In high school and college, I competed as a springboard diver, and I once asked an Olympian if he had a trick for learning to do three and a half somersaults. His answer: Go up in a ball and spin fast. He was so naturally talented that he never had to learn the mechanics. He simply did it. The most useful explanation I got was from my coach, Eric Best, who had spent seven years trying to get that dive right and was able to walk me through the physics with stunning clarity. The physical limitations that prevented him from becoming an Olympic-caliber diver himself led him to gain the knowledge to become an Olympic-caliber coach.

Third, focus as much on how well the teacher communicates the material as on how well the teacher knows the material. Communication is especially hard for experts teaching basic classes. That might be one reason evidence shows that when college students take an introductory class with a lecturer who’s not on the tenure track, they go on to get higher grades in a more advanced class in that subject.

This is why I recommend creating separate tenure tracks for teachers and researchers. Instead of just learning from researchers who spend their days dividing cells in a lab or churning out code in front of a computer, you can take classes with people who study the most effective methods for teaching cell division and JavaScript.

Here’s another flaw in that “Those who can’t do, teach” canard: Teachers often turn into great doers.

After all, the best way to learn something is not to do it but to teach it. You understand it better after you explain it — and you remember it better after retrieving and sharing it.

As you gain experience studying and explaining a skill, you might actually improve your ability to execute that skill. A powerful example comes from a study of what happens when teachers become doers. Although appointing a business school professor as an executive sounds like a terrible idea, researchers managed to find more than 200 companies that did it. Compared with closely matched industry competitors, the companies with ex-professors in their executive ranks generated significantly higher revenues per employee, especially if those former teachers were in vice president roles where they could leverage their academic expertise. Knowledge from researching and teaching didn’t prevent them from making good decisions; it actually seemed to help.

In education, we often assume that a successful career qualifies someone to teach. It’s why business schools love to hire former executives as professors. But we’re doing it backward: We should be sending teachers out to run businesses.