Teaching? You want me to talk about teaching? You think I have something to say on the topic?
I guess it's a reasonable expectation. I'm married to a teacher, and most of my friends are teachers, and I work in the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Faculty Development. I mean, it's right there in our name. I've been advancing this thing we call teaching for over a quarter of a century. You'd think I might have some idea what I'm doing.
And yet I confess an unreasonable dread steals over me when I contemplate the prospect. My mind goes blank. Teaching? What is that? I'm not sure I know. I'm not even sure I can cough up a working definition.
I asked my wife how she defines teaching, but she hadn't had her coffee yet and merely grumbled angrily about standardized tests. I asked my co-workers how they define teaching, but they were all far too busy to play my little game. (Blows nose.) Fortunately or otherwise, I came down with a cold and spent a few days at home reflecting on this mystery.[1]
Let me sneak a quick peek at our mission statement. I helped write it, after all. (Opens a new tab.) Nope, no definition there. Sure, I could look in the dictionary, but that would be cheating. I don't mind looking up the etymology, though. (Opens another tab.) "Teach" is from Old English — no surprise there. It has that harsh and earthy sound. That seems instructive, actually. I appreciate the reminder that teaching is not some modern innovation. It's such a basic activity that it was already in the language in the Middle Ages, long before the craze for Latin and Greek imports like "education," which didn't come into English until the middle of the 15th century.
I've dithered enough. I really should be able to muster up something on my own. It's a point of pride. Let me venture out on a limb and say that teaching is the art and science of helping others learn. See what I did there? I offloaded the heaviest part of the meaning to another concept: learning. That's a pretty sneaky subterfuge. I feel justified in this move, however, because it's my sense that learning is even more fundamental than teaching.
The etymology bears this out. The Old English tæcan, root of our word "teach," didn't really mean "to teach" back in the olden days.[2] The word that meant "to teach" was actually læran, which is related to our word "learn."[3] This is highly amusing to me, but it makes clear that the two concepts are in a relationship that is intimate and reciprocal yet asymmetrical. Learning without teaching? Sure, we can learn plenty without another human teaching us. Teaching without learning? It happens all the time, but it's generally considered problematic.
The meaning of tæcan was "to show," a notion that persists in contemporary ideas about teaching, which can also be problematic. I'll finally open up my dictionary to confirm it. (Hefts heavy book.) Yes, here it is: the first definition of "teach" begins with "to show." Often, we equate teaching with simply showing stuff to students. The teacher stands at the head of the class and reveals facts, figures, content, information, Truth, or whatever it is that professors profess. This paradigm was forcibly installed during the Second Industrial Revolution and has been labelled the Factory Model of education.
I grew up under this model of teaching, and maybe you did too. It's sometimes called the "sage on the stage," always contrasted with the "guide on the side." The maxim holds that we should be moving from the former to the latter, from teacher-centered instruction to student-centered learning. This move was initially advocated in K-12, with the slogan entering the popular lexicon in 1971[4], but change is slow. It wasn't until 1993 that a professor of education, Alison King, published an article in the journal College Teaching under the title "From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side."[5] It's since become so familiar in higher education that it's aptly labeled a cliché.[6] The truth is we're still trying to implement these ideas in the academy. Change, as I may have mentioned, is slow.
One more observation and then I swear I'll shut up. In my own usage, at least, I recognize the word teaching shows up almost exclusively as a verbal noun, rarely as an action verb. This tendency, which I associate with colonialism,[7] is emblematic of the very problems I've discussed here, to say nothing of my overweening focus on definition itself. You'll notice I've spoken very little about what teaching could be, what it should be, how it feels, what it requires of those who attempt it. I value these other ways of knowing, and recognize I've taken a very narrow approach to a very broad topic. I haven't talked about what makes teaching good or effective. In order to do that, I really would need to define learning, and that seems like an even more daunting challenge. You'll have to wait until I come down with another cold.
A note on AI consultation: I wrote every word of the preceding essay myself, but portions of the research and editorial development were informed by consultations with an AI assistant (Claude-Sonnet-4.6 run through a custom bot on Poe). In other words, I shared my prose with AI to check facts, as well as to suggest where to expand and where to cut back. AI also formatted the footnotes. All analysis, interpretation, and final prose are my own.
Footnotes
- I wouldn't want anyone to suppose I was contemplating such matters on campus. After all, as computer scientist David Levy has noted in many talks and presentations, "just as hospitals aren’t places to get well, universities aren’t places to think (deeply)." David M. Levy, personal communication with the author, August 28, 2026.
- Douglas Harper, "Etymology of teach," Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed September 11, 2026, https://www.etymonline.com/word/teach.
- Douglas Harper, "Etymology of learn," Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed September 11, 2026, https://www.etymonline.com/word/learn.
- This claim may be considered controversial in the realm of educational development, so I'd better back it up. Examples from the popular press are too numerous for exhaustive citation; these are the five earliest that I've found:
• Robin Dinsmoore, “Many Phases of Social Studies Are Considered at Convention,” The Brookfield News (Brookfield, WI), April 8, 1971, 30.
• “Debt to Horace Mann,” Transcript-Telegram (Holyoke, MA), May 6, 1971, 4.
• Patricia Cooney, “They’re Getting Kids Ready for 2001,” The Des Moines Register (Des Moines, IA), July 18, 1971, 37.
• “Stay Out of Education’s Way, Teachers Urged,” The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, FL), July 21, 1971, 38.
• Richard Gulick, “Superintendent’s Notes,” The Falmouth Outlook (Falmouth, KY), November 19, 1971, 5. - Alison King, "From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side," College Teaching 41, no. 1 (1993): 30, https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.1993.9926781.
- Charles D. Morrison, "From 'Sage on the Stage' to 'Guide on the Side': A Good Start," International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 8, no. 1 (2014): Article 4, https://doi.org/10.20429/ijsotl.2014.080104.
- On verbs, indigenous languages, and the colonial imposition of European nominal categories, see Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), particularly the chapter "Learning the Grammar of Animacy."