How To Learn By Teaching Others, Leveraging The Protégé Effect
One of the most powerful ways to learn something is to teach it. Known as the protégé effect, this phenomenon describes how explaining concepts to others enhances our own understanding and retention. Basically, when you teach someone else, you naturally structure and organize information in a way that makes it easier to convey in order to help them understand it. This, in turn, solidifies your own understanding.
For those embarking on an L&D journey, learning with the purpose of teaching instead of passively consuming content can significantly amplify your learning outcomes. This article will show you exactly how.
What's The Protégé Effect?
Humans have always enjoyed the communal aspect associated with disseminating knowledge. We have been teachers, writers, guides, and mentors for millennia, sharing information, innovation, and practical know-how with our communities. The protégé effect reflects that age-old practice.
Let's see how it works. Basically, to explain a concept to someone else, you must first understand it well yourself. Preparing to teach or actively teaching others makes you process the material more deeply. Hence, you learn more effectively, and you help others learn with you. A 2014 study [1] showed that students who expected to teach performed better on later tests than those who expected to be tested.
Specifically, participants were divided into two groups prior to examining a passage of text. One group was informed that they were studying for an upcoming test. The other group was told they were preparing to teach the material to a fellow student. The researchers observed that students who had prepared to teach the content demonstrated a greater ability to recall the main ideas of the passage. This group also employed more effective learning strategies, such as organizing and prioritizing the information and considering how different concepts interconnected. Consequently, this approach increased the likelihood that the material would be transferred to long-term memory for future recall.
The protégé effect has also been used in classrooms over the decades. A notable example was in the early 1980s, when Jean-Pol Martin, a French teacher in Eichstätt, Germany, introduced the "learning by teaching" (Lernen durch Lehren) approach [2] in classrooms to enhance his students' language-learning experience by having them research and present various curriculum topics to their peers. This approach yielded great results regarding learner motivation, self-efficacy, and communication abilities, and soon spread to other educational institutions across the country.
Cognitive And Social Mechanisms Behind The Effect
Deep Cognitive Processing And Organization
When learners prepare to teach, they engage in generative cognitive processing, which involves organizing, integrating, and rephrasing information. These actions require the learner to go beyond surface understanding and translate the material into coherent explanations. In doing so, the learner builds richer mental models and identifies gaps in their knowledge.
Retrieval And Elaboration
Teaching forces repeated retrieval and elaboration. To explain a concept, one must recall it accurately and relate it to examples. Each bout of retrieval strengthens memory traces by reinforcing relevant neural pathways, while elaboration forms additional associative links. This is a powerful combination that fosters durable, flexible knowledge and also enhances applicability in fresh contexts.
Metacognition And Self-Regulation
Teaching enhances metacognitive awareness, the ability to monitor one's own understanding. When learners realize they cannot explain a concept clearly, this metacognitive signal prompts the start of a targeted review. In L&D and other independent learning contexts, this self-assessment supports improvement and accountability, both essential to keep one's journey going.
Empathy And Perspective-Taking
Teaching also promotes empathy and perspective-taking, which require you to understand a situation from someone else's viewpoint, not from your own frame of reference. In the protégé effect, for a learner to communicate/teach effectively, they must first imagine how another person understands the topic. Flipping between others' and your own frames of reference can enhance clarity of thought, cognitive flexibility, and concept application—highly valuable and transferable skills across contexts.
Accountability And Engagement
Knowing one must teach others also increases accountability. Learners are more attentive and persistent because they anticipate social evaluation from their peers. Studies show that anticipated teaching heightens intrinsic motivation and task engagement, reducing passive learning behaviors and making the learning experience a more participatory process.
Autonomy And Agency
Teaching fosters a sense of agency and autonomy in our own learning journey. When you take on the responsibility of helping others grasp a subject, your drive to learn also tends to rise. And, as we mentioned above, this heightened motivation leads to a more efficient learning process and enriches the overall experience.
Applying The Protégé Effect To Reach Learning Milestones
Peer Teaching And Discussion Forums
L&D leaders, Instructional Designers, and eLearning pros can incorporate structured peer teaching through discussion boards, peer reviews, and collaborative projects. As for individual learners, you can start your own blog, publish a guest post on someone else's, and teach others about your current area of interest. Even short written reflections framed as how you'd explain this to a peer can elicit the effect and help you reap the benefits.
Teaching Simulations
Some digital tools allow users to record mini-lessons, create concept/mind maps, or simulate tutoring sessions. These designs mirror the cognitive processes of teaching and can be embedded in professional training programs and online courses, or in personal curricula for independent learners. Teachable agents have also proven highly useful [3] because they encourage learners to invest more effort; learners try harder when they have to teach their agents than when they only learn for themselves.
Self-Explanation Prompts
If teaching someone else isn't possible at the moment, self-explanation prompts can help you simulate the teaching process internally. These prompts usually involve articulating why or how a concept works, encouraging learners to connect it with prior knowledge and convey the information in their own language. Not only does this improve problem-solving abilities and deepen understanding of the material, but it also makes this type of cognitive processing instinctive over time through practice.
Informal Mentoring
The best part is that the protégé effect doesn't have to be limited to formal contexts to trigger the cognitive benefits we've already mentioned. Informal mentoring sees everyday interactions as meaningful learning experiences. In action, this means prioritizing spontaneous conversations and promoting reflection in yourself and your peers. This not only fosters strong personal connections but is also highly effective for individual growth—and not just your own.
Conclusion
The protégé effect suggests that sometimes the most effective way to learn is to teach. You apply yourself differently when you feel responsible for conveying knowledge to someone else. So, whether you are an education and eLearning professional or a lifelong learner, you can harness this powerful cognitive effect in a way that suits your needs and helps you (or your learners) hit those learning goals precisely and effectively.
References:
[1] Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages
[2] Lernen durch Lehren (LdL) in theory and practice
[3] Teachable Agents and the Protégé Effect: Increasing the Effort Towards Learning
