Why teach?

Although I have learned many things in perfect solitude, I have learned more and faster in cooperative–even highly interactive—group situations. In these interactive groups, the designations “teacher” and “student” become blurry and arbitrary whenever I have been the talking head in a classroom course or seminar. To understand this approach, consider an analogy from sports: the “player coach,” in which the designated authority sets an example by performing (learning) right alongside the rest of the team.
A corollary to preferring cooperative learning is my fascination with team teaching. One way to illustrate team teaching is with two people whom I consider the patron saints of team teaching, “Cah Talk: Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers” alias Tom and Ray Magliozzi on National Public Radio. Their informative weekly hour of banter with broadcast audience members (“students”) who challenge Tom and Ray with questions on the subject of automobiles (“cahs”) is a paradigm for cooperative learning, team teaching, and sharing understandings with a wide audience.

Over three decades, my rewards for being the teacher, or one of several formally instructors of record, in a variety of courses have come from cultivating a sort of hyper-learning environment. Hard for me to say whether or not these courses have enriched and advanced students’ understanding, but they have certainly enriched mine. Part of the explanation for my enrichment, no doubt, is that not one of the various subjects in which I have awarded undergraduate credits (e.g., Natural Sciences, Natural History of Alaska, Ornithology, Earth Sciences, Discovering Beringia, Human Anatomy and Physiology, Museum and Heritage Studies) represents a course that I took as an undergraduate or even a graduate student myself. Selfish of me, some might say, to learn so much from the folks who pay tuition for the privilege of earning college credits. On the other hand, by straying from rote learning and into subjects that I have had to master outside the formal classroom, perhaps I have avoided getting in a rut, while keeping the discourse animated with the excitement of my own discoveries.