Over the past few years, one activity that I have done more and more of is teaching and guiding others. I have hosted 3 STEM clubs at school where I taught Computer Science concepts at different levels to other students, and I have provided extensive support to my peers in STEM subjects when we were studying for the IGCSEs.
I’m a student, not a teacher. While what I’ve learnt from this will probably not be much use for teaching classes professionally, I think that this is a valuable skill that every student should invest some time to learn.
When I refer to “teachers” in this post, what I really mean is anyone who teaches, helps, or guides anyone else to learn something, and not just professional teachers who teach students as a job. Additionally, some things I say may seem very obvious in theory — but I certainly was surprised by how hard it was to effectively teach others in practice.
Why?
I think that the ability to teach others effectively is an often-overlooked aspect of being a student. Teaching others can be very time-consuming and frustrating, leading some to think that teaching others (as a student) is a waste of time.
This is a fair point, but I would argue that there are also benefits to helping others. Richard Feynman proposed the “Feynman technique” for improving learning, the crux of which being the ability to clearly explain and teach another person on the same subject. It’s hard to say that you fully understand a concept before you can explain it to someone else with clarity and conciseness. Teaching others can reveal gaps in your own knowledge, especially when the learner asks questions; it can be a way to develop true mastery of a certain concept or idea.
Teaching doesn’t just deepen your understanding of the subject or concept that you are teaching. As you are going back through your own learning to retrieve information, you are not only practicing active recall, but your brain may even form new connections or realize something that you may not have before. This becomes even better when the learner probes your knowledge by asking a question: you suddenly gain a new perspective of the concept, and you may see a different approach to solving the same problem.
I’ve found out that once you’ve revised up to a certain level, just pure revision by yourself often yields diminishing returns. I’m not at all saying revision isn’t important, but once I’ve solidified my basic understanding of a topic, I’ve been able to achieve better results by helping someone else reach the same understanding.
Flaws of education
The education that most students get from high school isn’t perfect. Undoubtedly, there are many good teachers, but there are likely just as many mediocre or poor teachers out there. Teaching can easily make a difference in the student’s knowledge of and passion for the subject.
Rote memorization is certainly one of the most prominent flaw pervasive in education. I think that this is really exacerbated by some subjects having tons of compulsory details that no student can do anything better than to just memorize, especially as there isn’t an obvious pattern to form the basis of a proper conceptual understanding.
It is unfortunate that much of the knowledge gained in high school is through memorization, and hence students often complain that they never learn anything useful for application to the real world — they never developed a proper understanding of the concept that is actually useful, and instead just memorized the answer, did the exam, then forgot about it. I don’t blame the teacher; some subjects just happen to work like this, and this is really more of a fundamental problem with the syllabus rather than a teaching issue.
Doing it properly
However, when you can avoid rote memorization, I’ve found out that many teachers, especially students when helping other students, don’t tend to do so. This is surely because learning properly requires many stages, patience, mistakes and a lot of frustration. When the exam is in an hour, no one has time for that. But this practice greatly reduces the chance that you actually remember what you’ve learnt, especially after the exam, and basically completely removes your ability to put the concept into practice in the real world, effectively rendering your learning useless and your time and effort wasted.
As a student, make sure that you don’t fall into this trap. Your upfront effort to learn things properly will eventually be rewarded in a better understanding and ability to apply what you learn to the real world, in a similar manner to delayed gratification. If you’re like me, it’s also much more interesting and engaging. The other great advantage is if you have many tests over a long period; if you take your time to learn things properly, you’ll realize that you can retain concepts for longer periods of time, without having to cram it all the night before the test every time.
As a teacher, this requires even more effort from you. It’s imperative to understand the patience and time the process of learning takes, and most importantly, resist the temptation to just reveal answers to students. Just revealing answers completely ruins the exploratory nature of proper learning, and gives the student no time to make and learn from mistakes, or even understand how to get to the solution in the first place. Even when a student is stuck, they’ll benefit more from you guiding them in the right direction, than just telling them the answer. It may seem obvious, for sure, but this is surprisingly hard to apply when you’re actually teaching someone.
It’s very hard to teach someone who doesn’t really care. Some students tend to not care enough about the subject to the point that they just sit there and wait for the teacher to reveal the answer, which just makes it harder for both the teacher and the student. It’s not really possible, however, to make someone care about anything (certainly don’t force anything on anyone), so as a teacher it can help to make learning active and dynamic rather than mostly the student listening to the teacher talking.
You’ll find that when someone really cares, it will become more like they are teaching themselves, rather than you teaching them (a great sign), which definitely makes the teacher’s job much easier. A hands-off teaching approach is effective, not lazy — especially as a student myself, there is no way I will ever have the time to drag anyone through many concepts manually.
In practice
You’ll find that helping others will deepen your knowledge, as well as strengthen your connections to other students. Teaching is a great way to enhance your communication, presentation, public speaking, and even persuasive skills — if you want to convince someone of something, how will you do it before they can even understand it?
Human brains are (from what I know) lazy, and will take the path of least resistance as a preferred approach to many things, including learning and teaching. Make sure you actively remind yourself of what makes a good teacher and a good student, and it will certainly save you effort, no matter which one you are.