Guidelines for Teachers

3.6 Peer Learning

Peer learning requires a cooperative learning setting to complete tasks collectively toward academic goals. It is a way of shifting from independent to mutual learning. The successful incorporation of cooperative learning in the classroom implies that students can capitalize on one another's knowledge and skills and gain higher self-esteem. Most of the students feel uncomfortable sharing their views, conversely, with peer learning, the class is split into smaller more intimate groups that help students overcome their social anxieties and participate in discussions more. As students frequently share their ideas with peers and then present their work to the class, they improve their confidence exponentially and overcome their shyness.

In addition, peer learning encourages community building. Students not only work together, moving from individual to group accountability, but also get to understand each other on a deeper level: it helps students overcome any prejudices they may have against others and teaches them interpersonal skills.

By working in groups, peers provide feedback that wouldn’t be there otherwise. Learners must confront and make sense of differences of opinion as part of the learning experience. This leads to the idea of peer assessment that improves students' understanding of course materials as well as improve their metacognitive skills. When students grade their classmate’s assignments based on a teacher’s benchmarks, it makes the students focus on the grades and help understand the errors that they have made. Students can learn from grading the tests or assessing the oral presentations of others. The teacher can assign students to anonymously review fellow classmates’ assignments and to respond to that feedback. They can not only improve their ability to study for a test after participating in a peer assessment, as they are aware of the evaluation criteria but also they enhance their ability to evaluate others. Students can come to see tests as a positive part of learning and as useful feedback.

Activities that involve decision making, group problem-solving, role play and game play (as exemplified in the teaching sources of the project) are good examples of peer learning situations, or activities where a student assumes the role of the teacher on a given topic and is in charge of teaching the topic to a classmate. A key aspect of such learning situations is that students teach each other, and one can only teach something to others when they have a good understanding of it themselves. The idea is that if students can teach something, they have already learned the material.