It is one of the ironies of medical education that experts in a given field are not always experts in teaching about that field. In taxonomic terms, the educator needs three forms of knowledge: knowledge of the topic, knowledge of the audience and knowledge of how to communicate the topic to the audience.
A hard truth: There probably is no such thing as a gifted teacher. Learning how to teach well is hard work, and thinking of it as a gift discounts how much work great medical educators put into their craft. The good news is that, like any skill, one can learn to become a gifted teacher.
It starts with a script. Think about a topic you want to teach, an area in which you already have some expertise. Then come up with two lists: pearls and pitfalls. Pearls are the important teaching points you want to make; pitfalls are the common errors the learner needs to avoid.11
Now, a second hard truth: You have to learn the script. One does not expect to deliver Hamlet’s soliloquy by reading off the cue cards. In the same way, you have to learn your script well enough that when the opportunity strikes, you are ready for your closeup.
The good news is that learning to teach from a script is freeing; learning the material so well leaves you free to improvise, so you can tailor the lesson to your audience. It also, frankly, decreases the cognitive load of teaching, so that part of your mind is free to observe and to respond.
Teachers who appear to be gifted have many of these teaching scripts ready to go. Although no one wants to just sit down and memorize scripts that may or may not be useful at some point, as you learn something new, it’s not a bad idea to break it down in terms of pearls and pitfalls and imagine how you might teach a trainee about that topic.
Also, you don’t have to do this alone. Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery, and when you are learning from a gifted teacher, take a moment to think about the mechanics: What is making the lecture especially effective and what you can appropriate and try to pass off as your own flash of brilliance?
The ability to teach is like any muscle; it gets stronger with use. We have all benefitted from extraordinary teachers, and even if teaching is not your full-time avocation, it is worthwhile to learn how to pay that gift forward and learn how to share what you know even more effectively.
