During the first two years of my career, I frequently had the experience of stopping mid-lesson and saying, "Oh, I get it now." My students were a little shocked to find out I might not have gotten it before. "No, no," I said, "I've been teaching you HOW to do it correctly, but I just put together WHY it works that way." I'm not sure if this made my students feel any better about my competence.
Anytime I share this story, people adopt a truism, assuming it to be a given. "Well, the best way to learn something is to teach it," they say. Education is full of these statements that people assume to be self-evident. But when I started learning about research into the science of learning, I had to investigate, not only what things work, but why. When you learn some principles of how the human brain works, you come to realize that everything is more complex and filled with nuance than you ever imagined.
Consider, for example, this tweet using this idea for a sports related skill. If a coach wanted a college athlete to learn a new skill, would he send that student to a middle or high school and have them teach that skill. Of course not. He would show them how to do it (either demonstrating it himself or showing them film). He would then have them perform the skill while providing feedback until it became automated.
Apply the same notion to a person learning a musical instrument for the first time. Would any piano teacher say to a student, "Now that you have had one lesson, it's time for you to teach one of my younger students"? It is easy to recognize the absurdity of this idea when we apply it to this type of skill, right.
Still, this is the kind of malarkey being fed to classroom teachers throughout their degree and in professional development sessions. Get off the stage; have the students lead; have them teach each other. Then people post graphics that look "science-y" because they arrange them into a pyramid shape and attach numbers to them. You see it with Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Bloom's taxonomy, which I have addressed on this blog before. I've seen it in non-academic contexts, which I addressed here.
"But, but . . ." I can hear you saying, "You started this blog with a story of learning something by teaching it." Thanks for remembering that, but if you go back and read it again, you might find it is a bit less straightforward than that. You will see that I was teaching something I already knew how to do. In fact, I was teaching something I had learned in high school and had been doing throughout college, writing chemical formulae. Teaching it solidified my understanding of the deeper reasons for the techniques, but it would have been an absolute mess if I had tried to teach it to them while I was a high school chemistry student learning it for the first time.
There are some in the evidence informed world who think we have to throw out all techniques that are not explicit teaching. As a science teacher, I do know that other techniques have value when implemented well as part of an environment based on explicit teaching. I advocate for using other techniques sparingly and judiciously, with an understanding of the cognitive science principles behind the techniques. When it comes to students teaching others, I think there are three things that are important to consider - retrieval, summarizing, and thinking about meaning.
- Retrieval is one of the most powerful activities our brain has. I love learning interesting facts, and I really enjoy telling people about facts that I have learned. When I share, people frequently ask how I remember all these random things. Until a few years ago, I didn't know. I thought I just remembered things because I liked knowing them. After I started learning about the science of learning, I realized why remember all of this trivia. The penny dropped the day after I learned why we say uppercase and lowercase when referring to capital and non-capital letters. (If you are interested, it is because, during the time of type setting, the blocks with capital letters were kept in the top drawer - literally the upper case). I heard it on the radio one evening, and I thought it was amazing; so the next day, I told all six of my classes about it. I told other teachers about it. I told anyone who would stand still and listen to me tell it. Over the course of several days, I must have retrieved that piece of information seventeen times. I remember things because I tell people things. In spite of the recent disdain for drilling, coaches, theater directors, and music teachers will tell tell you they work. Cognitive scientists will explain why - retrieval myelinates the nerves required to remember information or perform a task. When we teach, we retrieve previously learned knowledge. It's not the act of teaching that is helping you learn; it's the retrieval (at least in part) that is helping you remember.
- Summarizing is a skill that you likely learned in late elementary or early middle school. It's the basis for a good book review, decent story telling, and critical to note taking. It's also something your brain does while you are learning. As a teacher speaks, the student brain unconsciously sums up the gist in order to figure out where to store the new information by figuring out how it relates to what they already know - their schema. Because it is an unconscious process, we often don't know if the brain is doing it well. I can't tell you how many times a student has said, "So, you are saying . . ." followed by something I was definitely not saying. But I've also had some students finish that sentence with a brilliant rephrasing that made it more clear for everyone. My favorite one was "So you are telling me that everything is mostly made of nothing" after a detailed explanation of the distance between the nucleus and the electrons in an atom. Teaching others forces us to take this often unconscious process and engage with it on purpose. It's not the act of teaching that is helping you learn; it's the summarizing that is helping you work what you have learned into your existing schema.
- Focusing on meaning is, according to Daniel Willingham, the best way to aid your memory. After reading his book Outsmart Your Brain, I started telling my students to slow down with their flashcards and ask, "Why is this the answer?" and "Why isn't it a different answer" and "How does it connect to other things in this chapter?" while retrieving. Focusing on meaning gives the brain something to hold onto. When I was learning to write chemical formulae in high school, I could get it right by following the process. When I was teaching students to do it, I had to focus on the underlying chemistry behind the process in order to explain the rules, which led to my moment of clarity while I was explaining. If a student asked a question, knowing the underlying chemistry was essential to giving them a quality answer. It's not the act of teaching that is helping you understand; it is the focus on meaning of what you know that is required to teach it.
What can you, as a teacher, take away from these three principles if you want to use the technique of students teaching for learning in your classroom.
- Timing is key - If you are going to have students teach other students, it is important that they not do it too early in the learning process. It should be after they have mastered the fundamental concept themselves. I had a project in which students taught, but they had almost three months of research and practice on their topic before they got up to present (and I promise you that we could all tell if they had not).
- Heavy guidance - Students will not summarize and focus on meaning naturally, so you have to require it from them if you want them to learn from the activity. Make them summarize their lesson either verbally or in writing. Give them feedback on whether their summary indicates a proper understanding. During the preparation process, ask them questions that force them to think about meaning. Have them rehearse their speech with a volunteer and instruct the volunteers to ask the types of questions students ask.
- Reflection - Reflecting on our learning is the most neglected part of the learning process. After students have presented, ask them questions about the content and the process to help them consolidate their understanding.
Doing this well is time consuming. If you decide to engage this technique, make sure it is worth the investment. What's the opportunity cost - i.e. what else could your students be doing with that time? If you decide it is worth doing, make sure you are ready to provide the guidance, feedback, and reflection involved in doing it well.
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