talk the talk
February 18, 2010
When we engage in any conversation, whether gossiping with friends over a glass of prosecco, making small talk with the cashier, or participating in a small classroom discussion about teaching styles, there is some level of learning taking place. You may have learned that Mary Sue didn’t earn her raise based on job performance alone, Derrick, your cashier, was having a wonderful day and your total for groceries was $ 48.12, and that it’s uncommon to come across some radical engineer with a high degree of nurturing teaching style and a knack for social reform. Whether this information is of value is the determining factor which draws the distinction between talking and teaching.
Teaching is talking with the deliberate purpose of delivering information perceived to be of professional and scholarly value.
Though we learn new facts and tidbits from our everyday conversation, the person we learned from did not intend to transfer information of value therefore said person was not actively teaching. Teaching occurs when a person made the decision to deliver information to others prior to the start of conversation and is the result of effort and reflection.
FierDeL'treEmpirical's Blog 
February 18, 2010 at 8:57 pm
When you say “Teaching is talking with the deliberate purpose of delivering information perceived to be of professional and scholarly value”, you appear to be focusing in on the broadcasting of information – or to take the term professor literally, the professing of information. Yet, I would submit that in this digital networked world, teaching is becoming more a situation where knowledge is co-discovered and co-created.
February 19, 2010 at 6:57 pm
You make an interesting point. This post was written in response to the assignment from class: “What is the difference between talking and teaching?”. So yes, there are many avenues to accomplish said task “teaching”, however my post was merely attempting to delineate the point at which conversational teaching occurs.
February 24, 2010 at 2:20 am
Allow me to raise the bar a little bit. Isn’t teaching really about changing people for the better? Or better yet, heping them to change themselves for the better. We can do this by delivering information at times, but I see this as necessary but not sufficient. Otherwise, they are likely to learn it enough to pass the test, or the class ,but not retain it. When it has real value (as you said), then it sticks. But sometimes we have to create value (or help them to create it), then we are more than the purveyors of information…we are creating knowledge workers.