Teaching Is Not Learning: Why the Distinction Matters for Educational Practice

Joseph Tyler (Doctoral Researcher)

For many, the days after Christmas and before the New Year create a rare pause. For some, it has been a time of celebration; for others, simply a brief slowing of pace. Either way, this in-between moment often invites reflection, not yet the urgency of January, but no longer the momentum of term time. In education, that reflective space is particularly valuable.

It is a good moment to revisit a distinction that lies quietly beneath much of what we do, yet is surprisingly easy to forget: teaching and learning are not the same.

The Assumption We Rarely Question

Education has spent decades trying to improve teaching. Lessons are more tightly planned, objectives more clearly stated, explanations more carefully structured, and teachers more frequently observed. And yet, despite these sustained efforts, concerns about pupil engagement, depth of understanding, and long-term retention persist. This raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: if teaching has improved, why does learning so often appear fragile, uneven, or short-lived?

Part of the problem lies in an assumption that is rarely made explicit—that teaching and learning are effectively the same thing. In everyday professional language, the two terms are often used interchangeably. A “good lesson” is taken as evidence of learning; a well-delivered explanation is assumed to result in understanding. However, as many experienced educators quietly acknowledge, it is entirely possible to teach well without learners actually learning very much at all. The appearance of learning can be convincing, even reassuring, while masking shallow understanding or passive compliance.

Sir Ken Robinson repeatedly argued that education is not a mechanical process in which outputs can be guaranteed by refining inputs, but a human system shaped by relationships, motivation, culture, and identity (Robinson, 2009). Learning does not occur because teaching has taken place; it occurs when learners actively make sense of ideas, test their understanding, struggle, reflect, and connect new knowledge to what they already know. Teaching may create the conditions for this to happen, but it cannot replace the learning process itself.

This distinction matters because modern education systems tend to privilege what is visible and measurable. Teaching is observable: learning objectives can be displayed, explanations heard, tasks completed. Learning, by contrast, is often internal, slow, and difficult to capture in the moment. As a result, systems of accountability frequently focus on teaching performance rather than learning impact, encouraging practices that prioritise delivery, pace, and coverage over understanding, transfer, and meaning (Biesta, 2013).

This article argues that unless educators consciously separate teaching from learning, efforts to improve education will continue to target the wrong thing. By clarifying the difference between teaching as an act and learning as a process, and by examining why the two are so often conflated, the article aims to offer both conceptual clarity and practical guidance. In doing so, it invites teachers to shift the central question of practice away from “How well did I teach this?” towards the more challenging but more important question: “What evidence do I have that learning actually took place, and what kind of learning was it?”

Defining the Difference: Teaching as Action, Learning as Change

At its most basic level, teaching is something that is done, while learning is something that happens. Teaching involves deliberate, observable actions undertaken by an educator: planning a sequence of lessons, explaining concepts, modelling procedures, designing tasks, asking questions, and providing feedback. These actions are purposeful and often highly skilled, drawing on subject knowledge, pedagogical understanding, and professional judgement. Crucially, however, the presence of these actions does not in itself guarantee that learning has taken place.

Learning, by contrast, is not an event but a process. It involves changes within the learner, changes in understanding, capability, attitude, or identity, that develop over time. Illeris (2018) describes learning as the interaction of three dimensions: cognitive (knowledge and skills), emotional (motivation and affect), and social (interaction and context). This framing highlights why learning is inherently more complex than teaching. While teaching can be planned in advance, learning emerges through engagement, interpretation, and experience, shaped by what learners already know and how they feel about the learning situation.

One of the reasons teaching and learning are so easily conflated is that learning is rarely visible in the moment it occurs. Teachers can observe behaviours such as listening, writing, and responding to questions, but these are at best indirect indicators of learning. A learner may appear attentive while mentally disengaged, or struggle visibly while developing a deeper understanding. Research in cognitive psychology shows that learning often feels effortful and uncertain, particularly when learners are required to retrieve information, make connections, or apply ideas in unfamiliar contexts (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 2000). In this sense, what looks like smooth progress may actually signal superficial learning, while moments of difficulty may be precisely where meaningful learning is taking place.

The danger arises when educational practice treats delivery as a proxy for learning. When teachers are encouraged to focus on clarity, pace, and structure without equal attention to how learners are processing ideas, there is a risk that teaching becomes performative. Lessons may be judged successful because content was “covered” or objectives were “met”, even when learners have not internalised or retained what was taught. This is particularly problematic in systems where observation frameworks and accountability measures prioritise what teachers do over what learners understand.

Distinguishing between teaching as action and learning as change does not diminish the importance of teaching; rather, it reframes its purpose. Teaching matters not because it is visible or measurable, but because of its potential to influence learning. As Bransford et al. (2000) argue, effective teaching is less about transmitting information and more about designing experiences that support learners in constructing meaning. When this distinction is kept firmly in view, teaching becomes a means rather than an end, and learning returns to its rightful place at the centre of educational practice.

Teaching Without Learning: Why It Happens So Often

One of the most persistent misconceptions in education is the belief that if teaching is clear, structured, and well delivered, learning will naturally follow. When learning fails to materialise, the instinctive response is often to search for faults in teacher competence or effort. However, research and professional experience suggest that teaching without learning is not usually the result of poor teaching, but of systemic conditions that unintentionally privilege performance over understanding.

A key factor is the prevalence of surface learning. Learners quickly learn how to succeed within the rules of the system: memorising key phrases, reproducing model answers, and completing tasks in ways that satisfy assessment criteria without developing deeper understanding. Biggs and Tang (2011) describe this as a predictable response to curricula and assessments that reward coverage and accuracy over meaning and transfer. In such contexts, learners may appear successful in the short term while retaining little that is durable or adaptable.

Curriculum overload further exacerbates this problem. When syllabi are densely packed and tightly sequenced, teachers are placed under pressure to maintain pace. Lessons become driven by the need to “get through” content rather than to explore ideas in depth. This can create an illusion of progress, where teaching moves forward while learning struggles to keep up. Slowing down to address misconceptions or allow for meaningful practice is often experienced as a risk, particularly in high-stakes environments, even though such moments are essential for learning to occur.

Assessment practices also play a significant role in encouraging teaching without learning. When assessment is positioned primarily as a tool for grading and accountability, rather than as a mechanism for supporting learning, teaching naturally adapts to the demands of the test. This phenomenon, often described as teaching to the test, is not inherently problematic; it becomes problematic when assessments measure only narrow forms of performance. In these cases, teaching becomes strategically aligned with assessment demands rather than with broader learning goals, limiting opportunities for critical thinking, application, or creativity (Biggs and Tang, 2011).

Accountability systems reinforce these tendencies by focusing attention on teacher behaviours rather than learner thinking. Observation frameworks frequently emphasise visible features of teaching: lesson structure, pace, questioning techniques, and classroom management. While these elements are not unimportant, their prominence can encourage performative teaching, where success is judged by how the lesson appears rather than by what learners understand. As a result, teachers may prioritise smoothness and compliance over productive struggle, despite evidence that learning often requires cognitive challenge and effort.

This is compounded by misunderstandings of cognitive load and instructional guidance. Kirschner, Sweller and Clark (2006) argue that learners, particularly novices, require carefully designed instruction that supports their limited working memory. However, this insight is sometimes simplified into an overreliance on tightly scripted teaching, where learners are shielded from difficulty rather than supported through it. In such cases, teaching becomes increasingly directive, reducing opportunities for learners to actively process, retrieve, and apply knowledge, processes that are essential for learning.

Teaching without learning, then, is rarely the result of negligence or indifference. It emerges when well-intentioned teachers operate within systems that reward short-term performance, visible compliance, and procedural fidelity. Recognising this shifts the conversation away from blame and towards design: how curricula, assessments, and accountability structures might be reimagined to support learning that is deep, sustained, and meaningful.

Teaching Without Learning: Why It Happens So Often

In education, few ideas are as persistent, or as misleading, as the assumption that effective teaching will inevitably lead to effective learning. When learning outcomes fall short of expectations, the focus often turns to improving teaching technique: clearer explanations, tighter lesson structures, or more detailed planning. While these refinements may improve the appearance of teaching, they do not always address the underlying issue. Teaching without learning is not an anomaly; it is a common and predictable outcome of how many education systems are designed.

One explanation lies in the dominance of surface learning and learner compliance. In highly structured environments, learners quickly learn what is required to succeed: reproduce key terminology, follow procedures, and provide answers that align with assessment criteria. This can create an impression of success while masking fragile understanding. Biggs and Tang (2011) argue that when learners focus primarily on meeting external demands rather than constructing meaning, learning becomes transactional and short-lived. Performance is prioritised over understanding, and success becomes synonymous with compliance rather than capability.

Curriculum design plays a significant role in reinforcing this pattern. Overloaded curricula, characterised by extensive content and tight timelines, place sustained pressure on teachers to maintain pace. Under these conditions, depth is often sacrificed for coverage. Teachers may recognise that learners need more time to practise, revisit, or consolidate ideas, but feel constrained by the expectation to move on. The result is a form of educational momentum in which teaching progresses regardless of whether learning has caught up. What appears to be efficient teaching can therefore conceal cumulative gaps in understanding.

Assessment further amplifies this problem when it becomes the primary driver of teaching decisions. Where assessments reward narrow forms of recall or procedural accuracy, teaching inevitably adapts to those demands. This is not a failure of professional integrity but a rational response to system incentives. However, when assessment is treated as the endpoint of learning rather than a means of supporting it, teaching risks becoming strategically aligned with tests rather than with learning itself. In such contexts, learners may succeed academically while remaining poorly equipped to transfer or apply their knowledge beyond the assessment task (Biggs and Tang, 2011).

Accountability systems reinforce these dynamics by focusing attention on observable teacher behaviours. Lesson observations and performance frameworks often prioritise features such as structure, pace, and clarity—elements that are visible and measurable. While these aspects of teaching are important, they are only weak proxies for learning. As a result, teachers may feel encouraged to prioritise smooth delivery and orderly progression over productive struggle or exploratory thinking. Learning, which is often messy, uneven, and difficult to capture in real time, is pushed to the margins of evaluation.

This emphasis on visible performance is sometimes justified through appeals to cognitive science, particularly concerns about cognitive load. Kirschner, Sweller and Clark (2006) highlight the risks of unguided instruction for novice learners, emphasising the need for structured support. However, when these insights are interpreted narrowly, they can lead to overly directive teaching that limits opportunities for learners to think, retrieve, and apply knowledge independently. In such cases, teaching becomes increasingly efficient, while learning remains shallow.

Understanding why teaching without learning occurs so frequently requires a shift in perspective. Rather than asking why teachers are not teaching well enough, it is more productive to ask how curricula, assessments, and accountability structures shape what teaching becomes. When systems reward performance, pace, and compliance, teaching will reflect those priorities, even when learning suffers as a result.

Learning Without Teaching: What This Tells Us About Learning

If teaching without learning exposes the limits of instruction, learning without teaching reveals something equally important about the nature of learning itself. Much of what individuals learn across a lifetime occurs outside formal teaching contexts: through conversation, imitation, experimentation, reflection, and persistence. Children acquire language long before they encounter formal instruction, and adults continue to learn complex skills through practice, feedback, and social interaction rather than direct explanation alone. These forms of learning challenge the assumption that teaching is the primary driver of educational development.

Social and informal learning are central to this understanding. Vygotsky’s (1978) work emphasises that learning is fundamentally social, shaped through interaction with others and mediated by language, culture, and shared activity. Knowledge is not simply transmitted from expert to novice but constructed through dialogue and participation. The concept of the zone of proximal development highlights that learners make progress when they are supported to do what they cannot yet do independently, not when tasks are either fully explained or entirely unsupported. This suggests that learning emerges through guided participation rather than instruction alone.

Equally significant is the role of struggle in learning. Research in cognitive psychology consistently shows that learning is strengthened through effortful processes such as retrieval, application, and problem-solving. When learners are required to recall information, test hypotheses, or explain ideas in their own words, they are more likely to develop durable and transferable understanding. These moments of difficulty often feel uncomfortable and can be misinterpreted as failure or disengagement. However, they are frequently the very conditions under which learning takes place. Smooth, effortless performance may signal familiarity, but not necessarily understanding.

Sir Ken Robinson captured this idea powerfully through his metaphor of education as a form of cultivation rather than production. In Creative Schools, Robinson and Aronica (2015) argue that teachers cannot make learning happen in the same way that factories produce goods. Instead, their role is to create the conditions in which learning is more likely to flourish. These conditions include emotional safety, meaningful challenge, relevance, time, and opportunity for exploration. Growth, in this sense, is not forced but enabled.

This reframing has important implications for how teachers understand authority and control in the classroom. If learning is recognised as something learners actively do, rather than something teachers deliver, then excessive control over pace, process, and outcome may inadvertently suppress learning. This does not imply a rejection of structure or expertise. Rather, it suggests a shift from controlling learning to orchestrating learning experiences. Teachers remain central, but their authority lies less in directing every step and more in designing environments that invite thinking, dialogue, and agency.

Learning without teaching, then, does not diminish the teacher’s role; it clarifies it. It reminds us that the most powerful teaching often operates indirectly, through carefully designed tasks, purposeful questions, and opportunities for learners to grapple with ideas. When teachers focus less on transmitting knowledge and more on enabling meaning-making, learning becomes something learners own rather than something done to them.

Recognising this challenges deeply embedded assumptions about what effective teaching looks like. It invites educators to value moments of uncertainty, productive struggle, and social interaction as legitimate and necessary features of learning. In doing so, it shifts the professional conversation away from control and coverage towards curiosity, growth, and understanding.

What It Means to Focus on Learning in Practice

If the distinction between teaching and learning is to have practical value, it must inform everyday decisions about planning, classroom interaction, and professional judgement. Focusing on learning does not require abandoning structure, explanation, or subject expertise. Rather, it requires a shift in emphasis: from what teachers do to what learners are enabled to think, understand, and apply. This section explores what such a shift looks like in practice.

Planning for Learning, Not Delivery

Traditional lesson planning often begins with content coverage: what topic will be taught, which slides will be used, and how much material will be addressed within a fixed time. While this approach supports organisation, it risks framing teaching as transmission rather than learning as change. A learning-focused approach begins elsewhere, with a clearer question: What will learners be able to do differently as a result of this learning experience?

This shift aligns closely with constructive alignment, where learning outcomes, learning activities, and assessment are deliberately connected (Biggs and Tang, 2011). Outcomes framed in terms of learner capability—such as explaining, applying, analysing, or evaluating, provide a more meaningful anchor for planning than outcomes focused on exposure to content. Planning then becomes an exercise in designing opportunities for learners to practise these capabilities, rather than simply encounter information.

Assessment plays a crucial role in this alignment. When assessment tasks reflect the intended learning, teaching is less likely to default to coverage and more likely to prioritise depth. Wiliam (2011) argues that assessment should function primarily as a tool for learning, offering evidence about where learners are in relation to desired outcomes and informing next steps. Planning with learning in mind therefore involves anticipating how understanding will be evidenced, challenged, and extended over time, rather than merely confirmed at the end of a unit.

Designing for Learner Thinking

A focus on learning requires attention not just to what learners do, but to what they think. Learning is strengthened when learners are required to actively process ideas through retrieval, explanation, application, and reflection. These processes demand cognitive effort and are often less visible than passive engagement, yet they are central to developing durable understanding.

Retrieval practices, such as low-stakes questioning or recall tasks, help learners strengthen memory and identify gaps in understanding. Explanation, whether through discussion or written articulation, requires learners to organise and clarify their thinking. Application tasks challenge learners to transfer knowledge to new contexts, while reflection supports metacognitive awareness of what has been learned and why it matters. Together, these processes make learning more robust and transferable.

Making learner thinking visible is therefore a central concern of learning-focused teaching. Rather than relying solely on correct answers or completed tasks, teachers seek evidence of reasoning, misconceptions, and partial understanding. This may involve carefully designed questions, structured peer discussion, or formative tasks that surface thinking without high stakes. As Wiliam (2011) emphasises, formative assessment is most effective when it reveals not just whether learners are right or wrong, but how they are thinking.

Rethinking the Teacher’s Role

When learning becomes the central focus, the role of the teacher shifts in important ways. Rather than being primarily a deliverer of content, the teacher becomes a designer of learning experiences, a facilitator of thinking, and a diagnostician of understanding. This does not reduce the importance of subject expertise; on the contrary, it increases the need for professional judgement in selecting, sequencing, and adapting learning activities.

Direct instruction remains a valuable and sometimes essential component of teaching, particularly when introducing new concepts or supporting novice learners. Research cautions against assuming that discovery alone leads to learning, especially where cognitive load is high (Kirschner, Sweller and Clark, 2006). However, direct instruction supports learning most effectively when it is purposeful, concise, and integrated into a wider cycle of practice, feedback, and application.

Feedback plays a critical role in this process. Hattie and Timperley (2007) identify effective feedback as addressing three key questions: Where am I going? How am I going? What are my next steps? When feedback focuses on these questions, it supports learners in regulating their own learning rather than simply correcting errors. For teachers, this requires ongoing diagnosis of learner understanding and responsiveness to emerging needs, rather than strict adherence to predetermined plans.

Ultimately, focusing on learning in practice means accepting that teaching cannot be reduced to technique alone. It requires sensitivity to learners, willingness to adapt, and confidence to prioritise understanding over performance. In doing so, teachers move from managing lessons to cultivating learning, designing experiences that support learners not just to succeed in the moment, but to learn in ways that endure.

From Teaching Performance to Learning Culture

This article has argued that while teaching and learning are closely connected, they are not the same thing, and that confusing the two carries significant consequences for educational practice. Teaching matters deeply. It requires expertise, care, and professional judgement. However, teaching is not the purpose of education; learning is. When education systems focus primarily on improving the performance of teaching rather than cultivating the conditions for learning, they risk mistaking activity for impact and compliance for understanding.

Reasserting learning as the central purpose of education requires a cultural shift at multiple levels. In classrooms, it means valuing evidence of thinking over smooth delivery, and recognising struggle, dialogue, and uncertainty as legitimate features of learning rather than signs of failure. In schools and institutions, it means designing curricula, assessments, and professional conversations around what learners can do, understand, and apply over time, rather than around what has been covered or observed. At a systems level, it requires moving beyond accountability frameworks that privilege what is visible and measurable, and towards forms of evaluation that respect the complexity and variability of human learning.

Such a shift cannot be achieved through technique alone. It depends on trust: trust in teachers to exercise professional judgement, trust in learners to engage actively with learning, and trust in processes that may not always produce immediate or uniform results. As this article has shown, learning is rarely linear, predictable, or tidy. It is shaped by prior experience, emotion, motivation, and context. Attempts to standardise it too tightly risk undermining the very outcomes education seeks to achieve.

Sir Ken Robinson consistently reminded us that education is fundamentally about human potential. In Creative Schools, he argued that the task of education is not to control learning but to enable it, to create environments in which curiosity, capability, and confidence can grow (Robinson and Aronica, 2015). When teaching is understood as a means to this end, rather than an end in itself, the focus of educational practice shifts from performance to purpose.

Moving from a culture of teaching performance to a culture of learning does not diminish the role of the teacher; it elevates it. It reframes teaching as a deeply relational, creative, and intellectually demanding profession, one concerned not merely with delivering content, but with shaping the conditions in which learners can develop understanding, agency, and a sense of possibility. In doing so, education moves closer to its most enduring aim: not simply to instruct, but to enable people to grow.

References

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Author Bio

Joseph Tyler (also published as Joe Toko) is an educator, teacher trainer, and researcher with over twenty years’ experience across primary, secondary, further, and higher education. He is a Senior Lecturer on MA and BA Education programmes and works extensively in teacher education and professional development. His research interests include learning and teaching, curriculum design, assessment and feedback, and professional identity. His work focuses on bridging research and practice to support meaningful, human-centred education.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of any institution or organisation with which he is affiliated, including Teacher Training UK. The article is intended to contribute to professional discussion and reflective practice rather than to prescribe a single model of teaching or learning.