Coaching practices for I'm Teaching a Mixed Group and I Keep Handing Everyone the Same Detailed Walkthrough and It's Clearly Not Landing the Beginners Are Lost and the Ones Who Already Get it Are Visibly Bored and Tuning Out and I Sense I'm Guessing at How Much Help to Give Instead of Actually Checking What Each of Them Can Already Do
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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I’m teaching a mixed group and I keep handing everyone the same detailed walkthrough, and it’s clearly not landing
- I try to teach someone the whole rich subject the way I hold it in my head, and I bury what they actually need to do under a mountain of background and context I find fascinating
- When I help someone learn I either smother them with so much help they never struggle, or leave them stranded and lost
- I keep trying to imagine how this lands for a total beginner, but I can’t actually un-know what I know
- I keep launching into explanations assuming people are starting from where I picture them, and I’m forever either talking over their heads or boring them with stuff they already know
Practices that may help
- Assess expertise level before deciding how much guidance to provide
The same support that accelerates novices can slow down intermediates — measure first, design second.
The Expertise Reversal Effect: When Help Becomes Harmful - Work backwards from what the learner needs to do
Start with the decision or action the learner must take, then trace back only to the knowledge that serves it.
The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach - Provide contingent support: more help when needed, less when not
Calibrate help to the learner’s actual performance moment by moment rather than delivering a fixed dose.
Scaffolding: The Art of Temporary Learning Support - Find a genuine novice to test your explanation on
Before the real audience, explain to someone who actually doesn’t know.
The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach - Ask what the audience already knows before explaining
Probe prior knowledge explicitly rather than assuming it.
The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach - Delay scaffolding until needed
Resist providing hints, worked examples, or structure until the learner has genuinely engaged with the challenge.
Productive Failure: How Struggling First Makes Instruction More Effective - Attempt before instruction
Try to solve a new type of problem with your current knowledge before any formal teaching.
Productive Failure: How Struggling First Makes Instruction More Effective - Use what you couldn’t teach as your study list
The moments you fumbled while teaching are exactly what to go back and learn.
The Protege Effect: Learn It Better by Teaching It - Teach cases to solidify and test your own patterns
Explaining your recognition logic to others forces the implicit to become explicit and exposes gaps.
Recognition-Primed Decision Making - Teach it to a real person
Explain the concept to an actual listener who can ask questions back.
The Feynman Technique, Step by Step
Related concerns
- The Curse Of Knowledge Why Experts Struggle To Teach After A Loss
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias in which knowing something makes it genuinely hard to imagine not knowing it — causing experts to communicate at a level that loses their audience. Chip and Dan Heath popularized the concept in Made to Stick; the underlying effect is well documented in psychology, though cures require deliberate practice.
- Backward Design Teaching
Start with the decision or action the learner must take, then trace back only to the knowledge that serves it.
Work backwards from what the learner needs to do
- Expecting To Teach
Tell yourself you will have to teach this — and watch how differently you read it.
Study with the expectation of teaching
- How To Fill Knowledge Gaps
Map the exact point where your understanding runs out rather than treating it as a vague area of weakness.
Knowledge-boundary identification
- How To Fix Knowledge Gaps
Map the exact point where your understanding runs out rather than treating it as a vague area of weakness.
- Teach To Learn
The protege effect is the finding that people learn material more deeply when they teach it — or even just prepare to teach it — than when they study it for themselves. Experiments support that expecting to teach, and then explaining to a real or stand-in learner, drives more organized, durable understanding, largely because teaching forces you to confront the gaps in your own knowledge.
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