The power of teaching others to solidify learning

The Unexpected Tutor: How Teaching Others Transforms Your Own Understanding

I’ll never forget the panic in my friend Sam’s voice during our sophomore year of college. “I don’t get it,” he groaned, staring at a dense biology textbook as if it were written in a lost language. “The Krebs cycle might as well be instructions for building a spaceship.” The exam was two days away, and he was spiraling. On a whim, I said, “Okay, explain it to me. Pretend I’ve never heard of mitochondria.”

What followed was a halting, fragmented mess of half-remembered terms. “So, there’s this… thing? Acetyl-CoA? And it goes in a circle and makes energy. I think.” He stalled, his frustration mounting. But in the gaps of his explanation, he saw the gaps in his own knowledge. He’d have to go back, find the connections, and rebuild the concept from the ground up just to tell me the story of it. Two hours later, after he’d wrestled the material into a simple narrative he could teach, something clicked. Not just for him, but for me, his captive audience. On exam day, he aced it. He didn’t just memorize the cycle; he understood it.

This experience isn’t unique. It’s a powerful, often overlooked engine for deep learning called the Protégé Effect. The simple act of preparing to teach someone else forces your brain to engage with material in a fundamentally different way than passive review or frantic last-minute study techniques. You move from asking “Do I know this?” to “How can I make this clear, logical, and meaningful for someone else?”

Why Does Teaching Turbocharge Learning?

When you learn for yourself, you can tolerate fuzzy logic and leaps in understanding. Your brain fills in the blanks with a “good enough” approximation. But teaching is merciless. It exposes every weak link, every shaky assumption. This pressure is a gift.

Cognitive scientists point to several reasons. First, teaching forces organization. You can’t explain a chaotic jumble of facts. You must structure the information, find the narrative arc, and identify the foundational principles before building up to the complex ideas. This process alone solidifies the framework in your mind.

Second, it requires retrieval. Simply re-reading notes is a passive illusion of competence. Teaching demands you actively pull information from your memory, strengthening those neural pathways each time. It’s the difference between looking at a map of your neighborhood and actually drawing one from memory.

Finally, and perhaps most beautifully, it fosters elaboration. To make a concept stick for your “student,” you instinctively connect it to things they already understand. You create analogies, metaphors, and real-world examples. In doing so, you weave the new knowledge into your own existing web of understanding, making it far more durable and accessible.

“While we teach, we learn,” said the Roman philosopher Seneca. It seems we’ve been rediscovering this truth for two thousand years.

From the Classroom to the Study Group: Stories in Action

Let’s step out of theory and into the hallway. Ms. Rivera, a high school history teacher, saw her students struggling with the causes of World War I—a tangled web of alliances, militarism, and nationalism. Instead of another lecture, she divided the class into groups and gave each a key nation. Their task? Prepare a 5-minute “diplomatic briefing” to teach the class why their nation entered the war, from its own perspective.

The room transformed. Students debated how to simplify complex treaties, created props to represent alliances, and argued over the most compelling way to present their case. On presentation day, they weren’t just reciting facts; they were advocating, explaining, and connecting. Their learning strategies shifted from absorption to creation. Ms. Rivera reported that their essays on the topic later were the most nuanced and accurate she’d seen all year.

Or consider the pre-med study group at the local university. They use a simple rule: if you want to attend, you must come prepared to teach one concept to the group. This flips the dynamic from passively receiving information to actively owning it. One student, Priya, told me she spends her initial study time asking herself, “How would I explain this concept to my study buddies?” This mindset shapes her note-taking, her questioning, and her focus, turning solitary effective studying into a socially accountable, deeply engaging process.

Making It Work For You: Practical Pathways

You don’t need a formal classroom or a captive audience to harness this power. The magic is in the preparation to teach. Here are a few natural ways to weave it into your academic life:

• The Study Buddy Teach-Off: Partner with a classmate. Divide upcoming material, and each take responsibility for teaching a chunk to the other. The “teacher” prepares a mini-lesson; the “student” asks clarifying questions. Then switch.
• The Imaginary Audience: After studying a chapter, close your book and explain the core ideas out loud, as if to a smart but uninformed friend. Record yourself on your phone. The moment you fumble or resort to jargon is your cue to revisit the material.
• The One-Page “Cheat Sheet” Challenge: Can you distill the most important concepts of a unit onto a single page designed for someone who missed the class? The act of curating and connecting the information is a powerful teaching simulation.

Tools can scaffold this process, too. Platforms like QuizSmart are useful here, not for passive consumption, but for creation and testing. A student can use them to build a practice quiz on a topic they’ve just studied, essentially designing a challenge for their future self or a peer. The act of authoring good questions—questions that probe for understanding, not just recall—is a high-level teaching task that forces you to think about the material from multiple angles. It turns memory improvement into an active, creative pursuit.

The Ripple Effect: Beyond Academic Success

The beauty of this approach is that its benefits extend far beyond the next exam. When you cultivate the habit of learning through teaching, you build communication skills, empathy, and intellectual confidence. You start to approach all new information with a different question: not just “What does this mean?” but “How does this fit into a bigger picture I could share?”

For educators, this is an invitation to design “student-as-teacher” moments more intentionally. It’s a move from being the sole source of knowledge to being the architect of experiences where students construct and communicate understanding. The reward is a classroom that hums with the energy of shared discovery.

So, whether you’re a student staring down a finals week or a teacher planning your next unit, consider shifting the paradigm. Don’t just learn it. Teach it. Find a friend, a sibling, a study group, or even your own reflection in the mirror. Organize it, simplify it, and give it away. In that generous act of explanation, you’ll find the knowledge doesn’t leave you—it roots itself deeply, becoming a permanent part of your intellectual toolkit. Your journey toward true mastery might just begin the moment you decide to become someone else’s guide.