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Editor's note: Our guest blogger today is Matt Brown, who can typically be found blogging on education issues over at Relentless Pursuit of Acronyms.

Reading through recent stories about the worth (or worthlessness) of teaching experience reminded me of one of my old college roommates.

I’m not normally that into video games, but during college, I made an exception for the NCAA Football series. While I technically have a degree in Political Science, I suspect I completed enough hours on our PlayStation for at least a minor in video game football. It didn’t matter if you wanted to run a spread offense, the option, Wishbone, whatever. Any of my dormmates knew if that if you fancied yourself a good NCAA guy, you needed to see how you matched up against Matt (I wasn't Mr. Brown yet).

But one of my roommates decided that he wanted to be the new floor champ. He was pretty good at a bunch of other video games, and he was a casual football fan, so he figured he could pick up the game pretty quickly. He thought that when I left the room to go to work or class, he’d play online, learn the secrets of the game, and then challenge me.

Sadly for him, playing video games online is not for the faint of heart. Only the best of the best plunk down the money for a subscription to play, and they take great pride in savagely destroying rookies. My roommate would routinely find himself down 28-0 before he would even get the ball.

My roommate had a couple of different options. He could have suffered beatdown after beatdown at the hands of his online tormentors, until he learned enough to squeak by. He could have bought a strategy guide, skipped class to watch ESPN Classic, learned how to read a Zone Blitz and figured it all out on his own. He also could have thrown down the controller in disgust and left the room to pursue other endeavors, like talking to girls (in retrospect, I'm not sure why both of us didn't do that).

In the end, though, he reached out to me for help. He might have had more video game experience, but I had been playing NCAA since the Sega Genesis, and I’d worked as a prep football sportswriter. After about a month of playing with me, he was able to figure out enough little tricks to the game that he could hold his own with our friends, and maybe even beat me once in a while.

Now, I know what you're thinking...I'm so glad you spent your college years wisely. But what does this have to do with teaching?

We often throw some of our new teachers into some of our most difficult situations, right off the bat. We don't give them a training camp, we throw them right into a room full of kids who might not respond to traditional classroom management methods, who might be significantly behind academically, and who won't punt on 4th down. Many of these teachers grow frustrated and quit, or at least fail to reach their potential as educators. I suspect this would have happened to my roommate if he got trashed online again and again.

As teachers, we learned about the power of social learning. We try to incorporate cooperative learning opportunities, find ways for our students to teach each other, and reach objectives as a team. These methods work, but when it comes to the teachers themselves, it can be easy to find yourself pretty lonely in that classroom.

This is where I think experience and real professional development can be critical. Your value-added test score improvements will eventually level off (you can't really grow by three grades in a year), but each year can bring important new insights to share with colleagues, so long as one maintains intellectual curiosity. Most of us learn techniques that we learned *with* others better than what we picked up from a faceless binder too.

If you can't figure out what play to run in NCAA Football, you can push a button to "Ask Coach," and the game will give you some advice as to which way to go. I was lucky enough in my school to have a few "Coach"-type teachers who had been working in my community for decades. They knew every parent, every test, every management problem, and every gadget play. I couldn't get that same mentoring if nobody in my building had taught for more than five years. Having it certainly made me a better educator.

Experience alone doesn't make somebody valuable. I could play NCAA for another decade, but if I don’t pick up any new tricks while the game evolves, I would still be *bad* and my playtime wouldn't really matter. The idea is to seek out those who are still learning, still thinking, still asking questions, after being in the business for a long time. You want people like that on your team no matter what kind of organization you're in, be it a school, professional sports team, newsroom, church congregation, etc.

There really aren't any shortcuts for acquiring that kind of knowledge though. Sadly, unlike in PlayStation, there are no cheat codes for education.