![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/41iqM5yh-pL._SY445_SX342_QL70_ML2_.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Some people are just naturally good teachers.” I’ve heard some version of that sentence more times than I can count\u2014in hallways, workshops, and conversations about colleagues everyone admires. It’s so familiar that it usually passes without question. And I understand the impulse: we’ve all known instructors who seem to command a classroom effortlessly, who make hard ideas feel intuitive. But the longer I teach, the less convinced I am that “naturally” is the right word. What if we’re confusing the finished performance with years of invisible rehearsal?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That question stayed with me throughout Teach Like a Champ: The Psychology-Based Guide to Effective and Efficient Teaching<\/em> by Regan Gurung and Elizabeth Yost Hammer. On the surface this is a book about teaching: course design, assessment, motivation, artificial intelligence, burnout. Underneath, it asks what teaching actually is. An art given to a fortunate few? A science? Or a continually evolving craft?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The irony is that universities have long treated teaching as though it requires little preparation. We spend years apprenticing researchers, then send them into classrooms with almost no preparation for work they will do for thousands of hours. Gurung finished his PhD without ever serving as instructor of record; he was advised not to “waste time” teaching. Hammer stumbled into her love of teaching when a mentor encouraged her to take on a social psychology course while finishing her dissertation. Their stories mirror so many of ours: borrowed syllabi, imitated professors, the hope that experience would substitute for instruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When preparation is scarce, intuition fills the vacuum, which may be why teaching myths are so durable. The authors’ first target is the belief that great teachers are simply born, and they answer immediately: both nature and nurture matter. Personality shapes teaching, but treating instruction as an inherited gift is psychologically dangerous. The charismatic teacher stops improving; the struggling novice concludes they never belonged. Both misunderstand expertise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The book’s evidence keeps undercutting instinct, and much of it will be new even to readers who follow this literature\u2014the authors reach past the usual canon, back to a 1934 survey of teacher workloads and forward to experiments on where learning objectives belong. My favorite example comes from Robert Boice’s studies of new faculty: the “quick starters” who thrived early were distinguished partly by preparing less for class. Overpreparation works as defensive teaching, a hedge against complaints that crowds out questions and turns discussion into a threat to the slide deck. Hammer’s own overprepared, lecture-heavy first course is the perfect illustration. Equally humbling: in John Hattie’s meta-analytic work, cited here, students account for roughly half the variance in their own learning; teachers, about a quarter. I found that number strangely freeing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout, Gurung and Hammer ask readers to look at the psychology beneath their practice. Self-determination theory and appraisal theory become lenses for understanding our own relationship with teaching, not just our students’. Before we design learning environments, we need to understand the minds creating them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I especially appreciated their refusal to equate good teaching with sacrifice\u2014the midnight emails, the endlessly redesigned courses, the weekends lost to grading. They cite survey data showing 64 percent of faculty report burnout while 67 percent remain satisfied with their jobs. We love work that is wearing us down. Their case for efficiency is simply that exhausted teachers rarely become better ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The authors write like colleagues in conversation\u2014they imagine chatting with you over coffee (Regan) or tea (Elizabeth)\u2014and insist teaching is contextual: large lectures differ from seminars, community colleges from research universities. Worth knowing: this is a book aimed squarely at college instructors, with graduate students and high school teachers invited along in the preface. K-12 readers will do some translating, though the underlying psychology travels well. The visuals earn their space too: a one-page infographic syllabus, a rubric mapping Bloom’s taxonomy onto generative AI, tables that condense whole literatures\u2014each summarizing a concept faster than prose could. Where much educational advice offers universal solutions to local problems, this book’s confidence comes from its humility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the end, the book had shifted one of my own habits of mind. I have tended to improve my teaching by collecting things: another retrieval activity, another assessment tool. Becoming a better teacher may be less about accumulating techniques than about cultivating a disposition\u2014studying our teaching with the seriousness we give our disciplines. That is liberating, because none of us are confined to the teachers we are today. It is also unsettling, because it lets no one off the hook. If teaching is a craft rather than a gift, we stay apprentices as long as we keep stepping into classrooms. That may be what makes the work so endlessly interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Some people are just naturally good teachers.” I’ve heard some version of that sentence more times than I can count\u2014in hallways, workshops, and conversations about colleagues everyone admires. It’s so familiar that it usually passes without question. And I understand the impulse: we’ve all known instructors who seem to command a classroom effortlessly, who make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":6678596,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6678595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6678595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6678595"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6678595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6678597,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6678595\/revisions\/6678597"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6678596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6678595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6678595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6678595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}