CONCEPT
The Teacher as Designer
Ericsson's specification of the teacher's role — not primarily instructional but architectural — designing practice activities that create the specific conditions required for the cognitive structures of expertise to be built.
In Ericsson's framework, the role of the knowledgeable teacher or coach is often misunderstood as primarily instructional: telling the student what to do, demonstrating correct technique, correcting errors. This mischaracterizes the function. The teacher's primary role is design — constructing practice activities that create conditions for the specific kind of learning the practitioner needs. The vocal coach who hears a singer straining on high notes does not simply say 'relax your throat.' She designs an exercise that makes relaxation necessary — a phrase that cannot be sung with tension, a passage that rewards openness. The design of the exercise does the teaching. The teacher's expertise lies not in knowing the right answer but in designing the right challenge. This distinction matters for the AI transition because it specifies what AI can and cannot do in the development of expertise: current tools can instruct but cannot design in the developmental sense the framework requires.
