The 'Teach Me' Strategy: Why Having Students Explain Concepts Deepens Learning

The best way to know if a student understands something is to ask them to explain it. The second-best way is to ask them to teach it to someone else.

These aren't the same thing — and the second one is more powerful for learning.

Why Teaching Something Deepens Understanding

When a student explains a concept to a peer, they engage in three cognitive processes simultaneously: retrieving the information from memory, organizing it into a logical sequence, and monitoring their own understanding to notice where the explanation breaks down.

That last one is crucial. When a student explains to a teacher, the teacher's expertise fills in gaps — students can give incomplete explanations and the teacher nods anyway. When a student explains to a peer, gaps in their explanation become visible because the peer doesn't have the background knowledge to fill them in.

Research from Ploetzner and colleagues (and replicated many times since) consistently shows that students who teach a concept to another student retain it better than students who studied the same material solo — including students who taught it incorrectly at first and then received correction.

How to Use This in Classroom Practice

Pair explanations: After teaching a concept, give students two minutes to explain it to a partner using their own words. Not copying from notes — from memory. The retrieval attempt is where the learning happens.

Teach-back protocol: One student explains, the other listens without interrupting, then asks two questions they have. The questions surface what was confusing or missing from the explanation. Then students switch.

Expert jigsaw: Divide the class into groups where each student becomes the "expert" on one concept and teaches it to others in a mixed group. Students prepare their explanation more carefully when they know they'll be the only source.

Error-finding tasks: Give students an incorrect worked example and have them explain to a partner what's wrong and why. Identifying errors in someone else's work requires the same deep understanding as explaining correctly.

The Explain-It-Simple Test

A useful formative check: ask students to explain the concept as if they were explaining it to a younger student who has never seen it before. Explanations that rely on technical vocabulary the younger student wouldn't know reveal that the student learned the terminology without the concept behind it.

Students who understand something can simplify it. Students who only memorized it can only reproduce it at the level they learned it.

Common Mistakes

Too much scaffolding: If you give students sentence frames for their explanation ("First, ___. Then, ___. Finally, ___"), you've scaffolded away the cognitive work that makes teach-back valuable. Use sentence frames for language learners who need them; for other students, let the explanation be messier.

Treating it as a check, not a learning activity: Teach-back is most effective when students know they'll be explaining before they study — the expectation of having to teach changes how they engage with the material in the first place. Using it only as a check at the end captures less of its value.

Only using it for simple content: Teach-back works for complex concepts too. Students explaining how natural selection works, why the colonists issued the Declaration of Independence, or how the quadratic formula is derived are engaged in more valuable cognitive work than students who can recognize the correct answer on a multiple choice test.

The LessonDraft Teach-Me Tool

Students who have had to explain something own it differently than students who only received an explanation. The difference shows on summative assessments — and more importantly, it shows six months later.