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I also think the idea of teachers "getting it" without formal education is interesting.  Since many teachers are able to intuitively know what will interest and encourage growth in a student, how important is it for teachers to learn about the brain more than on a very basic level?  In one of my classes today, the professor pointed out that although in every intro. psych text book there is a chapter on the brain, it is barely referenced throughout the rest of the text.  He also said that many behavioral (and thought-related) issues can be helped without knowledge of the brain - he even went so far as to say that knowledge of the brain is often irrelevent.  We all intuitively know basic things about our bodies and the world around us, and will learning about these things help or bring us further away from our very physical and innate knowledge, or help us harness tools we may have but are not using?  I wonder if teachers who know more about how the brain works are better teachers in any way - my natural inclination is to guess that they're not, but I'm not sure...

In a linguistics course I took last year, the teacher pointed out that although he knew a great deal about linguistics, he was not a better orator or interpreter of speech than anyone else - in fact, sometimes his knowledge hindered his abilities...