I came across this blog post today: "The Teacher Curse No One Wants to Talk About," by Christopher Reddy. It begins with a well-documented and intriguing phenomenon of teacher psychology:

a strong base of content knowledge makes us blind to the lengthy process of acquiring it.

Mr. Reddy then goes on to misunderstand the role of the teacher in the learning process.

we end up assuming that our lesson's content is easy, clear, and straightforward. We assume that connections are apparent and will be made effortlessly.

Failing to help students make a connection is not good if, as a teacher, that is what you are trying to do, but it's not. Neither are you a purveyor of skills. You are not a knowledge dispenser.We've always had libraries for that. That has always been the better way for students to beef up on stuff to know, and now we have Google for that as well.It feels a little closer to the truth to say that you are promoting academic skills. But YouTube is better for that as well. (Perhaps you've seen this TED talk about YouTube-trained dancers?)

The Teacher's job is to instill the disciplines of self-betterment. Is that possible?

Well, ask yourself. Who were your absolute best teachers? For me, Frank Millard, my high school wrestling coach wins that one hands-down. And not only — at the age of 45 — do I have no need whatsoever for the specific moves that he taught me, but most of those skills are pretty much gone from my sense memory. What remains is a visceral awareness of how physical learning is. And that awareness instructs every move that I make in the classroom. Kinetic learning is not something that Frank Millard explicitly taught. But whatever else my students get from me, my students always get that. They learn that learning is not about training the mind. Learning is all about mastering your body — whether we are studying a double-leg takedown or a past counter-factual conditional — and that they owe to Frank Millard.

I’m going to bastardize Maimonides, here: Teach a person to fish and you feed him or her for a lifetime … maybe. Instill in that person an appreciation for the subtleties of sustainable fishing, and the discipline by which to continually refine his or her practices in response to a changing environment, and you feed generations.And if you are an English teacher in Japan, (that happens to be the primary audience for this blog) your job is to help Japanese learners to acquire habits -- vis-à-vis English -- that will empower them to move closer to mastery (however a learner may define mastery given his or her own unique needs and purposes). Mastery of the content — that is something that the learner (like the person learning to fish) must ultimately achieve on his or her own.But Reddy’s article interested me greatly because after taking that wrong turn (of focusing on whether or not students are making connections), Reddy lists out seven ways to teach more effectively. Each of them is absolutely correct, given the premise that the teacher's job is to dispense knowledge — and so what I want to do, here, is take each of those seven points and modify them by correcting the underlying premise for each.Our premise instead being that the teacher's job is to instill discipline.

1) EMOTION

In what [Barbara Fredrickson] coined the broaden-and-build theory, [she] found that pleasant and mild emotional arousal before experiencing content leads to greater retention. A quick joke or humorous movie can serve as the positive emotional stimulant.

Right, and bear in mind that the researchers that Reddy is citing in his article are measuring retention because retention is measurable. Looking through the article that Reddy is referencing, Fredrickson’s thesis extends far beyond mere retention of whatever content is being taught:

positive emotions are worth cultivating, not just as end states in themselves but also as a means to achieving psychological growth and improved well-being over time. - via PubMed Central (PMC)

So while experimenters need to prove the point by running experiments that isolate the question of whether or not test subjects retain knowledge. As teachers, we need to be much more far-sighted.For example, when drilling target structures (which I do a lot) I keep it rhythmic, not simply because language is rhythmic but because engaging the students with language indistinguishable from music helps to drill the mindfulness of language as music into their bodies.And perhaps a better example would be this footage of Arizona State University’s Wrestling Practice (sorry about all of the shirtlessness, but I couldn't find an example that better made my point). If you look at the video, you will see that very little in terms of skills is being taught. “You gotta like this feeling! You gotta learn to embrace this feeling!” “You’re not fighting for you! You’re fighting for the guy next to you!” The coaches only have so many hours of contact with these kids and and only so many words they will get a chance to say. So the key is to engage the learner’s limbic system — that pre-linguistic level where the mind and body connect. That’s where habits are formed.2) MULTI-SENSORY LESSONS

Multi-sensory experiences activate and ignite more of the brain, leading to greater retention. So use a multisensory approach in your lessons to make learning easier.

Yes, but the point is that you have your own extensive knowledge of the content area (in our case, English) and you want a teaching strategy that is ultimately going empower learners to engage with your content area independently.Reddy chose to site Howard Gardner, but I think that the slightly older school of “learning-styles theory” is more applicable. Pedagogically, the relevance of learning-styes theory is that you need to give your kids multiple access points to the content. When there is more than one single way in which you are asking them to engage with your content (i.e. not just through a lecture) then the students feel freer to find their own unique point of connection. The learning process feels like it is more about them and their own initiative.3) SPACED PRACTICEHere, a contrast is being drawn with “blocked practice” where the learner engages the content in an extended intensive block of time.

As spaced practice is the way that you learned the content you teach, it makes sense to employ the same technique with your students. So thinking of your content as a cycle that is frequently revisited makes learning easier for your students while helping alleviate the curse.

Reddy makes the very good point that whatever the methods were of those that taught you, you acquired that content through a recursive process where you engaged and re-engaged the same material. But again, the point is not that you finally acquired and retained a static catalogue of knowledge for all time. The point is that by re-engaging with the material multiple times, you learned better and better habits for deepening your understanding of the content and maximizing its value to you.4 & 5) NARRATIVE and ANALOGIES and EXAMPLES

if students are listening to a story interlaced with content, they're more likely to connect with the ideas. So connecting with content through a story is at the heart of learning and can help alleviate the stress associated with the Curse of Knowledge.

This gets back to the notion of engaging the limbic system.If you want to get the facts across then send an email, attach a handout with pretty graphics, and link to a YouTube video. The point of using narrative is that you want the learner to project him or herself into a kinetic engagement with whatever you are teaching. Narrative helps the learner to picture him or herself DOING things in relationship to the content.6) NOVELTY

New challenges ignite the risk-reward dopamine system in our brains. Novel activities are interesting because dopamine makes us feel accomplished after succeeding.

Well, yes — but dopamine engages the whole body. It stimulates the cycles of approach behavior and reward associated with drug addiction, but also benign habit formation. Again, to prove the connection, studies (like this one) are going to test retention, but retention is not the ultimate goal.

7) TEACH FACTS (which I am going to tweak a little to make my point and say PROVIDE SCAFFOLDING)

When reflecting on the ability of analogies and examples to facilitate connections, it is important to remember that the connections need to be made to already existing knowledge. So providing your students with background knowledge is a prerequisite in forming connections and can make their learning easier.

Reddy is drawing upon the work of Stephen Krashen, and Lev Vygotsky (whose work I am particularly fond of). If the teacher does not provide a scaffold, the learner has a harder time connecting new information back to what the learner already knows. An affective filter then goes up and the learner’s brain does not actively engage with the new content.

But as teachers, it is the habit of actively engaging the content, not the content itself, that we are trying to cultivate.

So here is what I think Christopher Reddy is getting at when he says that no one wants to talk about the Curse of Knowledge…. A big part of what motivates us as teachers is love for whatever our content area may be. It is right for us to be proud of what we know. But when you realize that maybe you have been indulging yourself in front of your students — displaying your knowledge pretty much to please yourself -- it’s like learning third-hand that nobody likes that joke you always tell at parties.

But face up to it. Live it down by doing better.In relating to your students, you need to learn to take joy in joining each student at his or her unique point of connection with whatever the content is. — and in joining your students there, find ways to recreate that moment for each student again and again.

That gulf between what you know and what your students know is not a void. It's a reservoir. Draw upon it and let it fuel, for your students, the kind of inquisitive and reflective engagement with the unknown that is vital to being a life-long learner.