Name: Max Zinman

Essential Question: How does teaching while learning affect how one learns?

Prompt: Text investigation of outside sources

Source 1: https://ideas.time.com/2011/11/30/the-protege-effect/

Source 2: https://effectiviology.com/protege-effect-learn-by-teaching/

In both of the sources I found, the authors discuss something called the protege effect, which is when someone who is teaching a concept or subject of any kind to someone else learns more about the subject in the process. This is something I think I’ve benefited from in the past in a very passive way, such as gaining a better understanding of a math subject after helping a friend study for a test we were about to take. However, something that I thought was particularly interesting in the second article was how the author mentions that the person learning has more motivation to learn and understand the subject matter if they are expecting to teach it to someone else. Because the learning of the subject matter is for more than just yourself in this scenario, it gains a greater importance creating the extra motivation. Going into my laser research in Week 1 of Senior Project, after gaining a little bit of experience teaching in Week 0, I maintained the expectation of teaching what I learned to others, be they my parents or my friends, and I found that I was more invested in what I was learning. Additionally, this extra motivation led to the changes in how I conducted my learning that I mentioned in previous blog posts, the most significant of which was giving much more focus to completely understanding any background information related to the subject matter.

The second interesting answer to my essential question I found in the articles was that teaching, or expecting to teach, others leads to an increase in metacognition of the learner, which is to say that they are more aware of how they are learning. This tends to lead to the use of more effective learning strategies and thus a better understanding of the material. This confirmed what I observed while researching during my Senior Project: I paid more attention to background information, I took better notes, and I tried to learn things in an order that resulted in each subsequent topic building on top of previous ones rather than just jumping into the deep end.