Teaching doesn’t require you to be an expert

So your manager stops by and says “hey, we’ve got some new employees starting in a month, and you know SomeTechnology best, I’d like you to get them up to speed.” And you nod and smile and feel the impostor syndrome kicking in: you don’t know how to do this.

Software is complicated. Sometimes even when you’ve been using a tool or a language for a year or two, you might only know a small part of the functionality. It’s already tough and intimidating to teach as it is, it’s even worse when you’re not confident in what you know. How can you teach when you’re not an expert?

But as it turns out, being an expert can impede your ability to teach. You can become a better teacher by taking advantage your lack of expertise.

The problem with being an expert

Experts can actually make worse teachers. Specifically, experts often suffer from “expert blind spot”, where their own knowledge blinds them to the way their students are thinking (I first learned of this concept from the book How Learning Works).

Experts differ from beginners in a number of ways that impact learning.

1. Experts have much denser and interconnected conceptual models. Things that are obviously related to them are not at all obvious to beginners, who have sparsely connected conceptual models.
2. Experts will skip steps, doing certain things so automatically they don’t even realize they’re doing them. From the beginners’ point of view this results in unexplained jumps.
3. Expertise is often unconscious. When asked, experts may not be able to explain why they’re doing what they’re doing, even if they know it’s the right thing.

As a result, being an intermediate learner, where you know how to do a task but still need to consciously walk through the steps, can actually make you a better teacher.

Teaching when you’re not an expert

Since you’re not an expert, you don’t need to pretend to be one. Instead you can teach the valuable knowledge you do have: the combination of the understanding of the technology, and the understanding or recent memory of how beginners think.

• Instead of demonstrating a task you know perfectly, you can demonstrate a task you don’t quite know how to do, e.g. by doing a live coding exercise. You can then show the process you go through for finding solutions—how you debug the problem, how and where you search for solutions and documentation. (Thanks to Noa Bendit-Shtull for the idea.)
• Similarly, you can cover common mistakes and how to recover from them. Where an expert might never make these mistakes, you might still make them occasionally, or at least have the recent memory of what those mistakes were.

By showing how to deal with mistakes, and by admitting mistakes to your students, you’re also making the topic less intimidating. Unlike some experts, who get confused and perhaps annoyed when mistakes happen—they never make those mistakes after all—you are giving your students the confidence that they too can work through problems. (Thanks to reader Jake for this point.)

Go teach!

Teaching doesn’t need to be scary. It can just be you sitting down at a computer and saying “this is tricky, but I’ve figured out some ways to get things done, and so can you. Let me show you how.”

This also applies to teaching more broadly. Every once in a while you’ll see a conference call for proposals, and you’ll say to yourself “I’m not an expert, I can’t teach anything.” But the truth is you can: your perspective as an intermediate learner is often much more valuable to beginners than that of an expert. Submit a talk proposal even if you’re not an expert: you too have a valuable perspective.