This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
Could a possible solution be to teach new teachers?
How far is a person who "knows X" from a person who "can teach X"? I imagine that being able to teach X has essentially two requirements: First, understand X deeply -- which is what we want to achieve anyway. Second, general teaching skills, independent on X -- these could be taught as a separate package; which could already be interesting for people who teach. And what you need then, is a written material containing all known things that should be considered when teaching X, and a short lesson explaining the details of it.
The plan could be approximately this:
1) We already have lessons for X, for Y, for Z -- what CFAR offers to participants already.
2) Make lessons for teaching in general -- and offer them to participants, too, because that is a separately valuable product.
3) Make lessons on "how to teach X" etc., each of them requiring lessons for "X" and for "general teaching" as prerequisites. These will be for volunteers wanting to help CFAR. After the lessons, have the volunteers teach X to some random audience (for a huge discount or even for free). If the volunteer does it well, let them teach X at CFAR workshops; first with some supervision and feedback, later alone.
Yep, CFAR is training new instructors (I'm one of them).
In the education literature, these are called content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge respectively. There is an important third class of thing called pedagogical content knowledge, which refers to spec... (read more)