Now, there’s a story headline you might read in the educational equivalent of the National Enquirer. Are you aware that your material prevents instructional growth? How can that be?

I think it might work like this. When teachers are totally, even mostly, focused on course content and the need to get it covered, that generally means the process side of teaching is being ignored or is getting short shrift. It’s like focusing all your attention on developing the right side of your brain while pretending that the left side doesn’t matter. In fact, development of one side only serves to accentuate lack of development on the other side.

Teachers do need to know their material, and they have a professional responsibility to keep up with developments in the field. Moreover, this is not about denying faculty an intimate connection with their content. A love of the material and a willingness to convey that to students only enhances learning. The problem is when the content becomes the be-all and end-all of the teaching process, when the content matters more than anything else. When content is that important, faculty are prevented from using methods that enhance how much students learn. In this case the content orientation of faculty hurts students, but the argument here is that it also hurts teachers.

When teachers think the only, the best, the most important way to improve their teaching is by developing their content knowledge, they end up with sophisticated levels of knowledge, but they have only simplistic instructional methods to convey that material. To imagine that content matters more than process is to imagine that the car is more important than the road. Both are essential. A fancy car with a fast motor and a great suspension isn’t much good on a gravelly road peppered with potholes. What we teach and how we teach it are inextricably linked and very much dependent on one another.

Even though both are tightly linked and interdependent, they are still separate and discrete. Development of one doesn’t automatically improve how the other functions. So you can work to grow content knowledge more and more, but if the methods used to convey that knowledge are not sophisticated and up to the task, teaching may still be quite ineffective. It may not inspire and motivate students. It may not result in more and better student learning. Because teachers so love the content, they almost never blame it. No, it’s the students’ fault. They aren’t bright enough. They don’t study enough. They don’t deserve to be professionals in this field. Teachers are very good at getting their content off the hook.

But teachers who teach courses in which large numbers of students struggle and routinely fail are not generally positive about teaching. They are more often cynical, rigid, and defensive. It takes work to justify methods that are this ineffective. The truth about how much isn’t being learned in these courses is hard to ignore, no matter how routinely students are blamed.

Knowing content and being able to teach it involve separate skill sets. The typical college teacher has spent years in courses developing the knowledge skill set and virtually no time on the teaching set. This way of preparing professors assumes that the content is much more complex than the process, when in fact both are equally formidable. Marrying the content and the process requires an intimate and sophisticated knowledge of both, if the desired result is learning for students. Some kinds of content are best taught by example, some by experience. Other kinds are best understood when discussed and worked on collaboratively. Other kinds need individual reflection and analysis. Besides these inherent demands of the content itself, there are the learning needs of individual students, which vary across many dimensions.

We’ve known it for years; we can all point to examples. The best teachers are not always, not even usually, those teachers with the most sophisticated content knowledge. The best teachers do know their material, but they also know a lot about the process. They have at their disposal a repertoire of instructional methods, strategies, and approaches—a repertoire that continually grows, just as their content knowledge develops. They never underestimate the power of the process to determine the outcome. With this understanding, content is not a barrier to teacher development.

This article first appeared in The Teaching Professor, a newsletter written for everyone involved with classroom instruction in higher education. See for yourself what a great tool The Teaching Professor is - sign up for a free 3-month, no-obligation trial subscription.