Wanna Learn Something? Teach It!

We know this, right? We've seen this at work in ourselves and in others—when we teach something, we learn and understand that thing better.

This is a case in which our anecdotal experiences as parents and teachers is backed up by research. Gwen Dewar clearly describes several interesting experiments that show that kids who are asked to explain something learn that concept better than those who study in other ways. Kids who are asked to explain something to themselves benefit, those who prepare to teach the concept to others (but don't actually teach it) benefit even more, and those who actually teach it to someone else learn it best of all.

Interestingly, one study by Rittle-Johnson and Percival Matthews showed that quality concept-driven teaching made self-explanation unnecessary. When children grades 2 through 5 were taught how to solve algebra problems and also explicitly taught the reasons for the procedure, the concepts behind the procedure, the kids who were asked to explain concepts to themselves as they studied did not perform better than those who were not.

This seems to show that self-explanation and teaching others works primarily because it causes people to wrestle with the underlying concepts of math and science. If students are taught those underlying concepts, they already have that benefit.

I believe, however, that if the study had asked students to teach to others (rather than explain to themselves), and had then compared those students to students who didn't teach, the teaching students would have performed better.

When I have taught math, including algebra, I have always explicitly taught the underlying concepts. Still, I have found that many students are able to nod their heads, answer some questions correctly, say they understand, seem to understand—and then flub a new set of problems of the same sort the next day or even 28 seconds later! In other words, I “taught” (or, rather, tried to teach) the concept behind the math algorithm, but the student did not learn it.

Students who explain things to others actually have to engage their brains in a different way: Teaching the concept takes kids (and their brains!) out of the receptor state that they all-too-often stay in, and puts them into a more active stance with the material.

The upshot of all this is that parents and teachers can help kids learn by:

• presenting concept-driven curricula.
• urging kids to explain concepts to themselves or to someone else as they study.
• giving kids the opportunity to teach someone else.

In the old-time one-room schoolhouse, kids teaching other, younger kids was probably an every-day occurrence. This is easy to arrange in large homeschooling families as well. But everyone can share in the bounty of conceptual understanding through teaching, because kids can explain things to classmates, friends and siblings (including older kids or students who already know the material), parents, or even themselves.

Of course, kids teaching kids works with all sorts of things--not just concepts of math and science. Reading, games, songs, bad habits--kids have always been teachers, too.