The protégé effect is a psychological phenomenon in which teaching, pretending to teach, or planning to teach information to others aids in the learning of that information. A student studying for an exam, for example, could benefit from the protégé effect and improve their understanding of the relevant material by teaching it to their peers.
The protégé effect, because of its beneficial influence, can be a useful tool in a variety of situations. As a result, in the following article, you will learn more about this effect and how to use it as effectively as possible.
How the protégé effect aids learning
The protégé effect improves your ability to learn information as a result of several psychological mechanisms, all of which revolve around the differences between how we learn information when we’re learning for ourselves and how we learn it when we expect to teach others, as well as when we teach them in practice.
Specifically:
- Expecting to teach and teaching can increase metacognitive processing, making people more aware of their own learning process.
- Expecting to teach and teaching can increase the use of effective learning strategies such as organizing material and seeking out key pieces of information.
- Expecting to teach and teaching can increase motivation to learn because people will often go to greater lengths to learn for those they will teach than for themselves.
- Expecting to teach and teaching can lead to increased feelings of competence and autonomy by encouraging people to see themselves as teachers rather than students.
The Advantages of Teaching Others
Teaching others, as we saw above, facilitates your own ability to learn the material through a variety of mechanisms. As a result, students who learn the material with the intention of teaching it later outperform those who learn it solely for their own benefit when tested on it.
Furthermore, such advantages are not limited to academic settings; studies show that preparing to teach can improve motor learning and information processing when learning to perform physical tasks, such as hitting a golf ball.
Aside from improving one’s ability to learn the material, there are other advantages to teaching others. Improved communication skills, increased confidence, and improved leadership ability are just a few of the advantages.
Furthermore, when preparing to teach increases people’s motivation to learn the material, this serves not only as a mechanism by which the protégé effect facilitates learning but also as a direct benefit of the effect, which is intrinsically valuable. The same can be said for the increased feelings of competence and autonomy that people experience as a result of playing the role of teacher, which can help with learning but are also valuable on their own.
Finally, another notable benefit of the protégé effect, which applies when peers teach one another, is that peer-teaching can be extremely beneficial to the students being taught, as they often learn better when their teacher is someone who is close to them in terms of social and cognitive distance.
Some studies suggest that the fact that older siblings have higher IQs than their younger siblings can be attributed to the fact that the older siblings act as tutors in the family at a time when they are undergoing significant cognitive development. This is an example of the protégé effect’s powerful influence and long-term benefits.
How to Benefit from the Protégé Effect
There are three main ways to use the protégé effect to help your learning process:
- Prepare to teach the material as if you were going to teach it to others. For example, this could entail attempting to learn the material well enough that you would feel comfortable explaining it to someone else later, as well as locating answers to likely questions about the topic that people may ask you.
- Pretend you’re teaching someone the material. The more realistic this feels, the more you will benefit from the protégé effect, so it may be worthwhile to exert effort in visualizing and saying this aloud. Furthermore, while doing so, you can go beyond simply explaining the material and pretend to be asked specific questions about it by the person to whom you’re teaching it.
- In reality, teach the material to others. This entails actually meeting and teaching other people, either one-on-one or in a group setting. Though this approach requires the most effort, it can also yield the most benefits, especially because knowing you’re going to teach someone will likely provide you with the greatest boost in motivation.
- You are free to use any combination of these techniques. For example, you could learn the material as if you were going to teach it to others and then pretend to teach it to someone, or you could skip straight to teaching the material to others in reality.
When deciding which techniques to use, consider the potential benefits of each and weigh them against the potential costs involved, such as time and effort. Specifically, while teaching someone, in reality, will often allow you to benefit the most from the protégé effect, this method generally entails far more secondary costs than the other approaches, such as the time it takes to schedule a meeting with others. Learning the material as if you’re going to teach someone and pretending to teach someone, on the other hand, are both slightly less effective methods that are generally much easier and more convenient to set up.
Which methods you should use will also be determined by personal circumstances, preferences, and goals.
For example, if you enjoy teaching others and have a lot of free time, or if you have an upcoming exam where a high score is critical and you have a lot of free time, meeting with someone to teach them might be the best course of action. If you dislike teaching, or if you have an exam that isn’t important to you and you’re short on time, you’re probably better off learning the material as if you’re going to teach it, rather than actually teaching it to someone.
