The Goal:
to prepare (university and high-school) students for communication in knowledge societies

The Way: Lernen durch Lehren (LdL) “Learning by Teaching”

The Core Idea:
The core idea is to have a student or a group of students instruct a topic to their classmates, but: in a way that activates the classmates’ participation and communication in the best possible way.
It is not the student experts’ task to just present an issue in a structured way, but to think about ways that have their classmates find the solutions for questions and thus only gradually reach a structured knowledge at the end. This way learners are also given the chance of acquiring creativity, independence, self-confidence and key competences, such as the ability to work in teams, the ability to communicate, complex thinking, the competence to seek and find information, explorative behavior, presentation skills, project competence, internet skills, structuring information and generating knowledge; punctuality, reliability, patience. The role of the teacher is one of preselecting or suggesting topics, of giving guidelines to the student experts regarding didactic possibilities and the relevance of contents, of assisting student experts during preparation and in class, of observing the learning process reflected by the actions and reactions in class, and of guaranteeing that, despite potential problems, every learner will know at the end what the main insights or conclusions of the lesson were supposed to be. Teacher and students are conceived as partners, the hierarchy is flat.

The Academic Basis:
Research on information and (developing) knowledge societies has shown that members of such societies need the following three pillars of competences:

1. a broad general knowledge
2. various pieces of expert knowledge acquired through the realization of own projects
3. a catalog of
   1. personal competences, e.g.
      • keeping self-discipline
      • withstanding fuzziness
   2. social competences, e.g.
      • communicating empathically in an atmosphere of trust, openness, cooperation, efficiency
      • being able to work in a team
   3. methodological competences, e.g.
      • carrying out a project (setting a question/goal, finding the right method) (project competence)
      • finding and evaluating information in various sources, especially internet competence
      • presenting a project and its result in the internet (e.g. Wikiversity)
      • transferring information into applicable knowledge
      • translating expert knowledge into generally intelligible language with a focus on communication between human and human, not between human and machine

Studies from learning psychology, biology and education show that the following ingredients are vital for effective learning:

• the possibility for selffullfilment (sense in life, “world improvement competence”)
• affective attachment toward contents
• the experience of flow effects
• an active exposure to the contents (“grasping” their meaning)
• the presentation of contents in a familiar “language” (in a familiar register)
• the presentation of contents through intelligible metaphors and analogies
• autonomy in content selection, recurrent scrutinizing of knowledge
• learning in a community

The Father of the Model: Jean-Pol Martin, professor for teaching and key competences, teacher trainer
A “Son” of the Model: Joachim Grzega, associate professor for linguistics, teacher trainer