Jean-Pol Martin

Jean-Pol Martin (born 10 April 1943, Paris, France) is a professor for foreign language teaching in Germany. He established the learning by teaching method (German: Lernen durch Lehren) for students to learn by teaching their peers. This concept has developed into a common practice throughout Germany and has been experimented with in other countries.

Martin was born in 1943 in Paris and went to Germany in 1968. He studied German and French in order to become a teacher at a German grammar school, becoming a professor for foreign language teaching didactics at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (Bavaria) in 1980. In the same year he had the idea to let the students teach their peers in his French classes. That experience was successful, so he could establish the "Lernen durch Lehren" (LdL) (learning by teaching) method in Germany. He was the first scholar to do active research on that topic for 30 years, building a wide network with several thousand teachers and promoting it to a large scale. All teachers in Germany are now trained in that method during their pedagogic studies. Martin retired 2008.

2016 Weng/Pfeiffer emphazises Martin as "a precursor of the frequently mentioned 'shift from teaching to learning'"