By Angelo Ross, PSIA-AASI Education Development Manager

Connecting with all students can be a challenge for every teacher. Developing relationships based on trust often takes time, and in a fast-paced learning environment that can be crowded and noisy, subject to adverse weather, and a bit stressful, having specific strategies on hand for connecting with different personality types can facilitate communication, trust, and learning. Understanding and leveraging something called the protégé effect can help.

Improving Engagement

The protégé effect is the phenomenon through which some students become more engaged with the learning environment by teaching others. A best practice teaching strategy for connecting with some of your students is to turn them into teachers.

Clues for how to effectively interact with people with different personalities can be subtle and easily overlooked. Potential protégés may be those students who ask a lot of questions (or very targeted, very good questions), who always seem a step ahead, and those who help other students without prompting. Fast learners, precocious children, parents or older siblings in family lessons, helicopter parents, and insatiable students all come to mind as protégé candidates. 

In my personal experience, I think of Emily, a young racer I used to coach who was thoughtful, bright, and reserved. Other kids in the club gravitated toward Emily to provide clarity on tasks, which she seemed to enjoy. I began working with Emily, usually on the chairlift, to support her understanding, boost her confidence, and make sure she was comfortable with and understood her informal role as “coaching assistant.”

Teacher-Role Students

Researcher Keiichi Kobayashi uses the term teacher-role students to describe those for whom the protégé effect may be an effective strategy for engagement and proposes using the preparing-to-teach strategy to train them for the role. This is a strategy through which students receive instruction “with the expectation of teaching or providing explanations” to others. This may not be effective for all students in the group, rather it may be used judiciously with those identified as teacher-role students and could occur during chairlift or sidebar conversations.

Kobayashi states, using the “preparing-to-teach [strategy] may promote deep learning [in teacher-role students] …because teaching another person involves the process of transforming the contents of learning material into instructional explanations for the person, during which teacher-role students are spurred to select, organize, and elaborate information, constructing knowledge reflectively,”1 therefore engaging with concepts on a deeper level. This helps facilitate the learner’s ability to reflect upon experiences and sensations. It is the expectation of teaching others that frames the information and allows deeper connection with it for teacher-role students.

Of course, this does not mean that we hand over the reins of our lessons to our students. Rather, we can look for specific opportunities within the skill sets of our teacher-role students to provide them instruction so they may support the learning of others while benefitting from a deeper connection to the lesson content. This may include assisting other students in the lift line, helping to read terrain, giving feedback about in which part of the turn the highest edge angle occurs, describing turn shape, parents rephrasing our instruction so they may coach their kids more effectively after the lesson, or helping with translations due to language barriers.

As we endeavor to effectively recognize and influence the behaviors, motivations, and emotions of others to connect and develop trust, our ability to identify potential teacher-role students, create preparing-to-teach learning environments, and leverage the protégé effect are valuable tools to have in the toolkit.

5 Steps for Identifying and Training Teacher-Role Students

  1. Identify potential teacher-role students. Observable traits: quick learners; ask insightful questions; help others naturally
  2. Set the tone. Encourage humble positivity and patience; discourage bossiness and ego
  3. Train your protégés. Assign small, clear teacher roles based on observable behaviors. Model best practices in coaching. Keep it within their skill set.
  4. Monitor your students, including your protégés. Watch interactions; give real-time praise and Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) feedback: Format: “When we were practicing [specific activity], I observed [specific behavior], which had [specific impact].” Example: “When we were practicing side slips, I observed your upper body leaning up the hill, which reduced edge angle and caused your speed to increase. Let’s practice tipping the lower legs to create edge angles.”
  5. Reflect & Review. Ask your protégés to reiterate their understanding of your coaching in their words. Provide a few basic observables with which they can help others after the lesson. Examples include a retreating posture (ski tips/board nose not engaged with snow), turn shape, initiating turns with shoulders. Make yourself available for future lessons.

Note:

1. Kobayashi, K. (2019). Learning by preparing‐to‐teach and teaching: A meta‐analysis. Japanese Psychological Research, 61(3), 192–203. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/jpr.12221