Apologies if the title is confusing.
My wife is starting some art classes. I asked her if she had had the opportunity to view the teacher’s work, to assess his ability. But then I thought about sports coaches, who were not star players themselves. And the old saying, “Those than can’t, teach.” Made me wonder what - if any - “skills” one needs to have performed at a very high level to be a high-level coach/teacher.
Art? Music? Sports? Writing? Acting?..
Teaching/coaching ability doesn’t have to, and usually doesn’t conform to the ability of the teacher/coach in the subject. Knowledge and experience in the subject are necessary for a top teacher/coach, it takes more than an inspirational muse to guide someone toward the top level of excellence, but that’s another characteristic of the top teacher/coach also. More important than the ability to practice the subject is the ability to evaluate the performance of the student.
So in the end, excellence in performance of the subject is not at all a requirement of a top teacher/coach.
I would guess that someone would need to be a proficient pilot in order to be a competent flying instructor.
Interesting that the OP mentions sports coaches. There is some interesting anecdotal evidence that some of the most effective coaches were, at best, middling players.
In Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball, Scott Hatteberg talked about his problems when he was with the Red Sox. Hall of Famer Jim Rice was his hitting coach and he clearly did not understand Hatteberg’s approach. He tried to change him, Hatteberg resisted. (The main issue was Hatteberg was very selective at the plate and wouldn’t swing at bad pitches. Rice noted that when Hatteberg swung at first pitches he was often successful. Hatteberg said he only swung at first pitches when they were too good not to swing at. He felt Rice fundamentally mistunderstood that, and had he swung indiscriminately at more first pitches it wouldn’t have gone well.)
The point is, Rice was an incredible talent. He didn’t understand that things which worked for him might not work for others (Ted Williams had this problem too when he was a manager). Whereas, coaches who weren’t “greats” may be more likely to understand the work required to reach goals.
I’ve worked as a sports coach, a teacher, a flight instructor and a commercial pilot. I have had a lot of instructors, and I’ll take the ones who know how to teach over a “great” practitioner any day. Proficiency is a requirement to be a good teacher. Excellence is not - it can often be a hindrance.
George Will talked about this in Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball. He noted that a lot of successful managers - he was specifically writing about Tony LaRussa, but he also mentioned I think Tommy Lasorda, and I can add Bobby Cox - who weren’t standout players. His point was that to play in the major leagues, players who weren’t incredibly gifted at their sports had to instead observe and analyze, to make up their physical shortcomings by thinking about the game and how to play it. Which was a valuable skill for a manager and coach.
I recall some professors in college who were very well respected in their fields, but terrible teachers.
Good/great teaching has its own set of skills, which someone who is a great artist/writer/athlete/scientist/whatever may not have. At all. I think being great at both is an exception rather than a rule.
At least part of the mismatch there, I think, is that being a well-respected researcher in most academic fields means excelling at an entirely different set of skills and activities than an undergraduate class typically covers, and having domain knowledge that is far more specialized than your students need to have. I mean, if I’m teaching a Shakespeare class, the vast majority of what I’m teaching falls into the general category of “stuff you should know to be well-informed about Shakespeare, but that nobody is doing actual research on, because it’s known already.” For example:
– How to scan a line of verse; how to recognize if it’s something other than perfectly regular iambic pentameter; how to think about those irregularities. And, more basically, how to tell the difference between prose and verse in the first place, and a little about how and why early modern playwrights use each.
– What an early modern theater looks like, how the performance conditions and conventions were different from today; what your part would look like if you were an actor and what kind of skills you would need to have to bring it to life on the stage. And lots and lots about the performance choices actors, then or now, might make in particular scenes from particular plays.
– Lots of foundational cultural / historical knowledge, like what sort of things you’d learn if you went to school in the Elizabethan era, and what we mean when we talk about “quartos” and “folios,” and who the Puritans were. Plus a little bit about what textual editors do, and how to tell, for example, if a stage direction is original or added by a later editor.
– And a TON about interpretative possibilities for the particular texts we’re reading: why, for example, you can read King Lear either as a defense of absolute monarchy or a radical critique of it, and where in the text you might look to support each view. (Mostly, I try to keep my own interpretative preferences under wraps. Very occasionally, I succeed.)
None of this is what the ground-breaking Shakespeare scholars are doing, and I don’t have a lot of the skills they do (heck, I can’t even read early modern handwriting very well). Some of it is informed by what they do – we know lots more about actors’ parts and cues now than I ever learned in college or even grad school – and more of it is knowledge / skills you need to have before you can become one of those scholars, but sometimes they aren’t that great at teaching this material at the undergraduate level because they assume everyone already knows these things, and forget their students don’t. But, at the same time, I wouldn’t be much use at my job if I didn’t have the skills I do teach down cold; if I couldn’t, for instance, look at a syntactically complex passage of verse and recognize at once what it’s saying and what rhetorical devices are being employed.
Whew, that was a dissertation? To get back to the actual thread topic, I expect there’s something similar going on with the sports-coaching example – you don’t have to have been a best-of-the-best player of a sport to coach it well, and that might even be a detriment, but I’d argue it’s not only about the teaching skills either: it’s also about having lots of less-flashy-but-still-fundamental domain knowledge about the sport, and that knowledge base probably has to be both broader and deeper than might be apparent from one’s playing ability alone.
Most trades. Woodworking. Music.
For music, not necessarily, depending on where we set the bar for “excel”. In opera, for example, there are many highly prestigious voice teachers and coaches who are not themselves professional opera singers, and in many cases couldn’t make it as a professional opera singer.
Understanding voice production and the physical and performative aspects of classical singing, as well as knowing how to convey that information to a student, are more important for that profession than actually being able to hit all those notes oneself.
And I don’t think that’s limited to opera, either. High-end music academy faculty, the ones who train the world’s greatest musicians, are generally not among the world’s greatest musicians themselves.
Of course, if by “excel” we just mean “have sufficient competence to be able to assess quality of execution and diagnose and explain problems with execution”, then yeah, teachers of sports and music and dance and other performance forms all need to excel.
This is true–
The long answer, if anyone is interested, is borne out by my family:
My parents were both highly sought after college professors-- my father, in particular, was popular for graduate studies, and as a dissertation advisor, and my mother as a undergraduate instructor.
And, I remember them both as being excellent at explaining both simple and complicated things to me as a child-- and always honestly. They never shied from the truth. My friends used to come to them with questions, because they hadn’t understood their own parents’ answers.
My father even taught the preschool class at the synagogue for several years-- they were going to cancel it the year my brother was ready for it, because they couldn’t find a teacher, so he stepped up, and stayed for the next eight years or so. The little kids loved him-- they were shy the first day, so I would stay the first day, before going to my class, but after that, they’d be fine.
Now, they were good at their subjects, but my father’s was mostly theoretical (poli sci), and my mother’s was linguistics, and she spoke 8 languages, 2 well enough to write original articles in them, and another well enough to translate from it.
But teaching is clearly a separate skill set from doing a job. I teach preschool, and it requires different skills from simply babysitting, and very different skills from parenting. I also teach in the Hebrew school, and if you will forgive me for saying so myself, I am popular. I have it from the kids, that’s not my assessment.
But the kids do learn-- I was just told by the cantor that since I began coordinating with her on what to work on with the kids in class, kids are arriving day 1 for bar/bat mitzvah prep more prepared than she has ever seen them.
If teaching weren’t a separate skill, we wouldn’t have university degree programs in it. In fact, for the elementary grades, knowing how to be a teacher is actually considered more important than knowing the core material.
In a slightly niche sports field - horseback riding.
I have known many who were not particularly successful at competing, or simply didn’t enjoy competing, who had an amazing eye for what was going on between horse and rider and could frame the issue and changes needed in a way that the students understood.
I have also ridden with extremely successful riders, international competition successful, who were absolutely awful instructors.
Most instruction is to the very novice learner, and many (most?) highly successful competitors have forgotten what is was like to struggle with the basics, if they ever really knew. If you’ve grown up doing something so that it’s become an innate part of your being, it can be hard to have empathy for someone starting out later on in life.
But isn’t that a matter of knowledge/understanding rather than skill/ability?
I think that applies more for music than sports. For example, a music teacher often has to be able to demonstrate a tone, so they have to be able to produce that tone. Whereas I would not envision sports coach (beyond youth level) demonstrating blocking technique, starting from splintng blocks, fielding grounders…
It applies to language instruction in that you need to speak the language you are teaching, but you don’t need to speak it perfectly because there is tons of evidence (gathered in just the last 25 years of so, but huge and repeatable) that children correct poor language models, and it’s so unlikely adult new learners will speak without an accent, that insisting on a native speaker is not beneficial, especially if you put off beginning instruction in your quest for one.
Eventually, to master a language, you need an immersion experience (unless you are seeking only literacy, such as in Latin), and you can improve your accent substantially at that point. When I was learning Spanish, I had no particular accent I was pursuing at first, and it did not matter that my first teacher was an American who had gained fluency in Peru, nor that my conversation tutor was Colombian-- the country I went to for an immersion experience was Costa Rica, so I pursued that accent and set of idioms at first, albeit, I also studied Mexican idioms, since most of the people I meet in the US are Mexican.
I’m wondering if computer programming/coding might be a possibility.
I’d say no. Programming is largely self taught after an introduction. Skill comes mostly from experience, studying existing code, and making mistakes that have to be corrected. In specialized applications the important details of the specialty aren’t specific coding techniques, it’s the knowledge of the specialty that’s important such as knowledge of accounting or human interfaces. That kind of advanced expertise doesn’t involve much in the way of instruction though, it’s more about knowing where to find the information than details on how to use it.
If you draw a distinction between a teaching and coaching it may make things easier.
If a teacher is someone who provides instruction and content so the pupil has knowledge and skills then I’d say to teach someone to level X the teacher ( or person making the training content) would need to be proficient to at least level X +1 as minimum to be an effective teacher , obviously many other skills are needed to be a good teacher.
If a coach , or coaching is to help someone improve their skills or techniques or know when to apply them then some one coaching to level X would not need to be able to perform to level X , but certainly know how level X is done and identify what their charges need to do to improve.
So coaches may need to teach skills as needed and teachers will need to coach pupils in improving their learning skills , and as many have mentioned being highly skilled at something is not going to make them a good teacher or coach.
Imparting knowledge and improving someone ability to use their knowledge are two different things .