Learning by Teaching

Learning by teaching, known in German as Lernen durch Lehren or LdL, is a method in which students are made to learn material themselves and then prepare and deliver lessons on it to their classmates, developed systematically by educator Jean-Pol Martin in the early 1980s while he was teaching French as a foreign language. Martin gave the approach theoretical grounding in several publications and coined the German name for it. Though it met resistance at first within Germany's discipline focused school system, it later spread widely through secondary schools and, by the 1990s, into universities as well. In practice, material is divided into small units and students work in groups of up to three to work out how to teach a unit to their peers, trying and adjusting their own teaching strategies while the classroom teacher gives active support, a structure distinguished from both informal tutoring, which lacks this classroom structure, and formal student teaching, which is part of teacher preparation rather than a technique used with a class's own students.