Want to Really Learn Something? Teach It

Now that you're finally out of formal education after nearly two decades in school and have entered the workforce you might think that you've left teaching behind and moved on to mentoring. That's a mistake if a recent post by Michael Schrage on the HBR Conversation Starters blog is correct. His contention: if you want to keep learning in the world of work, teaching others may have more value than mentoring. Schrage concludes that "'mentoring' is overrated as a human capital investment. I suspect that there are CMOs and CFOs who would become far more expert -- and effective -- in their roles if they took the time to explicitly teach people core skills and competencies in their specialty."

Schrage explicitly targets his argument at the executive level, but from the real world example of the value of teaching he uses in his post, one can conclude that organizing, clarifying and imparting your knowledge can help those at all levels master difficult skills. Employees on the lower rungs of the career ladder can learn as much by teaching as by being taught.

The power of this practice was recently reinforced at a statistical software customer conference I attended. A participant complained that one of the training sessions was really more of a "technical demo" than a class. The session leader was less a teacher or facilitator that a presenter. The collective frustration was palpable. This seminar's attendees could "see" what the presenter was doing and observe the outcomes but they simply couldn't "get" the underlying principles.

So what happened? Three participants -- each from different companies -- got together during the break to teach themselves (and each other) how to marry the software to the statistics. Intriguingly, this ad hoc group had synergistic skills: One knew the software but had a shaky understanding of the statistics; another understood stats but had only a casual acquaintance with the software; and the third had a problem he thought the software could solve. Fifteen minutes of explanatory give-and-take around the keyboard later, everyone had clearly "learned" more about their own skill and competence by attempting to "teach" their colleagues. The software jockey gained greater fluency with the package as he demo-ed how to integrate the problem with the statistics. The stats geek got a better sense of the math in the course of helping translate the problem into the software.

(Image of teacher and pupil by Wonderlane, CC 2.0)