Name: Max Zinman

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

Prompt: Metacognition

Incidentally, my entire senior project is actually about metacognition. My question is mainly about understanding how I learn, and specifically how teaching changes it. Before starting my project, I took notes on how I learned. The main things that I got from that process were that I learn better from audio and visual sources than particularly dense texts, I learn best from a combination of explanatory information (in any format) followed by some kind of hands on application to observe what I’ve learned, I learn new concepts much better in school or other work-devoted environment than at home, and if there are any stakes AT ALL attached to what I’m doing it severely negatively impacts my ability to actually learn the information, since a lot of my energy and focus is used by my anxiety to panic about what might go wrong and what might happen if I fail at learning the information. 

During senior project, I have been going through my day-to-day life with the mindset of teaching others, and this has definitely affected my learning, certainly in a positive way. The most significant change is that if I am planning to teach what I’m learning or pretending I will, I am much more motivated to learn it and learn it well. One of the most important things to me is helping other people, and with the mindset of teaching what I know to someone else I convince myself that not only will I benefit and have fun learning, I have to learn it so I can help others by teaching them. When doing my laser research, I maintained the mindset that I was going to teach what I learned to my parents and therapist, and this kept me motivated to learn everything thoroughly so that I could adequately explain it. A side effect of the teaching mindset is how I learn things. Through teaching the 10th graders in Preethi’s physics sections, I’ve found that an important thing to know when explaining the concept is all the background info and concepts that tie into that subject. As a result, I changed my research habits from my typical approach of just jumping right into the end goal, in the case of my research laser cutters, and starting on the most basic (but relevant) background concept, and building up an understanding from there until I reach my target subject. This not only made me feel more ready to teach what I learned to someone whose knowledge was at that base background level, but by going in a logical, step-by-step order I was able to learn the subject matter more efficiently than I otherwise would have. The final thing I will mention is merely a confirmation of what I observed in trimester two about my learning habits then. Because there weren’t really any stakes (grades, research presentations, etc.) associated with my laser work, I was able to get a lot more out of it since I wasn’t wasting effort stressing about the possible negative timelines. The subject matter was pretty complicated and I went pretty deep into it, but because I wasn’t stressing I got a lot out of it. There are other metacognitive changes I noticed during senior project, but these were the most concrete three (and at this point the post is over 550 words and I don’t want to write another college essay).

Now, what I know I don’t know is two things. First is the reciprocal of my essential question: does learning while teaching affect how one teaches? I’ve found that teaching changes my mindset about learning in a positive way, but does having a learning experience along with one’s students help a teacher convey information to them better since they are experiencing a similar process? Second is whether or not these changes in my learning will persist after I’m finished with senior project and out of the teaching mindset. I can obviously pretend that I’m going to teach things that I learn in the future to maintain the mindset, but I’m curious as to whether or not these changes are concrete changes in my learning processes that will stick with me throughout life, or if they are only present while I’m in the teaching mindset. I obviously cannot answer this second question during senior project, but I’ll definitely try to keep an eye on that afterwards.

I have definitely found answers to my essential question, as evidenced by my second paragraph. I’ve learned a lot about how teaching changes my learning processes, and I’m eager to see if anything else pops up during the last three days.