A free self-assessment. 25 questions, about 7 minutes, results shown on this page.
Sit in on a departmental meeting and watch who explains and who asks.
There is usually one person who explains constantly. He is genuinely knowledgeable, he is generous with his time, and if you trace his explanations back you find that most of them were assembled around 2014 and have not been revised since. There is usually another who asks constantly, takes everything in, reads more than anyone, and has never once told the room what she has worked out. There is occasionally a third who does both, and the room is measurably better for it. And there is often a fourth who has stopped doing either, and nobody has noticed because nothing about his work has changed.
Knowledge moves in two directions, and most people only run one of them. Teaching is what leaves you: whether you explain what you know, whether you make it usable by someone else, whether you hand over the thing that took you years to work out. Learning is what enters: whether you are still taking in material that changes your mind, whether you can be corrected, whether you read anything that was not written by someone who already agrees with you.
The two are separate, they draw on different things, and the combination determines whether expertise compounds in an organization or evaporates when someone retires.
This chapter is about that flow. It applies to teachers, senior professionals, managers, parents, clinicians, engineers, and anyone whose knowledge will either be inherited by someone or lost.
The two dimensions
Variable A: Teaching
The tendency to make what you know usable by other people, deliberately and in a form they can act on.
Variable B: Learning
The tendency to keep taking in material that can change your mind, including from sources that are inconvenient.
Why these two vary independently
Giving knowledge out and taking it in are different acts, and every combination is easy to find in any organization. A consultant surgeon runs an outstanding teaching list, explains the reasoning behind every decision, and reads the current literature closely enough to have changed his own practice twice in five years: high on both. A senior partner explains everything to everyone and has not revised a view since he made partner: high teaching, low learning. A research fellow reads constantly, updates readily, and has never written down anything she knows for anyone else to use: low teaching, high learning. A long-serving administrator neither explains nor updates, and the role has quietly become undocumented and out of date at the same time: low on both. The correlation between the two is probably small and may be slightly negative among the very senior, because the same status that creates opportunities to teach also reduces the flow of correction. That is the specific trap this chapter exists to name: teaching more while learning less feels like growing authority and is actually a widening gap. **How this differs from two nearby chapters.** Q025 concerns feedback, meaning performance information about people. This chapter concerns knowledge, meaning how things work. A manager can give excellent feedback about someone's performance and never explain how any of the work is actually done. Q031 concerns how knowledge accumulates, deeply or broadly. This chapter concerns whether it moves at all.
Before you start. Your answers are calculated in your browser. Nothing is collected, stored, or sent anywhere. Close the page and it is gone.
This is an educational self-reflection tool, not a psychological test or diagnosis. Full notice at the foot of the page.
How it works
1You will read 25 statements and rate how well each one describes you.
2There are no right answers, and no good or bad results.
3Answer as you actually behave, not as you intend to behave.
4Your scores appear on this page and disappear when you close it.
The assessment
Rate how well each statement describes you.
0 of 25
Answer all 25 statements to continue.
Your scores
Teaching
0/ 65
133965
Moderate
Learning
0/ 60
123660
Moderate
Where you sit
Teaching, low to high
Settled AuthorityHigh teaching, low learning
Growing MentorHigh teaching, high learning
Closed CircuitLow teaching, low learning
Reserved ScholarLow teaching, high learning
Learning, low to high
Your current pattern
No quadrant is better than another. Each carries real strengths and real costs. What matters is recognizing the pattern you are in and deciding what to do with it.
Your report
Overview
Your strengths
Watchouts
Relationships
Leadership and work
What tends to wear you down
Growth recommendations
Reflection questions
Where this pattern usually moves next
The other three patterns
Reading these is often more useful than reading your own. Most people recognize a spouse, a manager, or a colleague here.
The developmental growth model
Every quadrant in this book is treated as a current position, not a fixed identity. Growth tends to move through four stages.
Unconscious pattern. The behavior runs without being noticed.
Conscious recognition. You can name what you do and when you do it.
Intentional development. You practice a different response on purpose.
Integrated maturity. The new response becomes ordinary rather than effortful.
Finishing this assessment puts you at stage two. That is a real step, and it is the one most people never take.
Your result code
Write this down if you want to use one of the companion pages later: comparing yourself with another person, checking a retake against today, seeing how someone else would answer about you, or building a thirty-day plan.
The code carries your framework and your 25 answers, nothing else. No name, no date, and nothing that identifies you. It is generated in your browser and is never sent anywhere.
Your results describe how you answered today. People shift across situations and over time. Retaking this in a few months often tells you something useful.