(Editor’s note: Today’s post is the first of a few excerpts from our new book, The Better Teacher’s Toolbox, that I’ll be publishing here over the next two months. You can order the book here, and access more free resources from it here).
PEER TUTORING AND MENTORING
Students teaching their classmates or younger students is an activity that has been key to our teaching.
One way we’ve done this is in our English Language Learner classes where older students receive credit for working each day as peer tutors assisting new immigrants in their academic classes. Extensive research, and our own experience, documents how this kind of tutoring helps both the tutor and the person being tutored.
But peer tutoring doesn’t have to be that formalized. If students complete their work early in our class, we often give them a choice—they can read, do extra credit, or help another student who is still working on the assignment. Nine times out of ten, students will choose to work as a tutor, and we emphasize that if they want to be able to continue being a tutor, they can’t just hang out with their buddy—they need to help someone who needs it. We monitor as best we can while circulating throughout the room, and have found that, at most, a very occasional reminder might be needed.
Another version of peer tutoring is when an English Language Learner is in a class primarily composed of English-proficient students, a teacher might pair them with a classmate, sometimes referred to as a “buddy,” who might or might not speak the ELL student’s primary language. This combination, only done with the permission of both parties, can help everybody.
Yet another kind of peer tutoring is a variation of the Dialogue Journal idea. Traditionally, dialogue journals are used as back-and-forth conversations between students and teachers. In English Language Learner classes, they’re often used for student writing practice. Instead of the teacher explicitly correcting the student’s incorrect grammar or spelling, they “recast” their mistakes. For example, if an ELL student writes, “We go to San Francisco last week,” the teacher might write, “It sounds exciting that you went to San Francisco last week” in their reply. The idea of direct corrections might make students feel more intimidated by the prospect of writing.
The peer tutoring part of this comes into play when, instead of having the dialogue journals between ELL students and us, they are between them and another class of English-proficient students or more advanced ELLs. Then it’s the responsibility of those “sibling classes” to engage in dialogues and recasts with the ELL students. And, believe us, our ELL students tend to be much more motivated to write to an authentic audience of another student instead of us. And, once again, the students in the sibling class get grammar practice, too!
Of course, in all of these situations, we provide training and guidance to students about tutoring expectations, including the difference between giving the answers and guiding their “tutees” to finding them on their own with assistance, the importance of positive affirmation over harsh critique, and technology-assisted and non-tech assisted strategies for communicating across languages. Demonstrating good examples and bad examples are very effective forms of training. In one situation, Larry used the good example of saying “How can we do this better?” and the bad example of saying, “You did this wrong.” It worked well for my students, but remember what we discussed in Chapter One and use examples that work with the relationship you have with your students.
Peer mentoring, though somewhat similar to peer tutoring, is a different kettle of fish. In peer mentoring, older students are paired with younger ones to provide regular emotional support. For example, as mentioned earlier, Larry’s IB Theory of Knowledge classes would go to a different ninth-grade class once a week and walk around the school with them for ten minutes. Mentors received training on providing support, and each week asked their mentees about their highs and lows from the previous seven days (and was there anything they could have done to make their low a little better). In addition, they were given a focus question each time, like “What is your goal for the next month?” and “What is your biggest worry right now?”
We also encourage students to do a home-based version of this kind of tutoring/mentoring. We offer extra credit to students who sit with younger siblings or cousins and read story books to them. They just have to write down the name of the book or story they read, how long it took, and how their sibling/cousin reacted to them. As with practically everything we do, we first provide an example of how to read to a child.
TEACHING OTHERS
This “teaching others” strategy is different from the one-on-one or one-on-two peer tutoring and peer mentoring discussed in the previous section.
In this context, “teaching others” means organized activities where the entire class is, in some way or form, teaching everybody else.
In effect, everybody is a teacher.
This could take several forms.
One is the use of the well-known jigsaw technique. In this strategy, which education researcher John Hattie offers as one the most effective available to teachers, an individual student or a small group is tasked with teaching smaller parts of a bigger concept or story (different parts of a historical figure’s biography, separate sections of a larger article, certain elements of a scientific concept) to their classmates, either in small groups or to the entire class.
Another is structured peer review. Research has shown that peer review tends to be very effective for enhancing student learning.We’ve used it primarily in student writing, with classmates providing structured (and supportive!) feedback, and when practicing for presentations. Here, as in most of our class activities, we often provide a written guide and share in writing and verbally both helpful and not-so-helpful peer feedback.
And a third version is having individual students or small groups instruct the entire class. In this activity, usually done near the end of the school year, we let small student groups choose any topic within reason and they have to develop an instructional unit utilizing the primary teaching strategies we’ve used during the school year (inductive teaching [see Chapter 3: Differentiated Teaching], Read Alouds, games for reinforcement, etc.). Though they have to create a full unit, they usually just actually teach one lesson because of time constraints.
Most teachers are familiar with the “Gradual Release of Responsibility” model—I do, We do, You do. We think that, when logistically possible, the more educators can add a fourth step, “Teach It,” the better for everyone.
