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"Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day…" - 5 new articles

Study Suggests That Enhanced Agency Contributes To Benefits Students Gain When They Teach Their Classmates
Sentences Of The Week
I’m Still Not Sure If The Tradition Of A “Civic Season” Is Going To Catch On, But Museums Pushing It Create Nice Collection Of Resources
Putin & Trump Demonstrate How, On A Micro-Level, It Never Pays To Get Into A Power Struggle With A Student
2026’s Best Posts From This Blog – So Far
More Recent Articles

Study Suggests That Enhanced Agency Contributes To Benefits Students Gain When They Teach Their Classmates

I’ve always figured that the main reason students benefit from teaching their classmates through jigsaws and other strategies is because they concentrate more on learning the material.

Now, researchers suggest that there’s another reason student “teachers” benefit academically from doing it – teaching provides them an increased sense of power and agency that directly translates towards them learning better.

The Powerful Teacher: A Power Hypothesis for the Benefits of Learning-by-Teaching is an open-access study that’s very interesting, though it’s a bit dense. I asked ChatGPT to explain it in more simple terms to me.

Here’s what it said:

The researchers argue that part of why students benefit when they teach others is because teaching increases their sense of power, and that increased sense of power helps their learning in specific ways.

Here’s how and why the authors say that works:

📌 1. Taking on a teacher role gives students a feeling of power

In their experiment, students were put into three different conditions:

Teaching group: prepared to teach their peers and wrote out how they would lecture.
Explaining group: wrote explanations as if for a textbook.
Note-taking group: prepared notes for themselves.

Students in the teaching condition reported feeling more powerful — meaning they felt more able to influence and control others’ understanding of the material — than students in the other two groups.

This sense of power wasn’t just about feeling confident in the information — it was about social influence: they were producing something that others would rely on.

📌 2. This sense of power boosts learning outcomes

The researchers found that:

Teaching others enhanced higher-order learning outcomes, especially research question generation, more than just explaining or taking notes.
The teaching condition produced more creative and generative thinking than the other groups even when controlling for basic comprehension.

In other words, it wasn’t just that teaching required deeper processing — it was that stepping into a teaching role gave students a psychological shift (a feeling of power over the learning context) that helped them perform better on complex tasks.

📌 3. Why “power” matters for learning

The authors propose what they call a “power hypothesis of learning-by-teaching”:

Teaching positions students as agents of influence. When learners prepare to teach, they aren’t just absorbing information — they are creating something for others, and this role gives them a sense of agency or power.
That sense of power motivates deeper engagement with the material and encourages cognitive processes like evaluation, organization, and generation of new questions.
Because students imagine how others will understand their explanations, they think more critically about structure and meaning.

The authors describe this as a novel mechanism behind learning-by-teaching — not just that teaching forces elaboration but that feeling powerful improves how students engage with and generate new knowledge.

🧠 How this connects to broader research

This idea fits with other educational theories suggesting that student agency — the feeling that learners can influence outcomes or others — enhances motivation and deeper learning. Research on learner autonomy shows that when students feel more control or influence over their environment, their engagement and motivation increase, which supports better learning.

🟡 Summary

In this study, teaching others seems to help learning not only because it makes you process material more deeply, but because it changes how students see themselves: it gives them a sense of power in the learning process, and that sense of power boosts their ability to generate new research questions and engage with material on a higher level

I then asked it this question:

So, previous studies, and my own understanding, suggests that the “teachers” benefit because they have to learn the content more in order to teach it. This study says that no, the key reason is because of the sense of agency that the student teachers feel?

Here’s the response:

No, this study does not say content-processing doesn’t matter.
It argues that in addition to deeper processing, there’s a psychological mechanism — a sense of power/agency — that independently contributes to the benefit.

Here’s the distinction.

🧠 The Traditional Explanation (What You’re Referring To)

Most “learning-by-teaching” research argues that student teachers benefit because they:

Organize material more carefully
Anticipate questions
Elaborate and explain ideas
Monitor their own understanding
Repair knowledge gaps

This is often called:

Generative processing
Elaborative rehearsal
Metacognitive monitoring

In that framework, the benefit is largely cognitive.

🔎 What This Study Adds

This study proposes a “power hypothesis” — meaning:

When students prepare to teach, they step into a social role of influence. That role increases their sense of power, and that psychological state changes how they engage cognitively.

So it’s not:

“Content processing doesn’t matter.”

It’s:

“There’s an additional motivational-psychological mechanism that helps explain why teaching boosts higher-order learning.”

💡 What They Found That’s Different

In their design, they compared:

Teaching others
Writing explanations (like for a textbook)
Taking notes

All of those require processing.

But the teaching group:

Reported higher feelings of power
Performed better on higher-order tasks (like generating research questions)

The key finding:
Even when processing demands were similar, the teaching role produced greater perceived power, and that power statistically helped explain the enhanced performance.

That’s the novel contribution.

🧭 How “Power” Changes Cognition

Psychologically, feeling powerful tends to:

Increase approach motivation
Increase cognitive flexibility
Promote abstract thinking
Reduce inhibition
Increase generative thinking

So the authors argue:

It’s not just that teaching forces deeper thinking — it also shifts the learner’s psychological stance from recipient to agent.

That shift enhances certain kinds of thinking — especially creative, generative, higher-order thinking.

🎯 So What’s the Real Takeaway?

It’s not:

“We were wrong before.”

It’s:

“The benefits of learning-by-teaching are partly cognitive and partly motivational/social.”

Traditional view:

Teaching → deeper processing → better learning

This study adds:

Teaching → sense of power/agency → enhanced generative cognition → better higher-order outcomes

🏫 In Practical Terms (For Your Classroom Thinking)

If the power/agency explanation holds up, it suggests:

The social framing matters.
Simply “explaining for practice” may not produce the same effect as
Being positioned as someone who will influence others.

So the mechanism may depend on:

Audience presence
Authentic responsibility
Role legitimacy
Perceived influence

That’s potentially important for classroom design.

I’m adding this info to:

The Best Resources On Student Agency & How To Encourage It

The Best Posts On Helping Students Teach Their Classmates — Help Me Find More

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Sentences Of The Week

geralt / Pixabay

I thought readers might, or might not, find this new regular post useful.

Each week, I highlight several sentences, with links to their sources, that I find interesting/concerning/useful. And they may, or may not, be directly connected to education. I may also include my own comments or related links.

This regular post will join my other regular ones on teaching ELLs, education policy, Artificial Intelligence, infographics, and Pinterest highlights, not to mention sharing of my regular Education Week posts.

Here are this week’s sentences:

The Quaglia Institute’s survey of more than 100,000 students in grades 6 to 12 found that those who believe they have a voice in school are 48% more likely to report being academically motivated and 41% more likely to report being engaged in learning.

The kinds of tasks that I hear teachers being encouraged to offload to “AI” — grading, lesson planning, communication with students and parents, design of handouts and other classroom material, IEPs — are actually constitutive of the very work.

More students are progressing through higher education and career programs and completing more years of total schooling than in decades past, and a case can be made that kids’ educational experiences have improved—especially for those ages 16-25, said Michael Kirst, one of the study’s authors. See The Best Articles Pointing Out That Our Schools Are Not Failing — Please Suggest More

Nearly 84% of Detroit district high schoolers were paid for coming to school this year, with far more students in neighborhood schools receiving the payout.

This is hardly Armageddon for higher education. But the future does kind of suck…

Every time someone designs the conditions for reading, people read.

Any money actually saved from closing a school building is largely offset by funding lost when affected students withdraw from the district to attend school somewhere else. See The Best Posts & Articles On The Impact Of School Closures — Suggest More!

But the overall track record suggests that, at least historically, state leaders are no better at running schools than local officials — even in places that have been identified as needing intervention.

“Too often, the language of parents rights is used to divide communities and advance policies that would limit what students can read, learn, and discuss,” said Rep. Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz. “When schools are pulled into these culture wars, the costs are real.”

New results from a long-running set of federal exams show a striking, persistent, and unexplained duality: Girls’ scores have fallen more sharply than boys’ and then have been slower to recover.

Across a series of studies, they find that spoken disagreements led to greater understanding, less conflict, and more favourable impressions of a conversation partner than written ones.

Across every indicator of well-being, teachers report worse outcomes than other working adults in the United States, RAND Corp. finds.

“I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital,” McAfee said. “But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer.”

If returning the U.S. to 1924 is the goal, the Trump Administration is succeeding.

It’s No Wonder Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/o…

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— Larry Ferlazzo (@larryferlazzo.bsky.social) June 5, 2026 at 4:43 AM

“It’s good that schools are not like start-ups, because children’s minds should not be tied to the whims of the marketplace.”https://t.co/FiBS9eMr8D

— Alexander Russo (@alexanderrusso) June 9, 2026

The girl in your freshman social studies class who raised her hand to ask why there’s no white history month is running half the major news outlets. https://t.co/p5YJCWFs1p

— Samantha Ruddy (@samlymatters) June 9, 2026

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I’m Still Not Sure If The Tradition Of A “Civic Season” Is Going To Catch On, But Museums Pushing It Create Nice Collection Of Resources

A ton of museums and nonprofit organizations tried four years ago to inaugurate a tradition they are calling “Civic Season”:

a twp-week period that stretches from Flag Day on Juneteenth through the Fourth of July, and includes Juneteenth and Pride Month… The project aims to ask Americans, and young people in particular, to stretch the usual bounds of the red-white-and-blue festivities to include a new mission of reflection and civic engagement.

When it began, I said I was a bit skeptical of it catching on, especially since that’s the end of the school year.

And, I continue to be skeptical.

However, they continue to have a website chockful of related activities, many of which can be used at other times of the year.

I’m adding this info to The Best Websites For Learning About Civic Participation & Citizenship.

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Putin & Trump Demonstrate How, On A Micro-Level, It Never Pays To Get Into A Power Struggle With A Student

Deadlocked Wars: How Major Powers Misread the Regions They Attacked is a good analysis of how Putin and Trump have made similar mistakes in the wars they’ve chosen to fight (Putin in Ukraine, Trump in Iran).

On a micro-level, it’s also a good analysis of when teachers make the mistake of getting into a power struggle with a student – a struggle that can never be won by a teacher. It may appear like we have, but the resentment created will always poison the atmosphere.

If you want some ideas of what to do instead, check out Good Classroom Management Advice: “The Person Who Asks The Questions Controls The Conversation” and Four Lessons From Community Organizing That Have Served My Students & Me Well Over The Years.

In fact, both Putin and Trump would be well-served if they checked out those posts, too, and applied the lessons there in their political situation (of course, I understand that would never happen in a million years).

I’m adding this info to Best Posts On Classroom Management.

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