The Protégé Effect: Learn by Teaching Others

‘While we teach, we learn' - a concept that resonates with many, but is it truly effective? Research has shown that it is, thanks to the well-known psychological phenomenon called the protégé effect. This effect demonstrates that when you teach a concept to someone else, it not only helps them understand but also deepens your own understanding of the material. The protégé effect highlights how teaching can fill gaps in your knowledge and improve your learning process. You’ve likely witnessed this in action: think back to school - how often did a classmate who excelled in explaining concepts to others also perform better on tests? This proves that while we teach, we learn. To fully grasp the psychology and benefits of the protégé effect, it’s important to understand what it is first.

What Is the Protege Effect?

The protege effect (fr. protégé effect) is the simple idea that teaching a topic to someone else helps you learn it better yourself.

Common sense suggests that to explain it to someone else, you must first understand the subject well. Traditionally, education followed a model where the role of the teacher or tutor was central. However, in modern settings like online courses, this model has evolved. New methods, such as peer-to-peer learning, have been integrated to use the protégé effect and often prove more effective in enhancing learning outcomes.

Why Learning by Teaching is the Best Way to Learn

The protégé effect is rooted in specific psychological mechanisms and social drivers, making it a powerful learning tool. By leveraging peer-teaching and effective learning strategies, students can improve their metacognitive skills and develop a deeper understanding of the material.

Psychology of the Protégé Effect

Respect for Teachers, Mentors, and Tutors

From an early age, we’re taught to respect teachers, mentors, and tutors. This ingrained respect influences how seriously we take the task of teaching. When you’re going to teach, you don’t want to give incorrect information. This sense of responsibility pushes you to study material more thoroughly and organize information in your head before you attempt to teach it. 

A Sense of Agency and Autonomy

Teaching gives you a sense of agency and autonomy over your learning journey. When you’re responsible for helping someone else understand a topic, your motivation to learn naturally increases. This increased motivation can significantly accelerate your learning process and enrich your overall learning experiences.

A 2009 study on Betty’s Brain, published in the Journal of Science Education and Technology, explored the effects of the protégé effect on students. In this study, eighth graders were asked to learn biology topics from a computer program called Betty’s Brain. Some students were given programs with Teachable Agents (TAs) - digital characters that could learn and reason based on how the students taught them. The students who taught these Teachable Agents learned faster and more effectively than those who simply studied the material on their own. The intention of teaching Betty pushed them to engage deeply with the content, leading to better retention and understanding.

Better Organization and Retention

When you teach someone else, you may naturally use memorization strategies to organize the information in a way that makes it easier to explain and understand. This process is key to really locking in what you know and making it easier to recall later, filling any gaps in your knowledge along the way. In terms of social and cognitive benefits, this process also involves spaced repetition, which further boosts retention and retrieval.

When you teach someone else, you naturally start to organize information in a way that makes it easier to explain and understand. Plus, this approach often involves techniques like spaced repetition, which helps you remember things better over time.

For example, if you were teaching someone about the World Wars, approaching the topic randomly would turn it into a mere collection of hard-to-remember dates and events. Instead, organizing them by timeline (the first war lasted four years, from 1914 to 1918, and the second, larger one lasted six years, from 1939 to 1945) makes it much easier to retain key dates. This structured approach helps both you and your peer grasp and remember the material better.

Using the Protege Effect to Learn to Code

Coding is a hands-on skill that you can really sharpen using the protégé effect. Working through one-on-one code reviews and solving problems with peers can help you spot areas where you might be struggling and get better at programming. One of the main things that helps you learn to code is practice, practice, practice. When you tackle problems yourself, you get a much better handle on how the code works and how to write it more effectively. Here are a couple of ways you can bring peer learning into your coding routine.

The Rubber Duck Method

The rubber duck method  involves explaining your code and the challenges you’re facing to an inanimate object - like a rubber duck! This might sound odd, but the process of verbalizing your problem often leads to a clearer understanding and sometimes even a solution.

As you talk through the steps, you might suddenly realize you’ve overlooked an important step. This “eureka” moment comes from the clarity that teaching brings, even if your “student” is just a rubber duck. This method is especially helpful with complex concepts like data structures, where visualizing the elements is key to understanding them. It can also be a confidence booster before you explain it to a peer or mentee.

Code Reviews

Conducting peer code reviews is another great way to boost your coding skills and learn information through the protégé effect. When you review someone else’s code, you’re not just looking for mistakes - you’re also picking up new ways to think about coding and solve challenges. This can introduce you to techniques and best practices you might not have come across before.

For example, imagine you’re reviewing a peer’s code for a simple calculator program. You’ve needed to decide how the calculator will handle different operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Your peer has used a switch statement, while you’ve been using if/else statements in your own code. As you review their code, you realize that the switch statement is not only more efficient but also easier to read and maintain. This insight prompts you to adopt the switch statement in your own projects, improving your coding efficiency.

Another example is a data analysis assignment you’ve been working on that has required you to clean the dataset extensively to get the most accurate results. The peer whose code you’re reviewing has used a better cleaning technique that takes care of more outliers and garbage values, allowing for more accurate results. Similarly, reviewing a peer’s SQL code has introduced you to a new method of writing queries that gets the job done much faster. This experience has not only improved your data analysis skills but also deepened your understanding of best practices in coding.

The Protégé Effect and Its Impact on Our Learners

At Turing College, the protégé effect is more than just a theory - it’s a powerful tool that we use to enhance our learners' educational experience. If you’re serious about mastering data analytics, data science, digital marketing, or web development, our online courses are the perfect way to benefit from the protégé effect.

Turing College's online courses focus on hands-on learning experience where the main format of teaching is one-on-one code reviews done by professionals and our students. As you progress through our programs, you’ll have multiple opportunities to review and assess projects from another student. This hands-on experience not only reinforces your own learning but also prepares you to tackle real-world challenges in a collaborative, community-driven environment. By the time you complete our program, you’ll have a deep, well-rounded understanding of your chosen field and be ready to advance your career.