Recognizing.
Becoming a teacher, sharing lessons learnt, is not only a major milestone in the development of a professional but is also a significant contribution to a safety culture. For the individual, being able to teach means that he or she has internalised and understood the working of the system or the experience to such a degree that it can be transferred to others. This will also accelerate this persons own learning even more. For the safety culture, teachers "from the ranks" greatly add to the credibility of the system as a whole as well as improving the feeling of safety: you demonstrate that people can learn lessons and are not punished but are enabled to learn and to share.
So, teachers should be recognised and rewarded.
What are you recognizing
As an organization, what you are rewarding is the fact that somebody who teaches others has either taken full ownership of (part of) the system or, in case they are teaching about a lesson learnt, has taken full ownership for his or her own role and experience and is showing the commitment to the team goal by sharing this learning with others.
How you are recognizing
Providing people with a platform to talk, openly appreciating their courage and willingness to share, and helping them in communicating and implementing the lesson learnt through their experiences are good rewards.
Again, also in this case guard the organization and the person against the ego-trap. This person has undergone his lesson "on behalf of the team" and we respect him or her for this fact, but it does not make the person any more special than the other. They are not sharing how great they were, but what they experienced and how this can contribute to improving the system. This makes the person a more effective teacher and also allows him to continue his or her role in the team.
If the team consistently demonstrates good sharing of lessons, consider rewarding the leader or manager by recognizing how he or she has built an environment and skills in which a team can succesfully improve. It could even be that the manager himself sets a model, by acting as a good teacher and demonstrating how lessons and skills can be shared without the trap of ego or authority.
Operators in the field often walk around with their "little black book" in the pocket of their coveralls. This little black book is a notebook in which they keep their personal notes about what to do but also, very often, how to do certain things. These are often little gems of knowledge but, on the other hand, can also sometimes lead to problems. An operator may have notes about "how to operate a certain system" in his black book, but when the system changes without him knowing these outdated personal instructions may lead to risks.
The pilot wrote an article in the safety magazine for his colleagues how he misheard the heading for flight level clearance. Instead of turning to heading 080 ("Turn right heading zero eight zero"), he CLIMBED his aircraft to flight level 080 (as if he had understood "climb flight level zero eight zero"). Thus his aircraft came into conflict with an aircraft that was descending to FL070 and this had to be solved by ATC. In hindsight, the pilot agreed that he mistakenly took the heading for a flight level and wrote extensively about this in the safety magazine of his airline company.