Peer teaching is not a new concept. It can be traced back to Aristotle’s use of archons, or student leaders, and to the letters of Seneca the Younger. It was first organized as a theory by Scotsman Andrew Bell in 1795, and later implemented into French and English schools in the 19th century. Over the past 30-40 years, peer teaching has become increasingly popular in conjunction with mixed ability grouping in K-12 public schools and an interest in more financially efficient methods of teaching.
Not to be confused with peer instruction—a relatively new concept designed by Harvard professor Eric Mazur in the early 1990s— peer teaching is a method by which one student instructs another student in material on which the first is an expert and the second is a novice.
Goodlad and Hurst (1989) and Topping (1998) note that academic peer tutoring at the college level takes many different forms
Peer education
What is peer education?
Peer education is a term widely used to describe a range of initiatives where young people from a similar age group, background, culture and/or social status educate and inform each other about a wide variety of issues.
Rationale
The rationale behind peer education is that peers can be a trusted and credible source of information. They share similar experiences and social norms and are therefore better placed to provide relevant, meaningful, explicit and honest information.
Defining peer education
The following definition takes the key elements of peer education into account:
'Peer education is an approach which empowers young people to work with other young people, and which draws on the positive strength of the peer group. By means of appropriate training and support, the young people become active players in the educational process rather than passive recipients of a set message. Central to this work is the collaboration between young people and adults.'
Fast Forward, national voluntary organisation promoting health and wellbeing
Peer education in school
Peer education is an increasingly popular method of providing information and advice to young people in both school and community-based settings. Well-considered peer education initiatives can offer a wide range of benefits to pupils, peer educators, teachers and the school as a whole.
Using a peer education model to deliver information and education to young people can ensure that the adult partner (for example, a teacher or school nurse), peer educator and peer educatee take an equal role in informing, shaping and passing on information.
Benefits of peer education
The benefits for peer educators are widely recognised and can include positive changes in terms of knowledge, skills, attitudes and confidence. Peer education has a strong emphasis on personal development and can be particularly effective in allowing low achieving pupils to fully participate and succeed in a wider range of educational and health promoting activities.
Peer educatees can benefit from credible, up-to-date, relevant and fun inputs delivered by fellow pupils with whom they can identify and build positive relationships with.
As part of a whole school approach, peer education initiatives can play a major role in helping schools foster positive relationships between pupils and teachers. They can help schools to create a caring and safe environment that promotes the health of all its members.
The main benefits of peer teaching include, but are not limited to, the following:
· Students receive more time for individualized learning.
· Direct interaction between students promotes active learning.
· Peer teachers reinforce their own learning by instructing others.
· Students feel more comfortable and open when interacting with a peer.
· Peers and students share a similar discourse, allowing for greater understanding.
· Peer teaching is a financially efficient alternative to hiring more staff members.
· Teachers receive more time to focus on the next lesson.
Research also indicates that peer learning activities typically yield the following results for both tutor and tutee: team-building spirit and more supportive relationships; greater psychological well-being, sFunctional Roles: What are Peer Teachers Doing?
When peer teaching is part of the law school curriculum, student teachers may perform a variety of teaching roles: pure teacher, mediator, work partner, coach, or role model. A peer teacher may perform only one or several of these roles depending on their responsibilities and the structure of the program. For example, the rules governing many moot court competitions prohibit any cooperation outside the team in preparing briefs and severely limit the cooperation in preparing arguments. These rules effectively constrain the ability of peer teachers on moot court boards to function in roles relating to active learning.
The peer teacher who functions as a teacher is involved in structuring and delivering information and skills to students and providing feedback and evaluation. These students more often are viewed to some degree as experts, rather than peers, by the students with whom they work. Students selected for the boards of a law school's moot court program or law reviews often function in the role of teacher/evaluator, though they may not as often provide the initial training to those students over whom they pass judgment on participation in these programs. For example, in legal research and writing, approximately one-half the programs use teaching assistants to present information in the classroom (though overwhelmingly, this information and the method of its instruction is planned by faculty supervisors). About one-half the schools use TAs to grade or evaluate student work.(7)
Where a peer teacher has less autonomy or power in these areas, they are more likely to function as a mediator: delivering or translating information provided by the faculty member, supplementing feedback, and interpreting evaluation. When combined with administrative duties, these peer teachers are most often termed "teaching assistants". This role is represented in a significant portion of the law schools using peer teachers in legal research and writing programs. Academic support programs are very often built upon this structure of student tutorial: providing information without the power to evaluate.
Peer teachers may function as work partners when they are involved with students in a cooperative learning project, as where student clinical supervisors work with fellow students in a representation or moot court team members work together on a brief. In this structure, the teaching role switches back and forth between the peers, though not necessarily in an even division. Peer teachers may also work cooperatively with students when functioning as coaches: providing primarily evaluation and encouragement in completing assignments or improving skills rather than transmitting the necessary initial information or training. Legal writing instructors who provide only informal feedback on writing assignments or moot court board students who critique mock appellate arguments often function primarily in this coaching mode.
Finally, peer teaching may also be structured so as to emphasize the role model function. Where peer teachers demonstrate learning skills -- as when study group leaders provide model outlines or sample exam answers -- they are primarily functioning as models for their peer students (though, if poorly structured, many of the students may perceive this as providing only information rather than models.) A substantial number of law schools have chosen to implement an academic support program developed Law School Admission Council's advisor, Dr. Lawrence D. Salmony. That program uses peer teachers to lead large group seminars in reviewing a series of hypotheticals in first year subject matters; small "study groups" to more carefully review specific subject matter of first year courses (approximately three hours in each subject per month) and individual sessions with students in which teaching assistants provide guidance in learning strategies and analysis of substantive legal issues. The peer teachers in these programs combine a number of roles, though the role model/mediator role appears to predominate.
Peer teachers also play roles that are less directly tied to cognitive learning. Often peer teachers are used to provide administrative support for an academic program -- for example, student graders following a faculty devised grading key; moot court board members setting up mock appellate argument schedules and judges; law review editors supervising allocation of cite checking assignments. Where peer teachers are structured into a program primarily for economic reasons, this often may be the sole role assigned to the peer teacher. However, one suspects that student administrative support often leads to informal mediation or teaching, for example, as peer teachers are asked to interpret grades or publication decisions.
ocial competence, communication skills and self-esteem; and higher achievement and greater productivity in terms of enhanced learning outcomes.
