I’ve seen a flood of news from email chains and group chats about learning by teaching as an easy way to master skills faster, especially in tech. Rubber duck learning (where you explain the concept to a rubber ducky) is common in software development, but this new trend is a shift to actually teaching other people. Several articles about learning retention have been passed around to accompany this trend.
I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater for learning by teaching. It is an excellent way to learn, but only when done right, otherwise, it’s at best a Pyrrhic victory. Pushing someone to teach without really understanding the concepts in the first place is a recipe for disaster.
What’s The Difference?
Talking to and trying to explain a problem to a rubber duck is substantially different. If you mess up the explanation to an inanimate object, you don’t really hurt anything. You can also stop whenever you want or need and it’s not going to be awkward. The duck doesn’t judge. If you mess up the explanation to a person, you hurt their comprehension and maybe your own.
The rubber ducky method is also not typically employed until later stages of knowledge growth. You use it when debugging (which means you can already write the code) or talking through a concept to nail it down (which means you’ve already gone through it). If you get stuck, it’s easy to stop and do further research.
If you aren’t intimately familiar with the subject, you’re almost definitely going to get stuck. This isn’t really the issue, it’s the norm for anyone. But, when you have a person sitting in front of you waiting with bated breath, it’s hard not to just make something up to keep going instead of admitting ignorance out of fear of losing authority. Remember the teacher who couldn’t admit they didn’t know and just made it up so the class would shut up? That’s exactly how I unlearned calculus.
This method of just finding someone and teaching with a shallow understanding has been touted as a great way to learn all sorts of technical skills. I’ve heard about using teaching to learn for everything in tech from machine learning and coding to networking and administration. The worst part is that it’s sold as an early step in the ladder to learning as a “life hack”. The problem is it’s not.
Teaching Isn’t A One Size Fits All Approach
Learning by teaching typically requires one have the fundamentals down before trying to explain them. When a student stands in front of a classroom to introduce a concept, either the school is really cheaping out, or, the student is expected to have thoroughly researched their topic, the topic is expected to be within reach of the student, and there is a teacher nearby for damage control if things get derailed. When someone just decides to do it, no one really gets much out of this arrangement, except new confusion about the subject if the “teacher” in the scenario is ignorant. This approach is also more social and centered around group learning.
Teaching is also a very specialized skill. Not all teaching styles and students are compatible either. Teaching also introduces a social element and specific social pressures that make it easier to make mistakes. Teachers go to school to learn how to overcome these issues.
Learning by teaching is a great exercise for interpersonal conflict in school, with a structured environment and someone overseeing the whole exercise. This probably isn’t the kind of exercise you want in an unstructured meeting at work like the articles tend to be pushing. Even though the approach is extremely useful when employed as intended, without structure or the right preparation, it manages to be less than useless.
What About The Rubber Ducky?
The rubber ducky method helps to speed up learning because it gives some of the benefits of more active learning methods without requiring the same level of mastery. It is a crutch towards mastery without the skill requirement. Don’t forget though, it’s still a crutch.
The rubber ducky method forces you to confront the learning by teaching method, ideally while doing whatever is being learned, with the fallback of being able to jump back into reading and further research. This method allows you to jump a few rungs on the learning pyramid in a safe, controlled manner. The safety net is still there, unlike with teaching a live person.
When Should You Use The Rubber Ducky Method?
The rubber ducky is a check on your understanding. If you know how to tell what you know and don’t know, it isn’t really useful. It is best reserved for problems with no set solution which are being worked through, or concepts which are not quite concrete yet. The rubber ducky method isn’t a panacea for learning.
When debugging code, you’re actively practicing what you’ve learned. When you focus on an individual concept, you are limiting the scope to something more digestable (this is arguably an artificial form of scaffolding). These constraints limit the scope of what you are learning and prevent accidental overreaching.
Practice requires the mastery to actually use the concepts. A singular concept has fewer hurdles to master and limits what can be misunderstood when explaining the concept. The rubber ducky method artificially limits your learning by either requiring the skills for the leap to be believable, or by limiting the explanation to concepts which are bite size enough for the learner. This aims to scaffold the learner and allow them to slowly advance their knowledge base without leaving holes in their knowledge.
Thanks to the often referenced Dunning-Kruger Effect, most people first learning about a new field or topic grossly overestimate their skills before being knocked down to where they understand how little they really know. A little bit of knowledge can actually be worse than no knowledge on this front. The rubber ducky helps mitigate this by forcing you back to the zone of proximal development, where you aren’t trying to learn things which you cannot hope to master without more knowledge and scaffolding. This method mitigates the tendency to overestimate skills at lower levels and provides an artificial jump to employ more active learning techniques without the same caveats.
Why Is This Going Around?
I really don’t know whether this is a case of good intentions run amok or grasping at straws for content. It doesn’t really matter either way, the advice to “just go find someone to teach so you can learn” is dangerous as presented. It keeps going around because it’s an attractive “life hack” (even though it isn’t as presented).
It could be great advice with a bit of fine print, but that doesn’t really sell does it? The advice also persists because of a disconnect between machine learning and education theory. Humans are more than just input and output, and computers are little more than that at present. Shortcuts in one can be dangerous in the other until the singularity pushes machine learning to parity with human learning.
Moving Forward
The reason more active techniques result in more retention is that you have to have reached a certain baseline for them to be practical. You can’t start debugging code if you can’t even read it. You can’t put the cart in front of the horse and expect anything to happen. Once you get the basics down, you can easily move in pretty much any direction. If you try to jump too far too soon, you run the risk of ending up with catastrophic holes in your knowledge.
Learning by teaching only works when the baseline is established. Before then, it is at best a waste of time, and at worst disastrous for you and your would be student. The rubber ducky method has soft safety mechanics builtin, teaching does not.
You don’t try to jump into deep machine learning without understanding what a neural network is, though some articles tell you to do so. You can’t jump into teaching without understanding the concepts you want to teach or how to deliver them, and why it matters. Don’t waste your time and some poor unsuspecting fool’s by telling them you can teach them about a given subject when you can’t. Teach an inanimate object or test the waters before going all in.
Conclusion
Countless articles about teaching to learn have been floating around my personal and professional sphere. I wouldn’t normally write a rebuttal to a method that just rips on the advice with nothing particularly constructive (without compromising the core premise), but unfortunately this method just isn’t sound advice to give someone early on. One may as well try to build a skyscraper on a foundation of sand to fix this problem.
Skip teaching someone else until you can teach a rubber ducky (or your inanimate object of choice). Shortcuts can be taken sometimes, but most shortcuts which are not thought out end up being long detours. Focus on the basics and skip the misunderstood science.
Learning by teaching is very powerful, but it requires you to be high enough on the learning pyramid for this to be a worthwhile method. As the pyramid gets higher, so does the requisite skill. An expert just needs to see a mistake once to fix it, but a newbie may need a bit more to understand that they even made a mistake in the first place, let alone how to fix it.
Would you trust yourself as a teacher? If you can’t say yes and back it up, then you probably need to learn more before this method is worthwhile. Even then, not everyone is fit to teach (without a lot of work). Understand yourself and understand your limitations and you will advance far faster than trying to take misguided shortcuts.