Could you expand on the reasoning behind this?

Presumably, they are not teaching material that they are still struggling with. Are they teaching the previous material, which they have understood?

If you are having students teach each other, I would have thought that quicker-to-learn students would be better candidates to teach the material.

So under which conditions is expecting your students to teach themselves better for them exactly? It seems to me that there's some sort of selection bias going on here if the best students are the ones that successfully teach themselves, and then reflect on the fact that they were able to teach themselves as the cause for why they were able to learn so well. I'm pretty sure that if you stuck a self-learning student in a hand-held environment he would learn equally well, but might risk learning less due to the natural time cost such a teaching style has. The logical conclusion for this are the whole 'advanced placement' classes and such, because like it or not, not all students are going to be equally well-suited to teach themselves, and thus endure poor teaching. A self-learner meanwhile, will be able to endure such poor teaching, regardless of whether they're even aware of how bad the teaching is.

Teaching is not a fixed methodology, it's really an art that's quite broad in scope and requires honing in on each specific batch of students' needs. If you're going for 'mentor' style inspiration teaching, great -- but make sure you're applying it to a student that'll be receptive to it. If they're not, then maybe try to figure out how you can make them be receptive to it, but I guarantee you that it's going to require some level of hand-holding at the onset; and if you're a good teacher, you should be able to pick up on that.

The premise of the question is problematic. Most students aren't curious (in the absolute sense, maybe), capable, or motivated.

Those who are are hindered by the crurrent system because it is designed for students who are not, who are the majority.

One of the biggest challenges of teaching is precisely that. How do you make the student curious and motivated so they become capable.

These students would benefit from a different teaching style, no?

When I read that part, I assumed they were talking about the individual students performing better, not the class in aggregate. If it's student by student, that is (weak) evidence against learning styles.

I get that and mostly agree with it. Exception being the people who learn best with the help of others (esp face-to-face). They don't learn the hard stuff well with text but they're valuable once they learn it. The other exception would be the topics where having a pro at hand can greatly simplify the learning process mostly due to nature of topic itself.

In most situations, you're totally right. People just aren't putting in effort. I think the stuff with lots of historical baggage of unknown usefulness seems like unjustifiable effort to many in IT. So, I don't throw them into that category if it's such a thing rather than their own skill set. Now, if they didn't know essential networking skills and griped that nobody told them, I might link to your comment followed by a back hand.

Shouldn't a good teacher prod students in this direction?

My experience is that best way depends on the student, the thing you want to teach and probably even on the time of the day.

The best teachers are able to adapt to that.

[Citation needed]

Teaching is sometimes very easy. Sometimes very difficult. Depends what you're trying to teach.

Students don't need to know what makes a good teacher. They only need to be able to assess whether they learned, and whether they had fun in the process. Whether they learned enough is pretty much an orthogonal issue, and one that can and will be dealt with through standardized testing. Students also don't really need to give any thought to a teacher's specific methods in order to offer useful information.

I'm certain I read nothing more than snobbery in this article. It reads like "we didn't think of this free online disruptive academy first" or "how dare you do something differently from and outside of Official Academia."

Do you know who the best teachers are? I mean the absolute best, the ones who actually get what the student is struggling with? Other students-- the ones who just got through that particular lesson, the ones that just had the exact same struggle. The students' ability to teach like this declines with experience with the material because it all starts to become second-hand and they forget all the little things they struggled with early on. When an instructor takes note of students teaching students and the hows and whys of that interaction and remembers to cover the same territory in the next class, he becomes the best non-student teacher he can.

My mother is my perfect anecdotal example of this. In her 50s, she's getting a degree. While taking calculus, she also worked in the tutoring lab. After understanding new material, she'd be an absolute godsend for students for about two weeks and then her helpfulness would fall off. (You could also attribute this to all these classes being mostly in sync with at most two weeks of lag - that being the case, she would be less exposed to the reteaching of the material ... and forget those little details.)

I generally agree with this, the punchline of the article, but I’d say it separates the competent teachers from the incompetent ones. What makes a teacher great is the ability to probe a student’s current intuitions, and then chart a direct and efficient pedagogical course that starts from the right place.

And your assumption is that the potential leverage is quite big. I doubt it: I've seen many students profit a lot from 1 on 1 private lessons - from students 2 or 3 years ahead of them (or even from the same class). They are arguably nowhere near as good as a teacher who has studied teaching and has years of experience. Yet they can help the student a lot more because they can focus 100% of their time on the single student and his individual needs.

Sounds good, but how do you get them to grapple? You only turned "tell people the solution to a problem they don't have" to "tell people of a problem they don't have". I don't see how this (alone) will make a difference.

Whether the teachers are good or have good resources or have a class too heterogeneous to teach effectively is a different matter. But people who assume they know so much more than the experts need a humility and reality check.

The best teachers that I've had, were trained as teachers. They knew the material, but weren't application experts.

The worst teachers that I've had, were content experts. I remember this Calc II teacher, who was a genius, but had no patience at all, for people that weren't on his level (we call those people "students"). I generally ask a lot of questions; sometimes, ones that seem obvious. I end up learning the material very well, but the process can be a bit messy (and embarrassing). This guy would abuse people that asked questions.

I got an incomplete, that semester. I was on the Dean's List, all the others.