Our interns are here on Fridays, and those correspond with the days that our enrichments are led by students – which gives them so many chances to share their expertise and passions with even more people! We’ve had spy school and henna. Today was an enrichment led by our resident 12-year-old that involved a slide deck about the colors of our atmosphere and ended with cotton dyed with various colors in a jar so we could see color mixing and light refraction.
It’s so much fun to guide them through choosing their topic, navigating what items they need, discussing what learning objectives they have for their lesson and then facilitating a discussion if needed. It’s a crash course in teaching, public speaking and planning activities they would enjoy for their classmates. The act of learning something better by teaching something is called the Protégé Effect. The concept that teaching someone something else is the best way to learn.
The feedback we’ve received from students is that they’re excited to pick their topic, sometimes they want help, sometimes they choose something we’ve done previously (like continuing an art project), or other Fridays they would prefer to surprise us with their topic!
Want to keep learning more or use evidence-based research to implement this in your own homeschool coop or classroom? Let us know what your students choose for their topics in the comments!
The research:
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