Learning by Teaching Beats Reading About It
Most of us have walked out of a conference or a course with pages of notes, feeling like a different person, only to find a month later that almost nothing actually changed. All that material, gone. Compare that to the last time you had to teach something to someone on your team. Five minutes in, you find the holes in your own thinking. Every gap shows up, and you walk away understanding the topic better than you did going in. That is learning by teaching in action, and it works for a real reason.
Why Learning by Teaching Actually Works
There is a popular claim floating around business and training circles about a learning pyramid, with tidy percentages showing that lectures and reading produce only 5 to 20 percent retention, while teaching others produces 75 percent and doing something yourself produces 90. Those specific numbers are worth being sceptical of. Researchers who traced the claim back to its supposed source found no actual study behind it, and the exact figures have been thoroughly debunked in the academic literature.
What the research does genuinely support is the underlying idea. Psychologists call it the protégé effect: when people expect to teach material to someone else, they organise it more carefully, notice their own gaps sooner, and retain it better than when they are simply learning it for themselves. Real, replicated studies back this up, even without the suspiciously tidy percentages attached to the myth.
Knowing About Something Is Not the Same as Owning It
You can read every book on pricing, delegation, or advisory work, and still not really know it. Until you have the actual conversation, make the actual change, and do it imperfectly the first time, you have only learned about the topic, not learned it. That is where a lot of people get stuck: reading, researching, and waiting to feel ready, when readiness tends to come from acting, not from more preparation.
Put Learning by Teaching Into Practice
The move here is simple, even if it takes a bit of discipline to actually do. Take the thing you have been circling for months and put it in the calendar, a specific day, a specific time, since a decision without a date is really just a wish. Then teach one thing you have genuinely learned this month to someone on your team. A single week spent doing and teaching will move you further than a year spent only reading about it.
If building better learning and development habits into how your team operates is something you are thinking about, we are happy to help you think it through. Get in touch with the team at MBP.