Why Students Learn Better When They Teach (+ 4 Activities)

October 01, 2017 / Oskar Cymerman

“When You Teach Something You Get To Learn It Twice”

— Jim Kwik

Cameron, a former student of mine, who is now in college, commented on my recent post about efficient and effective learning titled Too Much What, Not Enough How. Here's what he wrote on Facebook:

As a student who graduated with a GPA well above 4.0, I completely agree specifically with the point about students teaching subject-matter. Most of what made me successful was not studying - I rarely did that - but teaching other students, and in doing so, closing gaps in and solidifying what I knew. I tutored other students in almost every single class I took throughout my high school career, especially the science courses. That was my secret to success and I didn't even realize it until senior year. The feeling you get when you help someone grasp an idea they struggled with is an awesome feeling, too.

But Why Is Teaching Such An Effective Learning Strategy?

If you closely analyze and dissect Cameron's comment you can identify at least 4 aspects that made his strategy of teaching others to learn it yourself super effective. They are Active Learning, Deeper Learning, Efficient Learning, and Emotional Learning.

Active Learning

Active learning is about engaging the mind in processing and making meaning from the information you're trying to encode. When teaching, the student has to figure out how to explain the concept to others. While that planning might take seconds, it is an active process. Moreover, it might take multiple approaches to teach someone who thinks differently than the student-teacher. This equates to multiple ways of processing the information. If you're a teacher, a trainer, or someone who has spent time explaining new ideas to people, you get this.

Deeper Learning

When teaching, the student has to pass his understanding of the concept on to someone else and as a result, he reprocesses the learned information multiple times. This leads to an even deeper understanding of the concepts learned/taught. The reason for this is that new association happen and new neural connections form in the brain as the existing ones keep strengthening. Light bulb moments make you a lit learner. Deep, huh?

Efficient Learning

Teaching concepts is one of the most efficient ways to learn because it requires students to present information to peers in an understandable way. This requires looking at the information from different perspectives and strategizing on how to pass it on best. There's so much brain activity and processing going on in the student-teacher brain that he remembers the information through and through in a short period of time. In addition, as the student struggles to come up with ways to explain difficult concepts, his hippocampus perceives them as important, which supercharges encoding and helps storage of information.

Emotional Learning

There are emotions and then there are emotions... When learning is accompanied by strong emotions it is memorable. While Cameron mentioned the "awesome feeling" as a side note, he might not have realized that those feelings associated with satisfaction of helping others, led to the release of dopamine in his brain, which helped memory and retrieval of information. As a teacher, you undoubtedly experienced breakthrough moments when a student you've been working with suddenly got it. If you can think of a past event like this right now, you can relive it. If I'm right, you just got a small kick of dopamine. Pretty cool, huh?

4 Activities To Bring Out The Teacher In Your Students

Many teachers reading this have has had their students create slideshow presentations and present to peers. This strategy, if done right, can be a way to have students teach their peers. And while it may not always be effective for the audience receiving the information, if the presenter takes the project seriously she learns the topic well because as she prepares, she does it with the intention to teach and to be more expert in it than her peers.

Thus, teaching benefits the teacher most. And that's precisely the point.

Here are 4 easy ways to engage students in teaching I use in my classroom.

Short Instructional Videos

Recently, I asked my chemistry students to create videos explaining how to calculate atomic mass of an element. I introduced the concept the day before and students did a few practice problems in groups. The next day, I asked them to find a partner and to make a Flipgrid video. Here are the exact directions I posted in Google Classroom:

Find a problem online you can solve to demo how to calculate atomic mass.
Solve it and discuss the steps needed for the solution to like totally understand it!
Write a script, practice it, and record the vid.

You don't have to use Flipgrid, but it is free and allows you to streamline the process. Videos are easy for students to submit and teachers to watch.

Dry Erase Board Drawings

I am lucky to have a flexible seating classroom and student tables painted with dry erase paint. Perhaps one day I will write an article on how much of a game changer the dry erase tables are but for the purpose of this post, I want to describe how my students use them to teach each other.

I frequently ask students to represent concepts they are learning visually. They draw diagrams showing concepts, with labels and descriptions that will allow viewers to learn about the topics they represent. It is important to make sure students consider the possibility that the audience knows little about the concepts. Such approach forces students to think like teachers. The idea is to create a product that helps others learn some concept and in the process, the diagram makers learn it more intimately. A unique Twitter hashtag is useful for capturing and sharing images of the visuals.

Spontaneously, my students often use the tables to help their group members understand the concepts better or to walk those struggling through problem-solving.

I realize not every teacher has dry erase tables. In the past, I used melamine boards sold at hardware stores. I bought two 8' x 4' boards and had each one cut into eight 2' x 2' pieces, which gave me 16 boards my students used in small groups of 2-4 students. Alternatively, students can draw on large sheets of paper.

Infographics

Using Piktochart, Canva, or Google Draw/Slides to make infographics is another way to take advantage of our visual processing power. Combining images with text to represent an idea is powerful. Going digital is not as efficient as drawing on dry-erase surfaces and Tweeting, but nevertheless effective and students learn useful design and presentation tools. If you can fit infographic making in, I highly recommend it. Check out this post I wrote for more on the benefits of using infographics in the classroom.

Paper Slide Videos

Paper slide videos marry old school posters with the digital world of smartphone video recording. In a nutshell, students research and organize information, write a script, create the slides, practice, and record a short movie in which images and speech are used more extensively than text. The process of preparing and practicing the show leads to increased expertise. Here's a video that gives more details on how to make paper slide videos.

When Students Teach They Develop Mad Skills

Call them 21st-century, future-ready, or mad skills they'll need, it is hard to argue with the fact that collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking, and leadership will help your students be more successful in academics and beyond. You can speed up the development of these and other skills by utilizing the Teach It strategy in your classroom.

I talk about the Teach It and other learning strategies on my blog, teach them to my students, and describe them in my Crush School Book Series because I want all students to have these skills now.

Big thanks to Cameron for allowing me to share his story and a shout out to my sister from another mister Janet, a California teacher, for pushing me to write this post. I hope many teachers find it helpful in their practice. Thanks for reading and remember:

You have the power to change lives. Use it often.

Hi! I'm Oskar.

I teach, write, speak, rant to make the world better.

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categories / Teaching
tags / focus, deep work, productivity, teaching teens, parenting teens

Let's Keep It Real In Education

September 25, 2017 / Oskar Cymerman

“I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.”

— Marie Curie

Translation: If you want things to change, get your ass off the couch and do the work.

That's what Marie did. In a world full of men unwilling to accept a woman, an atheist, and a person who followed her heart, she had to work her ass off to overcome the sexism and xenophobia of her times.

In 1911, just before receiving her Nobel Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences asked Marie not to come to Stockholm, so King Gustav V would not be subjected to shaking hands with an adulteress.

Of course, she went to accept the award in person. That was her second Nobel. She was the first ever woman to receive one, and the first ever person to receive two. She discovered radium and polonium and coined the term radioactivity. She earned many prestigious awards, honors, and posts for her work.

Ultimately, her work killed her. But before she died of cancer at 66, she changed the world. For women, for men, for all of us. And the way she did it inspires.

You see, Marie didn't just write a bunch of papers. She worked to apply what she learned to help humanity. She did not seek patents and recognition. Rather, she used her discoveries and knowledge to invent the first ever portable X-Ray machines. The Little Curies were used to diagnose over a million soldiers during World War I. Later, she raised money to build hospitals to use her discoveries to provide advanced treatments to patients. Today, we cure cancer and other illnesses thanks to Marie's work.

So What Does Marie Curie Have To Do With Keeping It Real In Education?

To me, everything. Marie understood that her work was greater than herself and she always saw it as more important than any personal achievement. She faced criticism and prejudice. She persevered. The work was too important not to and it did not matter what anyone else said.

I think the work educators do is just as important. We can't keep shying away from the difficult conversations, hard feelings, and tough decisions. I really believe it is the only real way toward meaningful and sustainable progress.

Beautiful words and flipping the script every time negative feelings surface is inspiring, but not always helpful. It is the kind of an approach that invalidates tough feelings our kids and we ourselves experience because we're human. Our humanness requires we process them, not simply shove them aside and immediately replace with growth-mindset. That's not real. Not always.

And while Marie Curie is my hero and compatriot, I would never presume to fill her shoes. I am not the champion for humanity she was, just a teacher pushing aside anxiety and introversion to muster courage to speak up and fight for what I believe.

That involves doing things I'm not always comfortable doing. Public speaking? Check. So, I started a podcast. Writing is one thing. This... the podcast... I feel naked. Here it is:

All teachers and administrators want their students to succeed in school and beyond. Many of us are noticing that our schools are becoming less effective at providing the right education to help our kids accomplish that. We see the need for change; a paradigm shift.

The few authentic voices and change agents we encounter get drowned out by the constant barrage of Band Aid approaches and empty words on social media. Hundreds if not thousands of educational technology blogs, which provide great tools, but nevertheless approaches that can easily be replaced with the next new thing. Would be leaders quoting themselves on slides encouraging, but not showing how. Noise.

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. ”

— Benjamin Franklin

At this point, I wish I had the answer to help cut through the noise and make education better, but all I have is ideas. And, I have passion and beliefs. And, I have you. And, you have passion, beliefs, and ideas too.

Let's take this passion and spread it. Let's use our beliefs to help make education better for our students. Let's combine our ideas and create new ways and tools to help teach and guide our students. Let's learn, but let's apply too. Let's talk, but let's show as well.

I want to use my new podcast as a platform for meaningful change in education. I want to take a closer look at the things we often don't talk about, shy away from, or passively aggressively ignore. I want to explore solutions we fear to help make education better. I want to always find the courage to seek the right, not straight, often rough full-of-jagged-rocks road.

I promise you not to shy away from the ugly and the happy conversations.

I hope you feel a little uncomfortable when you listen because I believe the greatest progress happens outside of the confines of our safe places.

I hope you are inspired to seek your own answers, ones that benefit those you serve.

I hope the conversations will help you think and reflect and act.

And while I don't hope for it, I know and accept that I will piss some people off in the process.

Because on Keeping Ed Real, taboos don't exist. From now on nothing is off the table. In fact, let's just kick the table down and make our own rules. We must.

Because, while there will never be another Marie Curie, maybe there's a Manya Sklodowska out there; a girl full of curiosity, passion, and drive. Maybe Manya is a student who needs to be given direction by her teacher, or the teacher who needs to be shown the way by her administrator. We owe her that. She's tired of empty words and promises. She's ready for real talk.

So, let's keep it real for her, others, and ourselves. Let's Keep Ed Real.

Oskar

P.S. Click here for the first episode of Keeping Ed Real. I promise you it's as boring as unicorns flying over rainbows as fireworks are going off everywhere :)

Hi! I'm Oskar.

I teach, write, speak, rant to make the world better.

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categories / Life Reflections
tags / teaching, podcast, education, education reform, be the change

How To Learn Faster Infographic

September 22, 2017 / Oskar Cymerman

I started teaching my students Accelerated Learning. I still teach them chemistry, engineering, and learning to study, but this is more important.

A few of my students might become chemists. Some are future engineers. Many will be other things.

All of them will have to know how to learn effectively and the faster they can encode, store, and recall information they learn the more successful they will be.

I want them to be wildly successful. I know you do too.

Here's a good way to start.

How To Learn Faster Infographic

I wrote a more detailed article connected to the infographic above here.

For more becoming a better learner resources, check out the archive to the right.

But whatever you do, please focus on helping your students how to learn more than you focus on what to learn. They need it more and are often not guided properly. Be that exception.

You have the power to change lives. Use it often.

Oskar

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Hi! I'm Oskar.

I teach, write, speak, rant to make the world better.

BOOKS & TOOLS

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CONTACT ME

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categories / Learning
tags / focus, deep work, productivity, teaching teens, parenting teens