A Blog by Jonathan Low

 

Jul 21, 2013

Why Teaching Makes Us Smarter

It's called the Protege Effect. Research demonstrates that those assigned to teach others are more motivated, more conscientious and they tend to learn more themselves.

The lesson for teaching and learning in the knowledge economy are profound. But the implications for organizations in every sector - public, private and not for profit are equally significant.

The prevailing view of people in organizations, the human capital, is all too often that they are variable costs, fungible assets to be transferred or discarded as economic conditions dictate. But the Protege Effect suggests that institutions are undervaluing the contributions that their current employees make. It also implies that wee experienced members of the work force utilized more effectively by more formally including teaching of new employees as a central task, that both the new employees and the existing ones might perform better.

In a world of resource constraints, there are no resources more potentially powerful than the wisdom and motivation of an organization's work force. Effectively harnessing that value is a competitive advantage that smart and ultimately successful enterprises will not fail to overlook. JL

Drake Baer reports in Fast Company:

"Students enlisted to tutor others work harder to understand the material, recall it more accurately and apply it more effectively."
We tend to think of thinking as something super solitary--but as Annie Murphy Paul observes in the Brilliant Report, cognition is a two way street. The result is a phenomenon called the protege effect: students who teach their study material to others perform better on tests than kids learning for the sake of learning.
Realizing that, innovative educators are setting up situation where students can teach young students, the most awesome of which may be happening at the University of Pennsylvania--a "cascading mentoring program" in which college undergrads teach computer science to high schoolers who teach CS to middle schoolers.

Other researchers--who have built a virtual pupil for kids to teach--found that since students are more motivated to learn their material, they study it more consciously--and as they try to parse the information, they discover gaps in their own understanding--a humbling, energizing epiphany familiar to anyone who's tried to teach English to a non-native speaker.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the factor the most accelerates the learning in a teacher is a kind of emotional intelligence. As Paul explains, there's an ecstatic empathy that arises:
Student tutors feel chagrin when their virtual pupils fail; when the characters succeed, they feel what one expert calls by the Yiddish term nachas. Don’t know that word? I had to learn it myself: “Pride and satisfaction that is derived from someone else’s accomplishment.”
So when you find someone who will take a risk on you, you're helping them, too. The Spirit Guide thing goes both ways.

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