Should our students teach their peers? The obvious answer to this question is: “yes, of course.”
Experience shows that teaching leads to greater understanding for the person who did the teaching. After all, when I figure out how to explain “tragedy” to my sophomores, I end up knowing more about tragedy than I did before. No doubt my students would benefit from such experiences.
In this blog post, I’m going to make a surprising pair of arguments:
- We should ask students to explain ideas and topics, but
- We shouldn’t ask students to teach those ideas and topics.
Here’s why.
Theory and Practice
Educators regularly hear that we should ask our students to teach one another.
One often-discussed version of this approach: the “jigsaw method.” In this pedagogical strategy, the teacher divides a topic into several jigsaw pieces. For instance, if I’m teaching the digestive system, I can divide it into several sub-topics: the stomach, the pancreas, the small intestine, and so forth.
Next, I assign these jigsaw pieces to pairs of students. Once each pair has mastered their topic, they all circulate and teach the other pairs. In this way, all my students reassemble the jigsaw by teaching each other.
Over the years, teachers have offered me other examples.
- When parents asked “how can I help my child study when I don’t understand the math they’re doing,” one teacher suggested: “have your child teach the concept to you. She will understand the concept better because she did.”
- A middle-school biology teacher explained: “I often begin class with a warm-up exercise: one student teaches a shoulder partner the concepts we studied yesterday.”
- A kindergarten teacher offered a fun example: “for one unit, my students each chose a community helper — a postal worker, a crossing guard, a firefighter — someone like that. They then taught the whole class about that community helper.”
No doubt you can think of many (many) other examples of students teaching students.
Definitions Matter…
As I’ve written before, our work often benefits when we stop and focus on precise definitions. Let me offer the most basic possible definition of the verb to teach:
“To teach is to cause someone else to learn.”
In the examples above, we’re inviting students to explain a topic to a second person: a parent, a shoulder partner, the whole class.
We are not – by the definition above – inviting students to teach a topic to a second person. In practice, we’re not measuring their success by someone else’s learning.
- If the parent doesn’t ultimately understand the math concept, that’s okay. The goal was to help the child learn, not the parent.
- If a kindergartener’s classmates don’t learn about postal workers or firefighters, no worries. The goal was to help each child learn about a specific community helper, not for everyone in the class to learn about all the community helpers. (I know because I asked.)
We have lots of research showing that explaining a topic to another person helps people learn. In fact, I recently read a study (Nestojko 2014) showing that students who thought they were going to explain a topic to another person learned it better – even though they never did the explaining. Simply planning to explain produced modest learning benefits.
If you’ve heard about generative learning, you know that this strategy fits neatly into that category. When students select, organize, and combine ideas, they learn those ideas better. Students might select, organize, and combine by
- Drawing a picture
- Creating a mind map
- Acting out a scene, or
- Presenting an idea to their classmates
When they do any of this generative mental work, students learn more.
But – to be precise – the goal of that last option is that the student who is presenting learn more about the topic. If their classmates haven’t learned, the presentation still counts as generative learning because the presenter learned.
… and Learning Matters
From one perspective, this distinction might seem merely fussy. If students are explaining ideas to one another, what’s the problem with calling that teaching? Explaining is close enough to teaching, isn’t it?
I myself don’t think so. Simply put, explaining – by itself – isn’t teaching. Simply hearing an explanation does not reliably lead to learning – and “causing someone else to learn” is the definition of teaching.
Let’s consider the jigsaw example above. At the end of that class, all the students will have heard explanations about the digestive system’s components: stomach, liver, large intestine. Those segmented explanations, however, will rarely add up to an understanding of digestion as a system.
Understanding that system requires not simply an organ-by-organ review of facts: “hydrochloric acid in the stomach breaks down proteins and kills off bacteria.” Instead, students need to see the connections among all those organs. Unless this lesson “causes students to learn” how those organs and functions add up to accomplish the goal of digestion, they have not been taught. They have heard explanations, but those explanations weren’t enough.
To be clear: I can help students learn by asking them to explain. That generative work — selecting, organizing, and expressing ideas — has real cognitive benefits.
But explaining isn’t the same as teaching.
- The goal of explanation is that the speaker learns.
- The goal of teaching is that someone else learns — and accomplishing that goal requires more than explanation alone.
When I ask students to explain, I’m giving them a powerful way to strengthen their own understanding. When I want their classmates to learn, however, that responsibility ultimately sits with me.
Nestojko, J. F., Bui, D. C., Kornell, N., & Bjork, E. L. (2014). Expecting to teach enhances learning and organization of knowledge in free recall of text passages. Memory & cognition, 42(7), 1038-1048.
