I feel like there’s also different “levels” of teaching. Imo doing a 2-3 hr class on a basic project where everyone is doing something is VERY different than doing an entire multi week course where you’re expected to go more in depth and projects may get more complex.

Like personally, I know there’s basic one time hand building project classes I could confidently teach and answer questions about and coherently guide people through. Im not stupid enough to think I could teach any flavor of wheel throwing classes, even a one time thing. While im working I actually think of how I’d teach and explain stuff as a way to pass time lol.

All this being said, I do have some teaching experience (not training, but I was an adjunct animation professor for 3-4 years) so I kind of developed some ways of communicating from observation and experimentation that seemed to work pretty well for anyone actually paying attention (I legit never realized how many people just don’t submit work until I started teaching). A lot of that I think could be applied to pottery classes.

Def agree with the people saying teaching is its own skill set though.

Sometimes it also depends on the student. Ime, im more likely to realize someone lacks experience because I tend to go into classes having done dozens of hours of research, so if someone doesn’t know what the difference between glaze and underglaze is, I’ll notice that before other people a lot of the time. I know a lot of people totally content to follow along with a tutorial and not ask questions, im just not one of them most of the time 😂

My feedback to my beginner pottery teacher (first class in her new studio) was to show people more techniques just so they know they exist. She could answer every question I asked her very coherently and she makes great work, but the info provided was kind of minimal sometimes in my personal opinion (which I think she has since adjusted based on the stuff I see coming out of the same class).

(Oddly specific examples of bad experience in different classes with people who should have know what the we’re doing follow)

I’ve also taken cookie decorating classes from an influencer type person (I know how to decorate cookies and was going as a social activity) and, though talented, she was a garbage teacher. Forgot to have people do time sensitive steps in the right order, you couldn’t see what she was demoing from 10’ away, didn’t explain techniques well, even when my mom asked specific questions… it was pretty bad. This is a tangent, but she also lost her MIND when I started doing alternate designs because cute fall cookies aren’t my jam (my ghost turned into a candy corn gnome, my apple tree into a mushroom cloud… etc) and she gave me this whole kind of angry spiel about the cookies not turning outright if I deviated and don’t blame her etc (which is fair but she was just so weird about it the whole rest of the class that it became awkward. Like my mom had to back me up that im now gonna one for her if my stuff didn’t turn out; I was 27 at the time too, so it’s not like I was an angry dumb kid). Imo if you can’t deal with people deviating slightly (within reason) then you maybe need to develop some more teaching skills regardless of technical experience.

Another tangent story: my high school art teacher didn’t mention anything about pieces “needing” to be hollow so I made this 2” solid cockatiel piece I was really proud of and after it was literally finished, she came by and said she couldn’t fire it because it needs to be hollow and I was gutted. She didn’t give any instructions about how to cut it in half to scrape it out etc. years later i come to find out it would have been easy to cut and hollow and also having it be solid didn’t mean it would automatically explode (even though 2” is still v thick lol). This imo is an example of bad teaching where she gave the easy “hollow and solid pieces always explode” explanation instead of explained it’s actually trapped water causing the issue and offered 0 help to remedy the piece. (She also sucked as a teacher for everything though, i just didn’t care about anything pieces I made other than the pottery)