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Teaching Elevates Our Lives
Those who do can also teach.
Posted December 2, 2021 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Key points
- Teaching encourages us to know our own areas of expertise more fully.
- Benefits flow in both directions between students and teachers.
- Teaching enriches connections with other people and allows us to see ourselves as others see us.
No matter what our job or skill set, teaching creates a fuller life. As teachers, we are specifically set up to do good, helping people increase their knowledge and expand their appreciation of life.
People don’t need to be employed as teachers to teach. In fact, professional teachers known as college professors receive no formal training to teach, the one activity most of them spend most of their time doing. The underlying principle: Teach what you know, and then you’ll know it even better.
Many opportunities present themselves for teaching: coaching a recreational sports team, participating (or leading) an after-school program, giving a talk at a retirement center, guiding visitors at a historical site, going into schools to present an area of expertise, offering a short course in a lifelong learning program. A carpenter friend of mine built small boats for many years, and now he teaches woodworking skills to small groups of middle-schoolers.
Consider the disparaging adage: People who can’t do, teach. That statement doesn’t actually diminish the value of teaching. What it really means is that we can all teach.
We each possess skills, knowledge, and experience that combine to give us a unique perspective. We simply need to ask ourselves, what do we know a lot about?
The Value of Teaching
Benefits, from interactions between students and teachers, flow in both directions.
Students gain knowledge, confidence, and insight, while teachers receive the gifts of enthusiasm, new perspectives, and an uplifting focus on the moment. As teachers, we have more expertise than our students, but we continue to learn by paying attention to the interpretations of others, which can reveal new facets of our subject matter.
Engaging Ourselves by Engaging Students
We can easily overlook our particular abilities. After all, our own experience is the only one we’ve ever known. But everyone has something valuable to teach. Even though our knowledge base overlaps with others, our distinctive voice provides insights to others. As we teach, we see our own special and distinct qualities more clearly.
The Protégé Effect
Imparting knowledge to others activates the protégé effect: People learn concepts and skills more thoroughly and more confidently when teaching those concepts and skills to others. This effect works in academic settings, as well as non-academic environments—at our jobs, in community organizations, in small groups.
The protégé effect comes about because teaching heightens awareness of our own learning process and leads to the discovery of new learning strategies. We learn to examine our assumptions and ask questions about ourselves. Witnessing the positive impact we have on other people also increases our motivation, which leads to increased confidence and autonomy.
The Joy of Improvisation
Teaching what we know animates the joy of improvisation. After teaching for many years, my diminishing eyesight has actually strengthened my teaching. Not being able to see my class notes encourages spontaneity and responsiveness. The notes are gone, but melodies continue.
Opening Up and Seeing Ourselves Differently
Teaching requires us to listen carefully to our students and to step outside our own interior lives.
Through teaching others, we become more willing to share our viewpoints, instead of keeping quiet and believing we have little to contribute. When in doubt, we can seek direct feedback from the students. In turn, that encourages being receptive to the observations of others and learning from these observations.
Ultimately, teaching allows us to enrich our connections with other people and to accomplish the difficult task of seeing ourselves as others see us.
