Are You A Technical Explainer?

“When someone has a problem, I want it to make sense”

There is a particular pleasure in watching confusion disappear from someone’s face. You know the moment. They arrive with a muddled description of something that is happening in a voice, a lesson or a piece of repertoire. You ask a few questions, something clicks, and suddenly they say, “Ah. That’s what’s going on.”

Technical Explainers tend to be good at that moment. You like precision. You like language that means something. You often have a strong body of knowledge and are good at organising it so somebody else can use it. In singing teaching, this is no small thing. Our profession contains more than its fair share of vague instructions, inherited terminology and explanations that sound impressive until you ask what they actually mean.

A teacher who can bring clarity is valuable. But there is an intriguing difficulty when explaining becomes mentoring. If someone comes to you because they are stuck, and you know something they don’t, it can feel almost perverse not to tell them. Why spend ten minutes asking questions when you could explain the whole thing in two?

Sometimes that is exactly the right thing to do. But not always. Knowing the answer and helping another teacher develop judgement are not quite the same job. A technically accurate explanation may solve today’s problem while leaving the underlying thinking untouched.

The mentor’s question becomes: does this person need information from me, or do they need help thinking with the information they already have? That can be surprisingly difficult for experienced teachers. We have spent years being rewarded for knowing things. Mentoring sometimes asks us to leave some of that knowledge temporarily in the waiting room.

The strongest Technical Explainers don’t become less knowledgeable. They become more selective. They notice when an explanation opens somebody’s thinking and when it closes the conversation too soon.

The twist? Expertise can make you so useful that people start outsourcing their thinking to you. They leave with a better explanation, but less confidence in their own ability to work things out.

If you are the person colleagues approach because “you’ll know what this is”, Technical Explainer may be one of your strongest Teacher-Mentor tendencies.
Take the “What Kind of Teacher-Mentor Are You?” Quiz and find out which helping instinct actually comes first for you.