Teaching is much harder than it looks - it is in a certain sense harder than performing brain surgery.
First up, brain surgeons: we appreciate and respect you. You are enormously skilled and save lives every day. It's just that... you are tasked with:
Restructuring parts of the brain that you can see…
On only one patient at a time…
With sophisticated tools and a multi-person support team constantly by your side.
By contrast, teachers are tasked with:
Restructuring something invisible (student knowledge)…
On tens of people at a time, each with a different starting point, and some who don't even want to be there…
With ONLY WORDS AND IMAGES AS OUR TOOLS
And all this happens in an environment of time pressure, high stakes and minimal real time human support. In short, teaching is orders of magnitude harder than brain surgery.
"After some 30 years... I have concluded that classroom teaching is the most demanding, subtle, nuanced, and frightening activity that our species has ever invented... the only time medicine ever approaches the complexity of an average day for a classroom teacher is in an emergency room during a natural disaster."
— Lee Shulman
However, despite this immense complexity, the challenge of teaching is often overlooked. What's going on?
Mary Kennedy argues that this situation arises because of the extensive experience—over 12,000 hours—that almost everyone has of observing teaching and generally participating in classroom life. As a result, everyone feels like they're an expert in teaching. Even when they're not.
Participating in classroom life as a student builds a skewed view of teaching. It misses the vast amounts of information processing and decision making that go on in the minds of teachers before, during, and after lessons. Pupils only ever see the results of all this thinking.
And here’s the rub: in general, the better the teaching, the easier it looks to the outsider.
The best teachers make what they do look effortless and natural. But it's not. Not even close. Teaching is one of the most fiendishly complex tasks ever devised. This is the 'teacher expertise paradox'.
Helping wider society to better appreciate the vast value and complexity of teaching is a critical agenda for us all to get behind. Because if we can make collective progress on this, it is likely to lead to higher (and more proportionate) status, funding, and professional agency. Which can only be a good thing for the world.
Summary
• Teaching is one of the hardest tasks ever devised.
• However, from the perspective of (past) students, it looks easy.
