From Learner to Teacher—and Everything I Had to Unlearn

A story about learning to teach while learning everything else

In medicine, we spend years learning how to learn—but almost no time learning how to teach.

Somewhere along the way, you go from scribbling notes to being the person at the whiteboard. It happens quietly. One day, you’re listening; the next, someone’s looking at you, waiting for an explanation. And so you start talking—repeating what you know, hoping it makes sense.

But knowing something and knowing how to teach it aren’t the same.

The first few times I tried to explain a complex idea, I could feel the gap between what was in my head and what was coming across. It wasn’t about content—it was about connection.

And I realized: teaching isn’t something you just do. It’s something you have to learn.

The Hidden Curriculum: Knowing ≠ Teaching

In med school, the focus was on absorbing facts fast enough to survive the next test or rotation. In residency, it was about managing patients and learning to think like a pathologist. Teaching? That was just something you were expected to do once you were a PGY-2. Or a senior resident. Or the only person standing near a whiteboard.

There were no lectures on cognitive load or instructional design. No guidance on how to tailor explanations to different learners. Just a vague sense that if you knew your stuff, you’d be able to teach it.

Spoiler alert: that’s not how it works.

Teaching Is a Skill—And I Didn’t Have It Yet

Eventually, I stopped assuming that teaching would come naturally with more experience. I started thinking of it as a skill set—one that I hadn’t been taught, and one I needed to actively build.

So I started watching people. I paid attention to the clinicians and educators who held a room effortlessly, who could make complex topics sound simple, who made learners feel seen instead of overwhelmed. I wasn’t just listening to what they said—I was watching how they said it. When they paused. How they used questions. How they simplified without condescending. I stole techniques shamelessly.

And I started reading. Articles, books, blog posts—anything I could find on cognitive psychology, medical education theory, and practical strategies for teaching in real time. It wasn’t about becoming an expert in pedagogy. It was about realizing there was a science behind good teaching—and that I could learn it.

I gave myself permission to treat teaching the way I treated anything else I cared about in medicine: something worth doing with intention, not improvisation.

Building a Framework (and Unlearning a Few Things)

Once I stopped treating teaching like something I should just know how to do, everything started to shift. I’d spent years memorizing details, drilling mechanisms, and juggling everything in my head at once—but none of that helped if the people I was teaching couldn’t see the big picture.

So I stopped trying to teach everything.

Instead, I started focusing on concepts. What’s the core idea? What’s the essential distinction that organizes everything else? I began thinking of teaching as building a skeleton—just enough structure for learners to start hanging information on as they go. If I could help someone walk away with a few solid bones to build on, I’d done my job.

This is where backward design became a game changer. Rather than starting with what I knew, I started with what I wanted the learner to walk away understanding. One clear goal per session. If the goal was, “recognize the signs of a hemolytic transfusion reaction,” then all the supporting material had to flow toward that—not away from it into tangents or sidebars. The details could wait. The concept had to land.

I also started using chunking more intentionally—not just breaking up lectures or slide decks, but mentally organizing information into pieces learners could actually retain. Two or three key ideas at a time, max. I built natural stopping points into my sessions and started asking: What are you hearing so far? What would you add to this idea?

The real magic happened when I gave people space to talk it out in their own words. When they could reframe the concept back to me—not just repeat it, but own it—that’s when I knew it had clicked. And when it didn’t? We went back to the scaffold. We strengthened the foundation instead of layering on more weight.

The truth is, you don’t need to flood someone with information to teach effectively. You need to help them make sense of what they already know, and show them how to connect it to what’s coming next.

Teaching isn’t about pouring knowledge in—it’s about helping people build something solid enough to keep growing.

Still Learning

Now, when I approach a topic, I don’t just think, What do I need to say? I think, How might this land with someone seeing it for the first time? I build in questions. I check for understanding.

And I still mess it up sometimes.

Teaching isn’t a static skill you master and move on from. It’s like diagnostic reasoning: the more you do it, the more you realize where your blind spots are. But it’s also deeply rewarding in a way that few other parts of medicine are.

There’s nothing quite like watching the lightbulb go on for someone—and knowing you helped flip the switch.

Final Thought: Teach the Teachers

Here’s the thing: if teaching is a core part of how we train, evaluate, and pass on knowledge in medicine, then it deserves more than a “just figure it out” approach. We should be learning how to teach as deliberately as we learn how to intubate, or interpret labs, or talk to patients.

So maybe this is a call to action—or just a reminder—that it's okay to not know how to teach right away. But it’s also okay to expect better support in learning how to do it.

Because “great job today!” isn’t enough.

And we deserve better than silence when we ask, “Any questions?”