Sharing Good Practice
ACCELERATE YOUR STUDENTS'
LEARNING BY USING A MODERN
APPROACH TO THE PROTÉGÉ EFFECT
By George Stokes
place in our schools? Is a change of
mindset required?
Around two years ago, with the
enthusiasm and benefits to my
students evident, I set out on an
ambitious mission to create a platform
that the students in my school could
use to share and organise their self-
created learning content in a more
efficient way. The results we had were
exceptional. Students were so much
more engaged with their learning,
because they suddenly had an
audience to share their content with.
“
While we teach, we learn,”
said the Roman philosopher
Seneca. This ancient wisdom is
something that we all know; yet
do we use it enough? For those of you
who utilise peer instruction, you will be
familiar with the accelerated learning
that occurs in students when they are
learning by teaching.
If you are a teacher who facilitates
collaborative learning or flipped
learning with your students, then the
odds are that you may also be using
the Protégé Effect without even
realising it. We now have hundreds
of applications at our fingertips that
are perfect teaching tools for our
students to capture their self-created
teaching content. Students can pause
and rewind their friends, should they
need something to be repeated. The
students in my classroom love to use
a whole host of apps including; Vidra,
Explain Everything, Show Me and the
old classic iMovie to create videos for
their peers to learn from.
‘The Protégé Effect’ phrase was coined
by a group of scientists who found
that, students who are enlisted to tutor
others ‘work harder to understand
the material, recall it more accurately
and apply it more effectively’. Going
further back in time, in 1800, Professor
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Jean-Pol Martin, developed his
approach “Lernen durch Lehren”,
or “Learning by Teaching”. These
methods demonstrated staggering
improvements
in
creativity,
independence and self-confidence.
Put simply, explaining something to
someone else, reinforces your students
understanding of a subject. It tests
their ability to explain their opinions
on the topic and truly measures
their depth of knowledge. In 2009
researchers at the Stanford University,
studied a group of grade 5 students.
One group was asked to ‘teach’ virtual
pupils or teaching assistants, the other
to learn independently. The results
overwhelmingly showed the ‘teachers’
were
‘much
more
emotionally
connected to the learning process’
and the independent learners did not
‘display the same ownership over their
own learning’.
So if the Protégé effect is so effective
in increasing students’ attitude
to learning and the depth of their
learning, then why is it not yet common
Class Time
Students are now active participants
in the creation of learning materials
rather than passive consumers. To
reflect this, we recently changed the
name of the platform to ‘Sharek’,
meaning ‘participation’ in Arabic.
Sharek is currently helping 16 schools
here in the UAE, with this shift in
mindset, and hopes to help many
more in the near future.
This social element is crucial in creating
stimulating educational environments.
Learning is a social endeavor, involving
student engagement and collaborative
understanding of concepts. In my
school, we have staggered our
curriculum as much as possible, so that
units that have links across the school,
are spread a few weeks apart, enabling
multiple opportunities for peer
teaching. The Key Stage Two students
have fully embraced the Protégé Effect
by creating a collection of E-Books, for
the younger students, which we display
in the library using the trusty QR code.
In summary, when the learning process
is externally directed to support
the learning of another, students
spend more time examining their
understanding and work harder to
revise their thinking. Let’s all unleash
the power of the Protégé Effect!
George is currently the Digital Learning Leader at SAFA British School. Around two
years ago, he built his own learning platform called Sharek, which is now widely
used across the UAE. This year, George will be speaking at the JESS Innovation
Summit, the GESS conference and the Edutech Middle East Conference.