People Power

The power to address many classroom concerns may be sitting, untapped, in the classroom. Students can be tremendous peer teachers. They add variety, energy, and sympathetic assistance. Well planned, peer teaching is a powerful classroom tool.

Over the last decade, a number of researchers have looked at how to make peer interaction the central way to organize a classroom. The CIRT has collected Johnson and Johnson's materials on Cooperative Learning in higher education for your use. The following tips are smaller ways you might gain the benefits of the people power in your class.

Inside the Classroom

Getting students engaged in active learning is a great way to integrate and extend class information. Social interaction is an excellent way to get students to process the information and researchers are clear: information that is processed is learned better. Here are some tips to start the processing.

Pair Share. When you reach a logical stopping point in your presentation, ask students to share with their neighbor. You can ask them to repeat what they just learned in their own words. You could ask them to develop a question about something they don't understand, instead. Give students 2-3 minutes and follow up by having several groups report their conversations. These 5 minutes should help consolidate learning and recapture their attention.

Listening Teams. Divide the class into four groups: questioners, agreers, naysayers, and example givers. At the end of your lesson, each group meets for a few moments to complete the task suggested by their name. Call on each group to report their questions, agreements, disagreements, and examples. (You might assign other roles too.)

Practice Pairs. When you have a set of skills or procedures (or writing projects) you can have students help each other. Have one person in the pair act as explainer, demonstrator, or author who presents his/her ideas or work. The other person acts as a checker who corrects, encourages, and coaches as needed. Partners should reverse roles half way through the time allocated.

Fishbowls. Assign the class into groups based on natural sections of your lesson. Each group will become the center of the fishbowl at the appropriate time. They may be asked to present, debate, discuss, or model the information. Others should be assigned the role of observers or questioners. Each group in turn should have its turn in the center. At the end, find some time for common reflection.

Recap. Leave time at the end of your lesson for students to meet in teams of four students and create their own summary of what was covered. Encourage them to make outlines, maps, pictures, tables or any other memory aid. Have several teams share their summaries. You might consider giving some guiding questions.

Outside the Classroom

Getting students together to prepare for the next lesson or follow it up has proven to be an especially effective technique. Here are a couple ideas.

Study Groups. Form groups and give them questions or problems that can be jointly done (or where each is responsible for sharing his/her work with the others). Give groups a few minutes in class to get organized. Even without a specific assignment, teachers can show their support for study groups by setting them up. (I call mine "home groups." They are responsible to help each other when absent, clarify assignments, and even make suggestions for changes.)

Electronic Discussions. List servers and chat groups are easy to set up and use.  Teachers introduce topics, questions, or assignments. Students can use computers to join the conversation. Tom Steiger (Sociology) creates a cafe-like atmosphere that encourages expression of ideas. Dennis Bialaszewski (SDS) has developed cross-disciplinary teams involving students from other countries that produce a common project.

Hypermail. Students can read and respond to each other’s comments through Hypermail, a world wide web program that dynamically saves and sorts messages. With little technical learning, students can share ideas without having to meet.

Advisory Groups. Meet with a volunteer (or elected) group after class. Ask them for feedback on the class. Encourage them to poll other students. What is working? What isn't? What would make learning better?

Final Comments

Mel Silberman has summarized many of these tips in his book Active Learning: 101 Strategies to Teach any Subject. If you contact us, the CIRT will be happy to send you his descriptions of how to conduct these activities.

This Teaching Tip was first published by Indiana State University’s, Center for Teaching and Learning on March 24, 1997.