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You Know It, Can You Teach It?: Overcoming Your Own Intelligence
Knowledge is power—at least that’s what we’ve all heard from multiple sources and with different applications. Usually, people who want more power are the ones making the statement. Rarely, do you hear someone state “I have knowledge; therefore, I have power.” The statement, though not wrong, is incomplete.
Power is an energy source—the source to do something. When energy is misapplied, it can be destructive, or, at best, ineffective. As a preschooler living overseas I remember watching my father painstakingly put together a Hi‐Fi stereo system he had brought with him from the United States. After what seemed like hours of attaching the radio, amplifier, and turntable system together, he finally plugged the stereo into the wall outlet. I remember the smell. To his dismay, he had just plugged a 110‐V system into a 220‐V outlet. More power was definitely not better.
As an expert of your product, you are like the 220‐V outlet teaching 110‐V students. You need a voltage regulator or transformer to be effective. You need to slow down. You must reduce the content you would like to provide and give your students what is best for them, instead. As you teach, keep in mind that you didn’t become a product expert in a day and you aren’t going to make anyone else an expert in a day, either. This is not a question of withholding information, but of offering the right information at the right time. This is about learning how to give your students time to create true understanding for themselves.
I have been fortunate in my career to work with very intelligent individuals. Most were competent and valuable employees. I have found very few engineers to be “knowledge hoarders” who fear power sharing with those they enlighten. To the contrary, I find that most love to share their knowledge in a coaching‐type environment, though some are not as effective in front of a classroom. This problem is not unique to engineers or technical experts. Universities are full of professors who rank among the top experts in their fields but are ineffective teachers.
Address Your Biggest Challenge: Yourself
For a variety of reasons, many experts struggle to “transfer their knowledge”—or to help others construct the knowledge that they already possess—in a classroom setting. Some of those external reasons will be addressed later. The biggest challenge that you, like any expert, will face is yourself. You must overcome your own natural abilities with your product.
Fortunately, overcoming your own expertise is not an impossible task. Managing your own intelligence is only daunting when you don’t know you need to or are unwilling to change the way you teach. Intelligence alone does not make a good instructor. Ability can be a terrible teacher. Both are important. But both often get in your way.
When you teach, you will unconsciously put yourself in the place of your students. Your tendency will be to teach them the way you want someone to teach you. That type of teaching does not work unless one has already achieved expertise. Your students cannot learn in the same way that you can. Good instructors are not less intelligent, but they are able to understand their students and communicate at their level.
The Four Stages of Competency Applied to Instructors
Several decades ago, Noel Burch developed a model for skill development that was quickly adapted by leading psychologists and educators. The model is brilliant in its simplicity and is helpful for experts, not only to understand their student’s level of competency, or skill, but also—and even more importantly—to understand themselves, and why they have a hard time teaching.
You can best understand the model as an XY graph, with “Consciousness” on one axis and “Competence” on the other, as in Figure 3.1. Competence starts in the lower left side of the graph and moves to the lower right side of the graph. This model represents the progression from being completely unaware and unskilled to being a true expert in the field.
Figure 3.1 Four stages of competency.
None of these levels represent aptitude, in either a physical or a mental sense. This is not a general progression from ignorance to intelligence, but rather a very specific application of very specific skills. Any individual will find themselves at level 1 for some skills and at level 4 for others.
Unconsciously Unskilled
This level, also known as unconscious incompetence, is where we all begin. At this level, an individual is unaware of what they even need to learn to perform a skill. They may not even know the skill exists. You may have heard the overused phrase “they don’t know what they don’t know.” When applied to a skill, the phrase refers to those in the first level of competency.
It is possible to get students in a product training class who are unconsciously unskilled. They may be coming with no idea about what your product does or that it even exists. Perhaps a manager sent them to your class, or they just happened upon it at a trade show. The good news is that the easiest and quickest transition is from stage 1 to stage 2, consciously unskilled.
Consciously Unskilled
The second level is also known as conscious incompetence. At this level, the student has moved from “not knowing what they don’t know” to “knowing that they don’t know it.” Hopefully, most of your students will be at this phase. They know that they need to learn something about your product and have a desire to increase their skills.
Consciously Skilled
The third level is also known as conscious competence. At this stage, an individual has acquired a skill and “knows what they know.” Generally, they also know how they learned it as well. Most trainers will see this stage as a developmental or continuous learning stage, since the individual has not mastered the skill to the point that it becomes easy for them.
Unconsciously Skilled
The fourth and final stage is also known as unconscious competence. At this stage, an individual demonstrates the highest level of skill—so much so that it has become almost second nature to them. At this level, one doesn’t even have to think about what they are doing; they have done it so much. You might relate it to muscle memory or reactive instincts.
Why Experts Find It Difficult to Teach
Generally, employers and educators alike reward the fourth level of competence as the ultimate achievement. This is where you want your skills to be in order to be a great employee. If what we do is truly what makes us valuable, then doing it at the highest level makes us the most valuable.
However, while doing something so well that it has become second nature to you definitely proves your ability to perform that task, it makes it impossible to teach. You cannot teach an unconscious skill. Said differently, you cannot teach what you don’t know you know. This is how your own “intelligence” can make you an ineffective instructor. It is not because you are smart, but because you are so skilled that what you do is easy or habitual for you. This is the reason it is so rare that sports superstars make good coaches. Their ability and skill becomes so second nature to them that they cannot explain to others what they need to do to replicate it.
There are at least three reasons why you can’t teach something you are very good at. First, you don’t know how you learned it. Second, you can’t distinguish between the easy and the difficult. Third, you can’t differentiate between the essential and the nonessential.
Experts Rarely Remember How They Perfected Their Skill
When you do something extremely well, you have systematically, and perhaps, deliberately de‐emphasized or forgotten certain things. One of those things is how you learned it. I don’t mean that you don’t remember your first training class or a particular lesson. But those were just events in a long learning process. Over time, you have added together many experiences that have accumulated to make you an expert. You have made many mistakes and you have learned from them. You have tried things—some that worked and some that didn’t. You have gathered information in bits and pieces and don’t remember where or how you learned certain things.
You also don’t remember the sequence in which you learned them. You don’t know which items you learned first and what was simply added on through experience. If your boss asks you to teach a class today, you will likely start with what is closest in your memory even though what is furthest in your memory may be the proper place to start teaching.
Experts Have Trouble Distinguishing Between the Simple and the Difficult
When you are an expert, everything is easy. Easy, of course, doesn’t mean it takes no physical or mental exertion. It doesn’t mean it takes no extreme focus or attention to detail. It simply means that the process has become normal for you. Easy is also relative. If you can do something that I can’t do, regardless of how much effort it takes you, it is easier for you than for me. You can do it, but I can’t. It isn’t easy for a surgeon to insert and control a guide wire through a vein and perform microscopic surgery. It isn’t easy for a lineman to climb to the top of a tower and connect a communication cable, or an engineer to make a computer‐assisted drawing of someone else’s latest idea. None of those are easy, but when done by a skilled person, it looks easy to the casual observer.
Before becoming an expert, you had to first master the difficult. You intentionally made the hard things look the same as the easy things. If only the easy things are easy for you, you are not an expert. It is this lengthy process of equalizing the simple and the difficult that made you valuable. It is exactly that process that must be undone to make you a good instructor.
Experts Don’t Differentiate Between the Essential and the Nonessential
Another line you have blurred over time as an expert is the differentiation between the essential and the nonessential. I’m not referring to the extremes. Usually, there are things on both ends of the spectrum that are obvious, even to the beginner. There are certain things that are extremely essential and others that are obviously not essential. I am referring to the bulk of learning between those extremes. If 10% is obviously essential, and 10% is obviously not essential, that means that 80% of your curriculum could fall into either category. Most experts have a difficult time prioritizing that 80%.1
The blurring of these lines, however, occurs differently than with the difficult versus the easy. Often, the addition of nonessentials is what turned your skill into an art. It is the way you do it. Nonessentials can distinguish you from even other experts. You have perfected them over time and they are your signature on your industry or product.
The problem with emphasizing your signature is that when the process is unique to you, the nonessential has become very essential to you. Good instructors, however, know the difference between what is essential and what is not. Good instructors are willing to set aside their preferences to teach the basics. There will come a time to teach others your nonessential signature. But first, you must be able to teach the basics.
How Experts Can Teach It
The great news is that experts can make remarkably effective instructors. It is preferable, in fact, to have an instructor that has reached the highest level of competence. No one wants to learn from a novice, and no novice wants to teach experts. The only way you can become a good instructor, however, is to force yourself to go back to the consciously skilled stage. You cannot teach at the fourth level of competency. Going back to the third level is a skill—one that, over time, you can perfect. That is why instructors should teach often. You can become unconsciously skilled at moving back to the consciously skilled level, but it takes practice (Figure 3.2).
Figure 3.2 How experts use the four stages of competency to teach.
Ask the Instructor (Yourself) the Right Questions
Good students ask good questions to the instructor. That is how students learn and improve. In the same way, good instructors ask good questions to the instructor (themselves). Here are some questions you should ask yourself whenever you face the need to move back to level 3 competency:
- How did I learn that? Asking yourself how you learned something forces you to connect the dots between formal and informal learning. Put yourself back in time as a student and force yourself to “learn” it all over again. Are there steps you had forgotten that you had to learn? Are there concepts that are important that you might have missed, or ones you thought were important that you didn’t learn until later in your career, after you were already an expert? Maybe those are still important, but at least it puts them in perspective.
- What am I doing? It is surprising how many experts cannot answer this simple question. They don’t know what they are doing or how they are doing it. Of course, they know the big picture, but it has been so long since they’ve thought through all the little steps that they don’t even know what they are really doing. It is your ability to do the little things effectively and efficiently that make you an expert. It is being able to explain those little things that will make you a good instructor.
I remember having to do this when attempting to teach my daughter how to drive a manual transmission vehicle. It is second nature to me. I couldn’t teach her until I deliberately went through all the steps again myself. Once I had them down, I could explain it to her. Until then, I only frustrated her by making it appear so easy.
- What am I assuming? Making assumptions when you are teaching is normal. You have to. You must also know what those assumptions are. I find that simply stating the assumptions to myself helps to clarify my objectives. If both beginners and advanced students make up your audience, it will take some creativity to keep them both interested. Regardless, you need to eliminate the easy assumptions. For example, don’t use acronyms that the students may not know, or jargon particular to your industry or company. If a level of expertise is expected, be sure to state that clearly in advance. If it isn’t, be sure to start the learning at a point where even beginners can start the learning process.
- What if they only learn one thing? For a subject matter expert, this question is one of the most difficult to answer. Do not answer the question with vague words like “an overview…” or “a general understanding of….” Instead, narrow it down to one thing. Answering this question specifically will demonstrate an understanding of how to teach. Knowing this answer will help you be more successful (“Hey, they learned the one thing I wanted to teach them!”) and it will help to determine what really is essential and what is not.
Conclusion
To become an expert instructor, you must first understand that teaching is a separate skill that requires a new way of thinking. Most importantly, like any other skill, teaching requires practice. You must do it. Your expertise can become a significant advantage to you as an instructor, but you must develop the separate skill of making that happen. It is true that teaching comes naturally to some, just as almost every other skill comes naturally to some. The gift is a rare one, however, and much more so in the field of technology. Even if it is, you must challenge yourself to overcome your own familiarity with your product.
Think about the task of cutting out a figure on paper. It is possible to cut it out with a sharp knife. But the job is much more effective when done with a pair of scissors. The scissors are really just two sharp knives working together. Your challenge is to take one sharp knife, the expert talent you have with your product, and pair it with another sharp knife, an expert talent in teaching. That is when you will become a great instructor.
Making It Practical
All adults are skilled in some things and unaware that other skills even exist. The more proficient you are in any skill, the more difficult it can be to explain that skill well to someone with no proficiency or experience. Understanding the theory behind that truth can be helpful in becoming an effective instructor.
- What level of competency (skill) makes the best instructor?
- What level of competency (skill) makes the best student?
- In your next training class, how will you emphasize the essential and de‐emphasize the nonessential?
Before you read Chapter 4, “Ready or Not? Why Some Students Are More Ready to Learn Than Others,” answer these two questions.
- Why do you think some students learn more than others in the classes you teach?
- Have you ever attended a class you weren’t interested in but ended up learning a lot from it? Why did that happen?