The Protege Effect: Hit Your Learning Goals By Teaching Others

"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."

"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."

The protégé effect describes how preparing to teach or actually teaching a topic strengthens the teacher’s understanding and memory. Teaching forces deeper processing by requiring explanation, organization, prioritization, and anticipation of learner questions. Experimental evidence shows learners who expected to teach recalled main ideas better and adopted more effective strategies than learners who expected testing. Applying the protégé effect in L&D means learning with the intent to instruct—creating lessons, practice teaching, using teach-back, and designing explanations for novices. Active retrieval, simplification, feedback, and spaced review amplify benefits. Peer teaching and mentorship programs operationalize the effect to raise both instructor and learner outcomes.

Read at eLearning Industry