The Teaching Instinct

CALERO, CECILIA I.; GOLDIN, A. P.; SIGMAN, M.

Review of Philosophy and Psychology

Springer Netherlands

Año: 2018 vol. 9 p. 819 - 830

1878-5158

Teaching allows human culture to exist and to develop. Despite its signifi-cance, it has not been studied in depth by the cognitive neurosciences. Here we propose two hypotheses to boost the claim that teaching is a human instinct, and to expand our understanding of how teaching occurs as a dynamic bi-directional relation within the teacher-learner dyad. First, we explore how children naturally use ostensive communication when teaching; allowing them to be set in the emitter side of natural pedagogy.Then, we hypothesize that the capacity to teach may precede to even have a mature metacognition and, we argue that a teacher will benefit from the interaction with her student, improving her understanding on both contents of knowledge: her own and her student?s. Thus, we propose that teaching may be the driving force of metacognitive development and may be occurring as an instinct from very early ages.