. You need to know about your subject matter – but you also need to know about teaching. So much of your experience of what you’re trying to teach might be implicit or automatic – you simply do it instinctively without giving it much thought.
Too good to teach?
You might be brilliant at an academic subject, a sport or artistic endeavour but can you teach others to do it? Or does your ability actually prevent you from you doing so? In 2021 David Levari led a team of researchers from Harvard Business School to investigate this idea – and they started with scrabble. They asked over a thousand people to assess whether how well someone performed at the game would determine how well they could advise a novice. By a substantial majority the participants agreed that someone who was proficient at scrabble would be good at teaching others the game. More than half of them said that they would like to learn from an expert scrabble player.
Then the researchers investigated whether advice from top performers would actually improve novices’ performance more effectively than advice from players who were mediocre or usually scored badly. They designated some of the participants “advisors” and some “advisees”. The advisors’ job was to play the game and to make notes on how to do so well. They then used these notes to teach the advisees and analysed the advisees’ performance.
According to the results top performing advisors believed that their instructions and recommendations would provide the best help to the advisees. The advisees themselves believed that advice from the best players would be most useful to them. Getting some kind of advice certainly did help advisees. However, the advisors’ own level of skill and competence had no effect on how well the advisees performed. “Skilful performance and skilful teaching are not always the same thing, so we shouldn’t expect the best performers to necessarily be the best teachers as well,” noted Levari.
Why, then, did the advisees believe that the advice they were receiving from the best players was better than that of the middle and low ranking players? What was it about this advice that made it seem so attractive, so confidence inspiring?
Rating advice
So, Levari and his team tried another experiment. This time they asked a group of participants to play a round of scrabble and then rate the various bits of advice they’d received for its apparent effectiveness. Even though the participants had not had the chance to try and implement this advice (because they’d received it after they’d played the games) they still rated what they heard from the experts more highly.
It seemed that the advice from the best players sounded good even though it wasn’t necessarily easy to put into practice. But why? To answer this question the researchers tried a fourth experiment. Here they recruited two people who knew nothing about the experiment’s purpose. Their job was solely to rate the advice from the second study on a range of factors, including authoritativeness, articulateness, obviousness and the relative number of “should” and “should not” instructions.
An analysis revealed an interesting factor in making advice sound appealing and helpful. It centred on the number of suggestions the advice from the experts contained – the more suggestions, the better the advice seemed, and the more willing advisees were to act on it.
More tips and practical advice
Although the research didn’t explore this idea, it seems likely that including more suggestions and recommendations gives those being advised more practical advice to go on. In other words, it wasn’t just the quantity of advice, it was the quantity of tips and practical advice buried within it.
As Levari puts it: “We spend a lot of time and money looking for good advice, whether from co-workers and coaches, teachers and tutors, or friends and family. The next time you get advice, you may want to think less about how much of it there was, and more about how much of it you could actually use.”
