Long before schools, before chalkboards and lesson plans, before teacher training programs—humans were teaching. Around fires. In fields. With hands, eyes, and stories. The impulse to teach is not an invention. It is an instinct.
In their illuminating and hopeful chapter, Daniel Schwartz, Melanie Tanner, and John Bransford argue something profound: teaching is not just a profession—it’s a natural cognitive ability embedded deep in our species.
And if that’s true, then teacher education—and classroom practice—should start not by installing skills, but by awakening what is already there.
The Evolutionary Roots of Teaching
Humans are wired for teaching. We gesture, we exaggerate, we explain. Even toddlers do it. When a three-year-old shows their sibling how to stack blocks, they are tapping into this ancient, adaptive function: helping others learn.
Unlike most species, we don’t just model behavior. We actively scaffold learning. We recognize when someone doesn’t know something, and we adjust what we say, how we act, and what we show. This sensitivity to the learner’s state of mind is what sets human teaching apart.
This means: every human being carries within them the architecture of a teacher.
The Problem with “Training” Teachers
Ironically, most teacher education programs don’t begin with this natural capacity. Instead, they often treat teaching as a series of external techniques—lesson delivery, classroom management, assessment strategies.
Of course, these are important. But they risk turning teaching into performance—something done to students, rather than with them.
Schwartz and colleagues ask: what if we began with the assumption that teachers are natural cognitive guides? That teaching is not about transmitting content, but about shaping understanding in real time, based on how learners respond?
To do this, teachers must be trained not just in strategies, but in sensitivity—to ambiguity, to variation, to the signals students constantly send through their questions, silence, and confusion.
Teaching Is Learning in Disguise
Here’s the twist: teaching is one of the best ways to learn.
Research shows that when people are asked to teach something—even before they’re fully confident—they understand it more deeply. This is because teaching forces us to organize knowledge, anticipate misunderstandings, and reflect on what we truly know.
This insight has two powerful implications:
- Students can become teachers. Classrooms that invite peer teaching allow everyone to learn more fully—by stepping into the natural role of a teacher.
- Teachers are always learners. The best teaching happens when teachers are actively thinking, adjusting, and growing—not repeating a script, but dancing with the dynamics of the moment.
Teaching, then, is not static expertise. It’s a form of real-time cognition.
Implications for Classroom Practice
If teaching is a natural ability, we should nurture it differently. Schwartz, Tanner, and Bransford suggest:
- Give teachers space to reflect on their own thinking and learning—not just their students’.
- Encourage teacher candidates to observe and describe how they teach outside formal contexts (coaching, mentoring, parenting, explaining).
- Train educators to recognize the signs of student misunderstanding and use those as opportunities—not errors to correct, but clues to follow.
- Value improvisation as a legitimate teaching strength—not a sign of disorganization, but a sign of responsiveness.
- Treat classrooms as shared cognitive environments, where teaching and learning are mutual, fluid, and alive.
A Final Reflection: The Teacher in All of Us
There is something deeply democratic in this vision of teaching. It says that teaching is not reserved for experts or professionals alone. It is a birthright of being human.
We are born to explain, to show, to connect, to reveal the invisible to someone else. We are born to care enough about what another person sees, that we shape what we do so they can see it too.
In this light, teaching is not just a job—it is an act of humanity.
And for those who choose to make it their life’s work, this truth matters:
You are not being trained to become something you are not.
You are being given the tools to become more fully what you already are.
Let us then build classrooms and teacher education programs that begin not with what teachers lack, but with what they naturally hold—the ability to awaken understanding in another mind.