POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

The title of this post is the title of an op-ed written by Adam Grant and published in the New York Times. Grant is identified as an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandburg, and the host of Worklife, a TED podcast.

In this op-ed he argues against the common axiom that suggests that teachers teach because they cannot actually do or succeed in the “real world” at a job related to what they are teaching, or perhaps even succeed at anything but teaching.

Grant starts with an anecdote about Albert Einstein’s mediocrity as a teacher and then describes his own experiences as an undergraduate at Harvard, where he discovered that the most acclaimed professors were generally not the best teachers. He builds to this insight: “It wasn’t that they didn’t care about teaching. It was that they knew too much about their subject, and had mastered it too long ago, to relate to my ignorance about it. Social scientists call it the curse of knowledge. As the psychologist Sian Beilock, now the president of Barnard College, writes, ’As you get better and better at what you do, your ability to communicate your understanding or to help others learn that skill often gets worse and worse.’”

Grant then identifies and elaborates on three factors that make a teacher effective, especially for someone learning something new. First, choose a teacher who has mastered the material relatively recently because he or she still remembers what the process of learning it involved. Second, choose a teacher who is an overachiever—someone who did not intuitively grasp the material but had to struggle to some extent to learn it and has some understanding of the steps or hurdles in that learning process. Third, choose a teacher whose ability to communicate the material is roughly equivalent to his or her knowledge of the material.

Grant then gives one more surprising turn to the truism:

Teachers often turn into great doers. After all, the best way to learn something is not to do it but to teach it. You understand it better after you explain it — and you remember it better after retrieving and sharing it. As you gain experience studying and explaining a skill, you might actually improve your ability to execute that skill. A powerful example comes from a study of what happens when teachers become doers. Although appointing a business school professor as an executive sounds like a terrible idea, researchers managed to find more than 200 companies that did it. Compared with closely matched industry competitors, the companies with ex-professors in their executive ranks generated significantly higher revenues per employee, especially if those former teachers were in vice president roles where they could leverage their academic expertise. Knowledge from researching and teaching didn’t prevent them from making good decisions; it actually seemed to help.

In education, we often assume that a successful career qualifies someone to teach. It’s why business schools love to hire former executives as professors. But we’re doing it backward: We should be sending teachers out to run businesses. Of course, there’s probably a selection bias in the data: Maybe only the competent professors landed executive jobs. But this reinforces my point that doing and teaching are distinct skills. Being good at one doesn’t mean you’re bad at the other. Before universities recruit high achievers, it would be a good idea to find out whether they can teach.

Grant’s complete op-ed is available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/opinion/sunday/college-professors-experts-advice.html.