The Protégé Effect: How to Become a Super Learner

Teach What You Learn

According to Alvin Toffler, “The illiterate of the future are not those who can’t read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

This was said more than half a century ago in his book Future Shock.

The future he was talking about is today…

If you can’t learn, unlearn, and relearn, you’re falling behind.

To meet the criteria, you must deploy the most effective strategies to update your knowledge.

People have known for thousands of years that this strategy is to teach.

Even Seneca, the Roman philosopher from the 1st century AD, once said, “While we teach, we learn.”

More recently, scientists have been digging deeper into this sentiment to understand why teaching is so effective.

This has brought rise to a phenomenon they’ve dubbed the protégé effect.

What is the protégé effect?

The protégé effect is a psychological phenomenon where teaching, pretending to teach, or preparing to teach others helps an individual learn better.

It’s a natural response to the foresight you’ll be responsible for educating someone else. Namely, when you know you’re going to teach what you’re learning about, you put in more effort than if you were merely learning it for yourself.

Studies have shown that those who teach others do a better job of consolidating the learned information in their brain.

This explains why the eldest children in families tend to develop higher IQs than their siblings, as shown in a pair of articles from 2007 published in the Journals of Science and Intelligence…

The researchers discovered firstborns are typically more intelligent than their younger siblings and suggested the reason for their higher IQs is that they spend plenty of time learning by teaching their siblings.

The mechanisms of the protégé effect

Several mechanisms work behind the scenes to make the protégé effect possible.

The most prominent of them include:

Cognitive processing

Our ability to consume, transform, store, recover, and use information is known as cognitive processing.

Teaching taps into this mechanism since teachers must organize and process the information they’ll teach in a logical and structured manner.

Cognitive processing enhances understanding and retention because the process of organizing and reorganizing information leads to new connections in the brain, which further deepens one’s grasp of a topic.

Metacognition

Learning by teaching requires individuals to think intentionally about their own thinking processes.

Reflecting on this enables the individuals to identify gaps in their knowledge or areas where they need further clarification.

In other words, people who teach what they learn gain a better grasp of the topic because they spend time thinking about their thinking, which allows them to spot things they don’t understand and brush up on them to gain clarity.

Feedback

Various studies have shown the best learning occurs when the time between action and feedback is short — this plays a major role in why learning by teaching is extremely effective.

Teachers receive rapid feedback from students through questions, discussions, or assessments.

This further helps the teacher to identify more misconceptions and gaps in their understanding, which prompts them to review and revise their knowledge.

Motivation

Evidence suggests that helping others can promote physiological changes in the brain linked with happiness. Doing good for others produces hormones and endorphins that foster positive emotions. Basically, teaching others can be an intrinsically motivating experience.

Various studies have shown positive emotions and happiness make it easier to learn. You’re more engaged with the material, which improves learning outcomes.

How to leverage the protégé effect

There’s three main ways to leverage the protégé effect and supercharge your learning:

Pretend you’re teaching the material to someone else

In the world of software engineering, there’s a popular debugging theory known as the rubber duck method.

The idea is to explain the program line-by-line to a rubber duck when they want to debug their code.

This process of explaining the problem step-by-step prompts the solution to present itself, thus enabling the programmers to continue with their work.

A slight variation of the rubber duck method can be used to help you become a more effective learner…

Create a realistic environment where you’re pretending to teach the material you’ve learned to someone else.

According to one study, the best way to do this is by pretending to explain the concept to a fictitious other on video instead of in writing.

Learn as if you’ll teach it

You don’t necessarily have to teach others to reap the benefits of the protégé effect.

By definition, the benefits of the protégé are felt even when you’re simply preparing to teach others, which means you don’t necessarily need to teach it.

Consume material as if you’ll teach it.

This means getting to a place where you’re comfortable explaining it to someone else and seeking to find possible questions people may ask so you can answer them to clarify your understanding.

Teach the material to other people in real life

This is the most obvious way to use the protégé effect…

Learn, then teach.

One of the main benefits of this approach is that it’s effective for both parties since the person teaching consolidates information they’ve previously consumed, which means they refresh their knowledge, and the person learning receives new information with context.

Whenever you’re teaching, be it a colleague, friend, acquaintance, or family member, you’re tapping into the benefits of the protégé effect, but it’s possible to receive different benefits by altering how you utilize it.

For example, instead of following the usual classroom-based teaching style where you sit the person down and educate them, you could use a more collaborative approach where you allow them to explain their understanding of the topic.

Final thoughts

Merely studying a topic is not the most effective way to learn.

If you wanna become a super learner, you must tap into a phenomenon scientists have dubbed the protégé effect.

This is where you learn with the intent to teach others what you’ve learned.

Since you know you’ll be sharing the information with others, you’re much more likely to put effort into learning the material.

Studies have shown this slight adjustment leads to improved retention, enhanced problem-solving skills, and a better ability to transfer learning to other areas.

TLDR: To become a super learner, learn by teaching.

Thanks for reading!

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